Triton: DirectX 11 Driver for QEMU

(blog.getutm.app)

148 points | by electricant 15 hours ago ago

23 comments

  • paulryanrogers 29 minutes ago

    Does this mean DX1-10 are also supported? I've been struggling to play some DX3-7 games because of VirtualBox and VMware limitations and Win10+ backward compatibility gaps.

    Article is quite long and technical, so it wasn't clear to me. That said, still great to hear Windows guests are getting some attention, especially from a long lived project that's proven it's not going anywhere.

  • equinumerous 2 hours ago

    Nice, I've been waiting for something like this for years. Meanwhile the gaming scene on linux has been getting better slowly thanks to Valve and friends... but being able to boot into a Windows VM with graphics acceleration was previously a pain on Linux machines that only have a single discrete GPU - I'd wonder whether a solution like this would work with VirtualBox, or only on QEMU.

  • mutkach 9 hours ago

    That’s like (at least) third GPU-related project named Triton

  • jamesu 10 hours ago

    Pretty cool to finally have a decent open 3d solution for windows vms. Now if only someone made an opengl driver for older intel macosx vms...

  • anonymousiam 10 hours ago
  • thehias 9 hours ago

    why always only DX11, why not DX12? Parallels and VMWARE can also do only DX11??

    • tyfon 8 hours ago

      DX11 is much more high level while DX12 implements direct control over the GPU. 12 is much more like vulkan.

      I guess since this is emulating the device instead of just passing the commands to vulkan it is easier to do DX11, but I could be wrong about this particular implementation.

      • bellowsgulch 4 hours ago

        DirectX 12 isn't just much more like Vulkan, it's so shockingly similar, it's basically Vulkan. It's jarring when you read it for the first time because you ask yourself why it even exists, but a second later, you realize it's so Microsoft can own their own graphics interface, too.

        I could be remembering this incorrectly, but that's the impression I remember.

        • aseipp 2 hours ago

          DX12 was over 2 years old by the time Vulkan was released. People in the industry also use DirectX extensively and have for decades (Vulkan is fairly marginal in comparison); many modern graphics API features (mesh shaders, ray tracing) were designed and developed in DirectX, as Microsoft worked with closely with ISVs on these features before they spread to wider audiences and published specifications.

          Honestly if you are creating games, with the rise of Proton and vkd3d, there is seemingly less need to target Vulkan today than ever before. Just target x86_64 Windows with DirectX11 or DirectX12 and you will even get Linux support (and some day, probably macOS) "for free". That's just for games, though.

        • izacus 3 hours ago

          There's that small thing of DirectX 12 predating Vulkan (and massively predating the useful Vulkan specs).

    • Squarex 8 hours ago

      DX12 is much more complex to implement. Very different API.

  • ramshanker 11 hours ago

    Maybe this is one of those topics to let an army of agents get loose.

    Nothing to lose and a lot to gain.

    • truncate 11 hours ago

      This is also one of things that needs to be well optimized to be any useful. Army of agents may get an implementation, but not sure it will be actually useful, and I'm also not sure if optimizing that implementation is going to be easier than more well paced use of LLM where person actually understands what code is being generated.

      • wrobelda 11 hours ago

        You seem to contradict yourself. Army of agents doesn't mean the person doing that doesn't understand the code. And optimization is required no matter whether the bulk of the code is written by hand or by the machine. LLMs definitely make things actually doable where previously they were nearly impossible.

        • acedTrex 10 hours ago

          > Army of agents doesn't mean the person doing that doesn't understand the code

          This is quite literally, objectively what it means lol. No human will ever seen it.

    • croes 10 hours ago

      Energy consumption and CO2 emission it causes is a pretty big lose

      • compiler-devel 6 hours ago

        This argument, while totally valid, will never halt the build out of data centers nor hamper the development of AI.