Version 2.14

Rolls up the usual collection of new features, performance improvements, bug fixes and the copious amount of game workarounds,
just in time for the holidays.

Features

• Implement DXGI frame statistics (exposed by DXVK DXGI).
• Implement a global frame rate limiter (see VKD3D_FRAME_RATE or DXVK_FRAME_RATE).
  Also improves behavior of presentation with swap interval > 1 since we use frame limiter instead
  of duplicated presents now. Also allows support for full-screen frame rate targets in DXGI which normally would imply a mode change.
• Implement support for planar video formats such as NV12.
• Implement D24 depth bias correctly now on AMD when VK_EXT_depth_bias_control is supported.
• Expose a new command interop interface that allows e.g. dxvk-nvapi to implement DLSS3 frame generation.
• Use VK_KHR_compute_shader_derivatives when available.
• Use VK_EXT_device_generated_commands when available. Expose execute indirect tier 1.1.
• Implement GPU upload heap from latest AgilitySDKs. Allows explicit control over ReBAR instead of heuristic based hacks in games that use the new API.
• Implement ID3DDestructionNotifier. Fixes some particular games that expect this to be supported.

Performance

• Reduce some VRAM bloat on RDNA2 and 3 GPUs when VK_MESA_image_alignment_control is exposed.
• Improve CPU overhead for games that query swapchain format support over and over.
• Remove old heuristic that preferred 2 frames of latency depending on BufferCount used.
  The default on DXGI is 3, and using 2 caused some performance issues in various games with GPU starvation,
  especially on Deck. VKD3D_SWAPCHAIN_LATENCY_FRAMES is still available as an override to force a tighter default.
• Rewrite queue submission logic to deal better with difficult submission patterns such as FSR3 3.1 Frame Generation.
  On implementations with only one graphics queue, vkd3d-proton will now attempt to do basic software scheduling of GPU work.
  This may regress GPU performance in some other cases and VKD3D_CONFIG=no_staggered_submit is a way to disable this code path.
  One particularly big improvement is FF XVI on RADV with FSR 3 frame-gen, with almost doubled performance in some cases.
  We are still awaiting a proper kernel-level fix for this problem to be fully resolved.
• Rewrite queue submission logic to use fewer "dummy" wait/signal submissions.
  Works around pathological CPU overhead in amdgpu taking 20ms+ to submit work in some cases.
• Rewrite queue submission logic for sparse updates to be more efficient.

Fixes and workarounds

• Rework various multi-sampling queries to be more spec correct.
• Workaround bugged MSAA behavior in World of Warcraft.
• Workaround buggy/questionable use of ID3D12PipelineLibrary in FF XVI.
• Always use native 16-bit integers for min16int. Fixes some real-world bugs where shaders expect min16int is always implemented as 16-bit.
• Workaround game bug leading to GPU hang in Dragon Age: Veilguard on RADV.
• Always emit proper floating-point environment modes in DXBC shaders. Fixes glitched eyes in Dragon Age: Veilguard on NV.
• Fix potential use-after-free bug for some sparse resource update cases.
• Correctly validate when application attempts to allocate a too large descriptor heap.
  Fixes Stalker 2 entering into undefined behavior.
• A lot of misc fixes in dxil-spirv as usual.
• Workaround broken amdgpu zerovram behavior on 6.10+ kernels. Fixes random extreme glitchiness in Helldivers 2 on AMD.
• Workaround NV issue which lead to GPU hang when loading a save file in Star Wars: Outlaws.
• Fix copying between BC <-> RGBA images in some cases.
• Add workaround for a game bug in The First Descendant which lead to broken cubemap reflections in some cases.
• Workaround Skull & Bones crashing on startup on NV GPUs by disabling Reflex support.
• Workaround Hunt: Showdown missing precise qualifiers on vertex shaders, leading to glitched rendering.
• Workaround poor CPU performance in Red Dead Redemption.

Misc / Debug

• Add support for instruction_qa_checks. For deep debug, allows us to be notified when NaNs and Infs are generated in shaders.
  For internal QA use.
• Add fine-grained control of QA behavior on a per-shader basis. For narrowing down issues.
• Remove a bunch of old and obsolete workarounds for NV drivers. New cutoff is 535 series.
• Bump exposed SDKVersion to 614 to match latest stable AgilitySDK.
• Add an optional code path to support DXBC via the official dxilconv library.
  This code is not enabled in release builds,
  and is currently only intended as a path to take advantage of QA instrumentation for DXBC shaders.