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Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

phoronix.com

41–50 of 308 posts

Re: Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

#41
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that's important for Linux gaming is that games played under Proton on Steam are counted as Linux sales, so publishers and developers get accurate statistics on how many Linux gamers there are. If the market is big enough, cross platform development is viable from the start.

On the other hand, if the Windows version works fine with Vulcan, why go through the trouble of making a Linux version?

True. I've heard some devs are spending at least some time to optimize their games to work better with Proton.

Re: Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

#42
post #11

Valve is doing god’s work when it comes to Linux gaming. I have played over 40 hours of GTA V without many troubles. The game looks great and performs great. So glad I could get rid of my windows install.

If I remember correctly, Valve started doing this some time ago as an "insurance policy", when Microsoft spoke about locking down Windows (before they introduced Windows Store). It is amazing to see how far Linux gaming has come since then. 10 years ago almost none of the big games worked, 5 years ago lots of games worked after fiddling with wine config, and now most of the games I have tried work out of the box afte…

All that is needed now is working with the most-used anti-cheat companies. It sucks when a game works perfectly but you get booted (and possibly banned) for running Linux.

Re: Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

#43

Most games will never work on Linux since anti cheat on the platform is infeasible.

This is an absurd comment for two reasons. Most games aren't multiplayer with anti-cheat requirements. And you're only talking about lazy, client-side anti-cheat systems.

It's impossible to verify everything between eyeball and public network. The drop-in systems available essentially check for known things, good and bad. This war on clients has a front line moving lower and lower into your computer. It used to be process and driver inspection but it's in the process of moving up to UEFI-locked ring0 (Riot's Vanguard) and it'll be a TPM-like hardware module by 2025.

There's another way: INSPECT ACTIONS. Every client knows what's going on, the server —if one exists— knows what's going on. Just replay 10 seconds leading up to a suspicious event and you very quickly discover wall-hacking, or aiming too fast and too accurately, or impossible macros. This system can be automated, cross checked by multiple clients, and you very quickly know if somebody is probably cheating.

Even if you don't want to spend time tuning your machine learning, you can just replay scenarios to other players. Hackers aren't subtle! CSGO's Overwatch is essentially crowdsourced moderation... and it works.

The reason we pretend that client-side checks are the only anti-cheat feature out there is because they're cheap. Drop-in. But they're awful for gamers' freedoms.

Re: Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

#44
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me optimistic, but I imagine a larger amount of "most" work out of the box by then.

A lot of games now don't work because of anti-cheat technologies. But Valve is working on this with Codeweavers with their refactoring of NTDLL.

The most egregious anti-cheat stuff is actually implemented in a windows kernel driver - I'm not optimistic about this being resolved without first party support for Linux.

Re: Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

#45

Valve is doing god’s work when it comes to Linux gaming. I have played over 40 hours of GTA V without many troubles. The game looks great and performs great. So glad I could get rid of my windows install.

I've had the same experience with Doom (2016). The most irritating thing was the reduced input latency on Linux, which threw me off for the first few hours. After getting used to it I only boot to Windows for UWP games.

>The most irritating thing was the reduced input latency on Linux

Huh. That's a big competitive advantage in competitive games. Why don't pro CS players use Linux? Is the difference smaller in the games that have been optimized for competitive play?

Re: Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

#46
Most game engines work with some kind of abstraction to unify access to the underlying graphics APIs such as D3D, DX12, OpenGL, Vulkan and Metal (for example in Unity there's GraphicsDevice). Does anyone know if there's any work being done to create an open source abstraction like that? It would be neat if it were possible for open source games and game engines to share the work being done to ease cross-platform development.

Re: Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

#47
This is nice and all but they need to fix things like alt-tabbing in an out of a game. Many games just crash. I know it sounds dumb but sometimes when organising a game or using discord you need to alt-tab from the game to the chat app. This almost never happens with Windows unless the games are old.

Also performance when streaming via discord or OBS significantly drops the framerate even on games my rig can play at 60FPS (while streaming) at 4k without any problems. Amid Evil for example with start stuttering when streaming in Linux but is 100% fine in Windows.

Many people say these games work fine but in my experience they don't. I am normally running with whatever is the latest version of proton valve is bundling with. Generally though this maybe because UHD is a total mess on Linux.

Re: Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

#48
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you can mount the Windows partition under Linux (ntfs) you may be able to link your Steam Library under the Steam Linux client, but you have to know that some compatibility issues will arise with non-Linux partitions.

Note that as the character ':' is reserved in NTFS, Proton cannot create its wineprefix in the NTFS steamapps/compatdata directory. To solve this, you need to symlink that folder to a filesystem that support filename with the character ':', such as ext4. More info here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Using-a-NTFS-di... https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/82#issuecomme... Windows and Linux can…

I'm having the same issue on my PC. It runs multiple OSes and I'd like to share the Steam library. I've settled for Ext4FS, which works on all the Linux distributions, but not on Windows. I wonder, has anyone tried to get this to work? There's at least 3 options: Ext4FS (Ext3/Ext2), NTFS, and Btrfs (which has a Windows driver as well).

Re: Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

#49
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy their games without steam.

I'm thankfully for the native games from Valve on Linux. And also for improving gaming on Linux in general. Steam? Steam itself is not necessary and is just another system to lure users and developers into a Vendor Lock-In. Everything useful it provides should be part of libraries. In a better world - we would use a package manager or Flatpak to install games. I'm sick of the software industry, every big company trie…

I think that that software industry philosophy now applies to many other things. I guess because most things now run software, from cars to farmers milk tanks. But it's probably not the only reason.

Re: Valve Is Working on Another Extension to Help in Direct3D-over-Vulkan

#50

It's cool seeing the tech develop to run D3D/OpenGL on Vulkan/DX12/Metal, moving a lot of code out of drivers and in to libraries. But in the long term apps should all end up using Vulkan/DX12/Metal themselves directly (or modern derivatives) - so there won't be many uses for the old legacy D3D/OpenGL stacks left, so these libraries will probably fall out of use too. So, nice for the short/medium term, but probably n…

> But in the long term apps should all end up using Vulkan/DX12/Metal themselves directly In terms of "a typical 3d app writes directly to the API", they really shouldn't. The fundamental shift between DX12/Vk and the earlier APIs is that the old graphics APIs were fundamentally about graphics, in the sense that they described a specific way to draw graphics, and then in conjunction with hardware translated that into…

To add to this: we've already seen high-budget games with worse performance on Direct3D 12 than on Direct3D 11. Making good use of the new APIs is no small task.
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