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

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171–180 of 308 posts

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

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Plus reasonably good documentation.

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

#172

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…

The client works fine on XWayland, but the games do not, I need to switch to X11 for that. I really only use the client to launch the games though, so I haven't noticed any of the other issues.

As far as the games go, I've been very impressed with how well Proton works so far! I was thinking about running Windows in a VM and doing GPU passthrough when I get a desktop next year, but with how well Proton has been working on my laptop (with only integrated gpu), I may not need to -- Proton may work perfectly well. In X11 (sadly, since I use Sway for my non-gaming use).

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

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the only gaming company that actively improve Linux gaming is only Valve. Compare this to Stadia, where I never see any news on them contributing to the Linux gaming stack

Well.. and Aspyr for porting. And CodeWeavers for employing Wine devs. And Collabora: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/10/collabora-expect-their...

Aspyr has not been doing any porting for years. Feral is scaling down their porting as well. Mainly because of Proton: https://boilingsteam.com/proton-the-native-port-killer/

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

#174
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We investigated that briefly. It's not as easy as it sounds, and even if it was, some games do useful things when they lose focus (e.g. auto pause the game, stop sending audio). We decided it wasn't worth pursuing.

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

#175
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I forgot about those Linux porting companies such as Aspyr and Feral Interactive. And Collabora isn't specifically a gaming company, but they and CodeWeavers also helps

Both Collabora and CodeWeavers collaborate with Valve (and with funding from Valve?) on the gaming front though so it's not wrong to attribute that to Valve (yes CodeWeavers also improves Wine independently, but that's more than just games).

Codeweavers is mainly working to support Proton these days, check out this interview from a few days ago: https://boilingsteam.com/podcast-12-with-james-ramey-from-co...

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

#176

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.

I'm not sure that applies here. Steam specifically ships it's own version of libraries for compatibility between different distributions.

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

#177

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 bought Civ 6 for Linux purely because it was available on Linux. Bought from Steam. It does seem like they're pushing things in the right direction for Linux gaming.

Civ6 was a very poor port on Linux.

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

#178

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…

The client works fine on XWayland, but the games do not, I need to switch to X11 for that. I really only use the client to launch the games though, so I haven't noticed any of the other issues. As far as the games go, I've been very impressed with how well Proton works so far! I was thinking about running Windows in a VM and doing GPU passthrough when I get a desktop next year, but with how well Proton has been worki…

Isn't Xwayland supposed to have proper support for GPU acceleration now? Does it just not work well?

There's also this port [0] of wine to Wayland but it only supports simple fully GPU-drawn windows AFAIK (not desktop apps). So, sufficient for playing many games. I haven't tried it yet.

[0] https://github.com/varmd/wine-wayland

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

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's interesting is that games are one of the main reasons the market share is negligible. It used to be games and Office, but home users can increasingly get by with the web version or Google Docs or LibreOffice. But people still keep Windows on their PCs for games. If the games start to run on Linux, what's still keeping people on Windows?

Google Docs is no replacement for actual serious work in Office. That's like asking someone who uses NetBeans to switch over to repl.it

Sure, but a lot of companies have switched. My previous job was a banking company with thousands of employees and they were using Google's suite for everything. So while Office is still ahead for serious work, there are more and more large companies out there who have migrated away.

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

#180
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The PCs are provided by the tourney organisers, and it's a marginal benefit really.

Most professional CS is played at 4:3 stretched so the PC is pulling in hundreds of FPS

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