DXVK, the Direct3D-to-Vulkan translation layer that does a lot of the quiet heavy lifting inside Proton, just got a bug-fix release. DXVK 3.0.1 landed on July 5, cleaning up several regressions introduced by the bigger DXVK 3.0 overhaul from late June — and while it’s not a flashy update, it’s the kind of fix that decides whether a specific older game runs correctly on Steam Deck and SteamOS today rather than in whatever week the next full Proton build ships.
DXVK sits underneath nearly every Windows game running through Proton, translating Direct3D 8, 9, 10, and 11 calls into Vulkan. Valve bundles a version of it with each Proton release, but the library also ships its own standalone updates, and those can be pulled into Proton or Proton GE manually ahead of the next official bundle. That’s exactly what happened here: DXVK 3.0 shipped a significant shader compiler rewrite and memory savings a couple of weeks ago, and 3.0.1 mops up what broke along the way.
The headline fix is a rendering regression that had been affecting a handful of Direct3D 9 titles on certain drivers:
| Game | What was broken | Status in 3.0.1 |
|---|---|---|
| Black Mesa | Rendering regression on some drivers | Fixed |
| Gothic 3 | Same underlying rendering regression | Fixed |
| GTA IV | Same underlying rendering regression | Fixed |
| Fallout 3 | Shader compiler regression breaking MSAA | Fixed |
| Empire Earth 2 | Fixed-function setups handled incorrectly | Fixed |
| Kane & Lynch: Dead Men | Severe performance regression | Fixed |
| King’s Bounty: The Legend | Performance regression | Fixed |
| Total War: Medieval II | Water rendering regression | Fixed |
| Splinter Cell 3 | Rendering regression with Shader Model 3.0 enabled | Fixed |
Beyond the per-game list, 3.0.1 disables secondary command buffer usage on desktop GPUs — a change the DXVK team says had been a “constant source of hard-to-debug rendering issues and GPU hangs” — and works around an Intel driver bug that could hang games entirely when graphics pipeline libraries were enabled. There’s also a flagged-but-unresolved issue: an ANV driver bug can still cause GPU hangs in some D3D9 games on Intel Alchemist GPUs and older, and DXVK’s workaround for it (enabling descriptor buffers on those GPUs) comes with a performance cost, so affected users are better off keeping graphics drivers current in the meantime.
None of this requires waiting on Valve. Players who want the fixes immediately can swap the DXVK version bundled into Proton or Proton GE by hand, the same way modders update vkd3d-proton for newer Direct3D 12 titles. Most people will just get it automatically the next time Valve rolls a new build — which happened just days after Valve pushed Proton 11 to stable, itself a Wine 11.0 rebase that pulled a wave of classic titles like the original Resident Evil and Dino Crisis out of Experimental for good. It’s a reminder that Steam Deck and SteamOS compatibility isn’t only driven by Valve’s own numbered Proton releases — component updates like this, or the standalone Proton Hotfix Valve shipped for Diablo IV after a Blizzard patch broke it, land on their own schedule and can matter just as much.
The full changelog, including issue and pull-request links for each fix, is on DXVK’s GitHub releases page.
