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

phoronix.com

141–150 of 308 posts

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

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. Of course you can play games without Steam. But I think it is disingenuous to characterize Steam as "just another system to lure users and developers into a Vendor Lock-In" when Valve has seemingly not put any effort whatsoever into locking in anyone despite their unquestioned market dominance.

They recently stopped developers promoting on steam, sale of their game on other platforms. Makes a lot of sense and if the battle with epic games gets worse we might see lock in.. Fortnite changed steam's dominance. Epic games is buying out a lot of games to offer on their store and they have the cash to burn on it. Who knows where all the fortnite fans will be in 5yrs, epic or steam.

> They recently stopped developers promoting on steam, sale of their game on other platforms.

Hard to blame them for a stance of "you can't use our storefront to advertise other storefronts" though.

Epic is doing the things it is doing precisely because Steam is so ludicrously dominant. I'd argue that they haven't been successful at usurping that dominance yet. They are still very much playing catch-up.

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

#142

I've fascinated with what Steam is doing for gaming on Linux. We'd been moving at a slow pace for years, and suddenly, we're jumping in strides. I'm likewise fascinated about how terrible Steam's CLIENT works on Linux. Like, no hidpi support, (it's just blurry), notifications don't work, and lots of other stuff is broken. Sometimes closing a popup closes the main window, but only for _some_ kinds of popups. It also o…

That's because they're working on Linux support, they don't care about Linux desktop. Steam os is based on Linux, but it would be naive to think they put much work in supporting Linux desktop, since the market share is neglibe.

I think the general idea here is that if you're competent enough with Linux to build something as useful as proton, you should be able to do something as simple as make a proper Linux client.

Having said that, I haven't experienced any of the issues mentioned.

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

#143
post #116

I've fascinated with what Steam is doing for gaming on Linux. We'd been moving at a slow pace for years, and suddenly, we're jumping in strides. I'm likewise fascinated about how terrible Steam's CLIENT works on Linux. Like, no hidpi support, (it's just blurry), notifications don't work, and lots of other stuff is broken. Sometimes closing a popup closes the main window, but only for _some_ kinds of popups. It also o…

Is it perhaps because Steam Client is being "worked on" by Valve employees (do whatever you want, no bosses, but if you work on something we wont like you will be fired immediately, ask Jeri Ellsworth) while DirecX compatibility is all volunteers with maybe some funding? I googled Hans-Kristian Arntzen (VKD3D-Proton maintainer?) and he doesnt appear to be employed by Valve.

Correct. SteamOS is a passion project by Gabe because of a grudge with Microsoft, and it's basically all contractors. Nobody at Valve internal gives a shit, in fact they're more worried about Epic Games than MS.

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

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is super hard to get right. Not _really_. The issue is that games are trying to do god-knows-what when they lose focus. In reality, they just need to ignore this happening. Regular applications handle losing focus just fine, and games would too -- unless you try to do magic funky stuff when you lose focus (my guess is that they do this to work around funky WM issues on window that don't exist on Linux).

First, sure, if games didn't do complex things, it would be easier to support. But they do. So it is hard. Also, it's much more complicated than that. When running in exclusive fullscreen mode (which almost all fullscreen games did before about 5 years ago), they have to do stuff like restore the original display resolution, tear down their graphics stack, and restore all of that when bringing the window back up. Man…

Thank you for doing this kind of work. That commit is funny -- I've read that there's similar stuff in graphics card drivers too :)

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

#145

I've fascinated with what Steam is doing for gaming on Linux. We'd been moving at a slow pace for years, and suddenly, we're jumping in strides. I'm likewise fascinated about how terrible Steam's CLIENT works on Linux. Like, no hidpi support, (it's just blurry), notifications don't work, and lots of other stuff is broken. Sometimes closing a popup closes the main window, but only for _some_ kinds of popups. It also o…

I hate to be that person but I've had no issues with the Steam client on Linux, and I've used it full time for years. Including more "advanced" features like in home streaming.

The nature of Linux platform problems is that they crop up for specific combinations of hardware and software. The biggest thing that Microsoft has over the open source community is the money to pay developers to bulldoze the combinatoric jungle that is compatibility. That, and the platform clout to get vendors to make their stuff work.

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

#146
post #116

I've fascinated with what Steam is doing for gaming on Linux. We'd been moving at a slow pace for years, and suddenly, we're jumping in strides. I'm likewise fascinated about how terrible Steam's CLIENT works on Linux. Like, no hidpi support, (it's just blurry), notifications don't work, and lots of other stuff is broken. Sometimes closing a popup closes the main window, but only for _some_ kinds of popups. It also o…

Is it perhaps because Steam Client is being "worked on" by Valve employees (do whatever you want, no bosses, but if you work on something we wont like you will be fired immediately, ask Jeri Ellsworth) while DirecX compatibility is all volunteers with maybe some funding? I googled Hans-Kristian Arntzen (VKD3D-Proton maintainer?) and he doesnt appear to be employed by Valve.

What happened with Jeri Ellsworth? I love her work. I vaguely remember her spinning out her Valve project into a new company backed by Valve. I believe there was a Kickstarter.

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

#147

I've fascinated with what Steam is doing for gaming on Linux. We'd been moving at a slow pace for years, and suddenly, we're jumping in strides. I'm likewise fascinated about how terrible Steam's CLIENT works on Linux. Like, no hidpi support, (it's just blurry), notifications don't work, and lots of other stuff is broken. Sometimes closing a popup closes the main window, but only for _some_ kinds of popups. It also o…

Working in strides because they don't want to get shut out of the Windows market. Having a credible alternative stay's Microsoft's hand about going Apple and requiring apps only come from the store except for Enterprise editions.

Not trying to play devils advocate here, but who genuinely believes a Linux Steam client is a "credible alternative" to Steam on Windows?

It's an alternative, I agree, but I can't imagine a world in which it makes a dent on their Windows revenues any time soon. If Microsoft try to really force Store only app distribution on all users, I think Valve's time would likely be better spent in the courts than trying to get hundreds of millions of users to install Linux.

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

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

passthrough and the required VM also has issues with many anticheat, right?

Not in my experience. I haven't run into a game that hasn't worked on my PCI pass-through setup.

Nice. I have always wanted to try passthrough, but with proton working so well I never had a need. Worth trying for a few multiplier games I guess.

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

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you would have been right 6 months ago, but right now it's absolutely not an issue any more. Even pointer capture works right. Even on multiple monitors. Try it again with a recent Proton.

You can thank Zhiyi Zhang for working on that for the past year or two[1]. I'm very happy to hear it's working well for you. [1] https://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/?a=search&h=HEAD&st=a...

Excellent work, I was really impressed.

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

#150

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…

I don't play many non-native games, but I have had many games on Windows crash or behave badly when alt-tabbing. Personally I've found that aspect significantly better on Linux.
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