I'm afraid we've run out of 3DMark versions at this point, and the Final Reality benchmark isn't yet workable, however this release officially introduces support for D3D5. Don't worry, you won't run into any GPU-related performance limitations in this cursed land of our 3D forefathers, no matter what you use for translation to more modern APIs. Mind you, in the vast majority of cases you're better off using the Glide renderers that nearly all such late last century games offer as an alternative.
In addition to that, the D3D7/D3D6 sides have also seen a fair share of fixes and improvements (see below).
Fixes/additions:
- Starting with v1.3 we are opting in to FSAA emulation, rather than enabling it globally by default and keeping it disabled until the game decides to use it (or not). That will save quite a bit of memory bandwidth, since it does away with multi-sampled surface use, unless a game is known to offer support for FSAA. You can still force enable FSAA emulation at your leisure, of course, however note that AMD users may run into issues with it in some cases due to a known driver limitation around 16-bit texel buffers.
- Also starting with v1.3 logging verbosity and log file path environment variables are prefixed with
D7VK_, to allow for better logging segregation between D7VK and DXVK. - Thanks to @CkNoSFeRaTU, an obscure FPU mode setup bug, that affected all D3D6/5 titles, was spotted and fixed. The new way of handing things has done away with glaring rendering issues in titles such as Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (yes, Raziel is finally play-worthy, as he should be!), Homeworld: Emergence (aka Cataclysm) and subtle precision issues in many others.
- Fixed a D3D6/5 texture loading oversight which prevented us from hitting an optimal level of performance in many D3D6 titles (e.g. Drakan: Order of the Flame, Freespace 2 and Arabian Nights) and sometimes caused texture corruption.
- Thanks again to the now notorious detective skills of @CkNoSFeRaTU, we've managed to do away with our proxy interface workaround, which technically enables various games to run under Windows (e.g. Gothic 1/2, Ground Control, No One Lives Forever, Blood 2: The Chosen and other LithTech engine games) and ensures intro videos and other back buffers surfaces used by these games are displayed properly.
- Finalized an assortment of DDraw legacy surface groundwork, which was needed to properly support various D3D5 games.
A short story about the first somewhat sane D3D API: D3D5
Back in the Windows 95 era, game developers were in a bit of a bind. Microsoft was pushing them to try out their new toy: D3D(3) immediate mode, but that API was, frankly speaking, absolutely awful. A few games adopted it, but the rest simply didn't bother and only implemented software renderers with optional Glide support for hardware acceleration.
But then something emerged, shyly. After a lot of brainstorming and rearchitecting, and a canceled DX4 release, DX5 and D3D5 came out and introduced a new way of handling draws, namely a DrawPrimitive/DrawIndexedPrimitive path, which was... fairly sane compared to its predecessor, and one that lasted, with minor adjustments, well into the glory days of D3D9. Which is why, ultimately, it wasn't an impossible task to add support for D3D5 in D7VK (... not that it was what I'd call a pleasant affair either).
And although some may say that D3D5 brought about the slow but inevitable decline of Glide, which may or may not be true, in truth Glide remained the main focus of developers well into the D3D7 area, with D3D renderers failing to meet it on even grounds in terms of performance and features in most cases. Therefore, consider D3D5 (and to some degree D3D6) support to be purely historical, and if a game offers the option of using Glide, always pick that with prejudice.
That being said, here's a few well supported titles you can try out today, in case you're nostalgic for Win9x era jank:
Carmageddon II: Carpocalypse Now
Tomb Raider II
Mortal Kombat 4
Nightmare Creatures
N.I.C.E 2
Mobil 1 Rally Championship
Deathtrap Dungeon
Lands of Lore III
As a final fun fact, some of these releases coexisted with the last generation of DOS games, released on CD-ROM(s). I, for one, never thought I'd see such titles run on the DXVK backend, yet here we are. As always, feel free to report any issues which aren't already on the issue tracker, and most of all have some early D3D fun!