VKD3D-Proton, Valve's Direct3D 12 over Vulkan translation layer for Steam Play (Proton), has merged support for the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap Vulkan extension. This extension, introduced in Vulkan 1.4.340 in January, enables explicit management of descriptor heaps and addresses limitations of the older VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer. The merge follows GPU driver support landing in NVIDIA's Linux driver, RADV (Mesa 26.1), and experimentally in Intel's ANV driver. The feature is currently hidden behind a VKD3D_CONFIG=descriptor_heap flag due to remaining NVIDIA bugs, but its inclusion signals a significant upcoming improvement to Proton gaming performance. Legacy code paths are retained for now, with plans to remove them once heap support is stable across all GPUs.
