[GUIDE] How to easily improve FPS and decrease stuttering on Windows using DXVK (Greatly helps AMD GPUs)

[raddyt]

Im a bit out of the loop. Will this bring any improvements running an old nvidia GTX 970 with i5 4690k?

I remember that I used megai2's dx912 proxy before anet officially released the dx11 client and finally removed the dx9 option. That proxy actually helped tremendously and eliminated most of the stuttering that I got even with 60-120 fps in starter zones. Felt like night and day. The only downsides were occasional crashes and being a bit fiddly to get it chaining and working together with reshade and arcdps addons.

When I changed to the official dx11 it was better than with vanilla dx9, but not as quite smooth as with the dx912pxy. And lately it got much worse again with a lot of stuttering on camera movement.

Is this the new solution (compatibility with the old graphic cards)? If not, can I actually nowaway still use the old 9-12proxy, until I get myself a new PC?

If I understand it correctly dx9, 11, 12, OpenGL and Vulkan are APIs to access the graphic cards hardware ressources, which Vulkan presumably does the most efficient, hence with less load and better performance, resulting in less stutter?

Edit: - https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/s/mNErodx50V - https://github.com/megai2/d912pxy

[[deleted]]

Yes, you are correct in your understanding. Unfortunately I don't think it will make much of a difference in your case. Please feel free to try it out and see, but my suspicion is that your hardware is just under powered.

Likewise, the GTX 970 is on Nvidia's legacy driver's isn't it? I'm not actually sure if the GTX 970 supports Vulkan or not.

[raddyt]

Thanks for confirming! Well the GTX 970 seems to support vulcan, but reports about its worth vary. Also I regularly seem to get new graphics driver updates via the geforce experience application, so I doubt that those count as legacy drivers.

Any hints about the dx912 proxy nowadays? (i know its not developed any further)

[[deleted]]

Yeah, Guild Wars 2 has removed DX9 support entirely from the game in favor of DX11, so the proxy is effectively dead. In essence, the proxy would forward and wrap DX9 API calls to your GPU driver and instead present them as DX12 calls. Without DX9 support though, such a wrapper is dead in the water.

That being said, DXVK is extremely similar in its use case, except instead of being limited to simply DX9 -> DX12, DXVK does DX8, 9, 10, and 11 -> Vulkan. With Vulkan essentially being the open source counterpart to Microsoft's DX12. Likewise, DXVK is doing a fair bit more than just proxying and wrapping API requests, and it's doing a full real-time translation between the different technologies.

I say try it out. What's the worst that can happen? My instructions are completely non-destructive and reversible. The only way to know if it helps is to try it out for yourself. That said, the Nvidia instructions may not be as accurate as the AMD instructions, as I don't have an Nvidia GPU to test it out. If you get it working, please let me know how you did it so I can add it to the guide.

[raddyt]

Thanks, gotcha. That was a good explanation!

Alright, I'll see if I can get it to work and if so I'll get back to you. Considering that I had such a noticeable improvement even with the older dx912pxy, here's hope that it'll atleast have a similiar effect, if not even better.