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

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

#181

Post by the_only_law »

ekianjo wrote: post #177
ricardo81 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh god. I have pretty good specs and decided to try to switch my PC over to Linux. At the time all I really wanted to play game-wise was Civ 6. It had a linux port so I'd imagine it would be fine. Dear God was I wrong. I tries it on Ubuntu and it was the only "officially supported" distro. The game was flat out unplayable, FPS drops to the point where I was watching a slide show, UI animations lagged, and attempting to start a multiplayer lobby froze the game at a blank screen, my graphics card showed up as "Unknown Device" despite being dected fine by the Nvidia drivers. I tried for months to figure out was going on. I made sure my graphics drivers were straight, updated firmware, even upgraded to a much more recent kernel and tried different Ubuntu versions. Nothing would work and no one was able to help me out at all. The best lead I found was some very old comments about how the Linux port had atrocious CPU optimization and had basically no multicore support.

Anyway maybe close to a year later, I tried again with Fedora, it ran a bit better, which I imagine to be the work of better updated kernel + system packages, but I had to keep it on the lowest graphics settings to make it barely playable. And this was on a system with a decent mid teir graphics card at the time, more memory than I've ever needed and a Ryzen 9. On top of that there were quite a few updates that completely broke cross platform play and apparently modifying version string resources could hack around that at the risk of desyncs.

To this day most people ive met that play Civ 6 on Linux swear to me that it runs perfect, so I have no idea what was going on. I've also been told running it via Proton might actually run better but I haven't tried.

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

#182

Post by squirtle1992 »

gregjw wrote: 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?

Maybe it's profitable already? 0.8-1% of Steam's userbase is not a small number.

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

#183

Post by dkersten »

ubercow13 wrote: post #178
dkersten wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not sure what the issue is tbh. The games launch, but in my testing, have all kinds of glitches or issues that go away when running on X11. For example, one game doesn't receive any input, another one has graphical artifacts but otherwise runs fine, another runs at a suuper low frame rate. All of these issues go away when running on X. For all I know its a driver issue or something else in my setup.

But things are improving, so maybe in a few months (by the time I get a desktop with some luck) it will all be resolved. I may give wine-wayland a try too if it's not. Or its my setup and it may just work on new hardware.

Either way, I'm quite impressed by Proton, but haven't been able to run it on Wayland properly yet.

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

#184

Post by ubercow13 »

Karliss wrote: post #157
kevincox wrote: post #112

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.

I think Xwayland GPU acceleration won't work with NVIDIA still, though.

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

#185

Post by mhh__ »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #61
FrojoS wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Precisely, and developing for Windows is much easier than Linux anyway because it doesn't suffer from the same "lets break userspace every 2 years" problem.

I know that games are hectic and everything but I am still genuinely confused that porting a game is this complicated.

The main meat and potatoes of the game is either nearly platform agnostic (Vk, OpenGL, or emulation) or usually similar in principle (audio).

Maybe I've been spoilt by only working on open source projects where people try to write good code because it's public.

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

#186

Post by mhh__ »

gregjw wrote: 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?

Linux is effectively valves insurance policy against microsoft going back to the good old days.

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

#187

Post by hvis »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #105

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…

> no hidpi support

It's been added quite late, and who knows why it's off by default, but there is a checkbox now in Settings -> Interface called "Enlarge text and icons based on monitor size".

Works well here.

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

#188

Post by kevingadd »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #105

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…

fwiw, Steam's HiDPI support was rubbish on Windows until relatively recently, so it's not weird that it's bad on Linux as well.

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

#189

Post by mhh__ »

Noxmiles wrote: post #14

How do we deserve Valve? Okay: Any possibility to support their open source work? (except of using steam)

As a gamer: Buy their games

As an industry: Follow their lead and be prepared to pay for the software you rely on - there are some really clever people out there, for a company like valve this is pocket change but someone still needs to have the balls to do it.

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

#190

Post by mhh__ »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #12

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 really really wouldn't trust a game across Linux to windows unless it was read only.

Probably possible, but when you have (for example) the DCS installer starting itself and possibly wiping the drive, I don't trust half the games I own to play nice enough to behave in a weird setting

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