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

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161–170 of 308 posts

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

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience most games work fine when switching away. However I know that Don't Starve Together and some other games really freak out. (I've been lucky enough not to see any crashes though) What I have found is that running games under Wayland (via XWayland) makes a lot of games behave better. I don't know exactly why this is but I suspect they are trying to manipulate a bunch of settings like fullscreen/input…

Haven't tried it myself since I switched away from NVIDIA, but supposedly initial support for the NVIDIA specific interface was added in KDE 5.16 and Gnome 3.31 both released last year might not be available if you are on a LTS distro.

For me the problem is that I have an Optimus laptop (Intel primary GPU with NVIDIA discrete card) which as far as I can tell has no published timeline for driver support, if it will ever come.

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

#162

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…

Since its all emulated why even tell the game its alt tabbed in the first place? Just keep it thinking nothing changed, its not like games do special stuff when in the background.

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

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> the money to pay developers to bulldoze the combinatoric jungle that is compatibility

For hardware support, the biggest thing is stable kernel ABI for drivers.

> the combinatoric jungle that is compatibility

Windows doesn't have combinatoric jungle. With their amount of supported hardware, combinatoric jungle would be prohibitively expensive even for Microsoft.

Instead, Windows has well-specified ABIs the drivers must conform to. And a set of development tools to verify that's the case, both static like code analysis, and runtime like driver verifier.

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

#165

I have a huge (already downloaded) library on Steam Windows. Does anyone know how to "share" the game resources so that the Linux version only download the executable/runner?

I just want to chime in and say you probably don't want to do this. Steam on linux can technically work with NTFS drives, but I've only had success running games that are linux-native. With anything that uses wine behind the scenes there are problems relating to file permissions.

I gave up and just created an ext4 partition and things got a lot more stable.

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

#166
post #163

Does Valve have a vested interest in helping gaming on Linux? What do they get out of it? Or are they a generous corporate machine doing it out the goodness of their heart?

Steam has a vested interested on Linux ever since Microsoft introduced the Microsoft Store.

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

#167

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 in home streaming has been a god send for this pandemic and having a new baby. Baby doesn't like sitting at the computer desk, so taking my handheld and using the home streaming I can play Slay the Spire anywhere around the house hosted by my linux machine. Works great!

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

#168
post #163

Does Valve have a vested interest in helping gaming on Linux? What do they get out of it? Or are they a generous corporate machine doing it out the goodness of their heart?

I've read that Valve was worried about Windows Store eating their lunch (i.e. creating a walled garden around gaming on windows platform). So Valve started investing heavily into gaming on Linux as a hedge.

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

#169

I really hope I can play all my games on linux one day. Right now I only play Age of empires 2 definitive edition, anybody knows if i can play it ranked on linux?

I've played some online ranked in Linux with DE. On some of the older patches I had random crashes upon reaching castle age so I'm currently sticking to windows though.

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

#170

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 pr…

>the server —if one exists— knows what's going on

Yes, but deploying even the most basic client input validation will mean we cant just ship a thin message passing shim masquerading as a server! Our cloud costs would go up by at least 20%!!1

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