Software developer Megai2 has released his Guild Wars 2 DirectX proxy wrapper on Github earlier this week. The wrapper forwards DirectX 9 calls to their DirectX 12 equivalent to improve game performance.
The Guild Wars 2 d912pxy add-on was built specifically for the game in an attempt to decrease the API overhead of DirectX 9. By using the add-on this overhead is claimed to be reduced by up to 70 percent.
The performance improvements when using the wrapper are significant: a 23 percent increase of frames per second. This is welcomed because the game is still barely able to go above 60 frames per second on high-end machines.
The project is interesting because Guild Wars 2 developers have previously claimed that updating the engine to use DirectX 12 instead of DirectX 9 would have an insignificant effect on game performance. This project shows that is not necessarily the case.
Forwarding DirectX API calls is not new and has been done in several other similar third-party projects, such as Wined3d, Vk9, Vkd3d and Dxvk. However, these projects are gaining popularity because of game compatibility and performance improvements.
Guild Wars 2 development studio ArenaNet has yet to comment on the project. Developer Megai2 states that players should use the project at their own risk. The source code and binaries are available on Github.
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