GRVK

GRVK is a Mantle to Vulkan translation layer.

Mantle was originally developed by AMD and DICE starting in 2013, in an effort to produce a low-overhead graphics API as an alternative to DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4. Mantle was discontinued in 2015, with only a few games ever supporting it. Support was dropped from the AMD drivers in 2019, and it was never compatible with Nvidia cards. Despite this short life, it spawned a new generation of graphics API, including Metal, DirectX 12 and Vulkan.

This project is an attempt to revive Mantle and make it run everywhere.

Building

Requirements

• mingw-w64 compiler
• Meson build system
• Vulkan 1.2 compatible GPU and drivers that support VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state

NOTE: binutils 2.34 has known issues and should be avoided.

Compiling

# 32-bit
meson --cross-file build-win32.txt --prefix $(pwd) build.w32
cd build.w32
ninja

# 64-bit
meson --cross-file build-win64.txt --prefix $(pwd) build.w64
cd build.w64
ninja

mantle32.dll/mantle64.dll will be generated.

Usage

After dropping the DLLs in the game directory, GRVK will get loaded by the game at launch. By default, GRVK will create a log file named grvk.log in the same directory.

Environment variables

• GRVK_LOG_LEVEL controls the log level. Acceptable values are trace, verbose, debug, info, warning, error or none.
• GRVK_LOG_PATH controls the log file path. An empty string will disable logging to the file entirely.
• GRVK_AXL_LOG_PATH similar to GRVK_LOG_PATH, but for the extension library (mantleaxl).
• GRVK_DUMP_SHADERS controls whether to dump shaders (IL input, IL disassembly, and SPIR-V output). Pass 1 to enable.

Credits

• Philip Rebohle and Joshua Ashton for DXVK, a DirectX to Vulkan translation layer
• Alexander Overvoorde for the MantleHelloTriangle example used to bring up GRVK
• AMD for making the API and publicly releasing the Mantle specification