DXVK 3.1.1 fixes issues in Skyrim Special Edition, Rayman 3, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Painkiller, Corpse Party, and several other titles.

Per-game fixes are the actual work

A release note listing five specific games looks unimpressive next to a feature announcement. It is what compatibility is made of.

DXVK translates Direct3D 9, 10, and 11 into Vulkan. The Direct3D specification is one thing; what games actually do is another. Twenty-five years of titles include ones relying on undocumented behaviour, ones with genuine bugs that happened to work on the drivers of their era, and ones making assumptions no specification ever promised.

Each of those needs finding, diagnosing, and working around individually. There is no general fix for “this game from 2003 assumed a driver quirk.”

The spread here illustrates the range: Rayman 3 is from 2003, Painkiller 2004, Call of Duty: Ghosts 2013, Skyrim Special Edition 2016. A translation layer that handles all of them is carrying accumulated compatibility work spanning the entire history of the API.

Skyrim SE is the one people will notice

It remains among the most-played games on Linux years after release, largely because of modding. A heavily modded Skyrim stresses a graphics translation layer in ways the base game does not, since mods introduce shaders, textures, and draw patterns the original never produced.

Fixes there reach a disproportionate number of people.

Where DXVK sits

Worth keeping the pieces straight, because they get conflated:

Wine implements the Windows API. 11.18 landed this week with expanded kernel driver support.

Proton is Valve’s Wine fork with gaming patches, bundling the rest.

DXVK handles Direct3D 9, 10, and 11 to Vulkan.

VKD3D handles Direct3D 12, and 2.1 improved HLSL support.

For most people all of this is invisible. You click Play in Steam and Proton assembles the stack. Our gaming on Linux guide covers the layers for anyone wanting to understand what is happening, or needing to override a component when a specific game misbehaves.

# force a specific Proton version per game in Steam
# Properties -> Compatibility -> Force the use of a specific tool

3.1 added Battlefield 3 fixes and groundwork for Intel GPUs under Proton, which is the more strategically interesting thread: Intel’s discrete cards have improved considerably and the software stack is catching up to the hardware.