D7VK Aims To Deliver Direct3D 7 Atop Vulkan

DXVK is an important piece of Steam Play (Proton) that over time expanded to supporting Direct3D 9 / 10 / 11 and even D3D8 too. Meanwhile VKD3D-Proton delivers Direct3D 12 atop Vulkan. Now there is a fork of the DXVK project working to bring Direct3D 7 support atop Vulkan.

D7VK is being worked on independently as a Vulkan-based implementation of Direct3D 7 and derived from the DXVK codebase. The intent here is on running even older Microsoft Windows games. The D7VK design is implemented as a D3D7-on-D3D9 implementation that then goes to Vulkan.

Besides D7VK being in its early stages of development, the developer acknowledges that all Direct3D 7 titles likely will not work with this implementation:

"Sadly, no. d3d7 is a land of highly cursed API inter-operabilty, and applications that for one reason or another mix and match d3d7 with older ddraw (not ddraw7) and/or with GDI are not expected to ever work. If those games provide alternative renderers, based on Glide or OpenGL, I strongly recommend you use those, together with nGlide where applicable."

Those wanting to check out D7VK can find the code via D7VK on GitHub.