Some major news on the Linux Graphics front this weekend coming from some developers on the Gallium3D project. Over the weekend, Luca Barbieri committed code adding a DirectX 10 and 11 “state tracker” to the project, offering some basic DX10 and DX11 support. It’s far from feature-complete, but its’ the first steps toward bring the popular Windows-based gaming API to Linux.
Unlike other options integrated into tools like Wine, this new code does not merely translate between DirectX and OpenGL, but rather goes from DirectX direct to the hardware, making it much faster than the alternatives. I would think such a solution would be less portable, but they claim it makes it ‘essentially free to All Linux Drivers’.
For those thinking that Direct3D 10/11 on Linux will be sub-par, “Finally, a mature Direct3D 10/11 implementation is intrinsically going to be faster and more reliable than an OpenGL implementation, thanks to the dramatically smaller API and the segregation of all nontrivial work to object creation that the application must perform ahead of time.”
via [Phoronix] Direct3D 10/11 Is Now Natively Implemented On Linux!.
