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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

#201

Post by xenadu02 »

coldpie wrote: post #174
rasz wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From one engineer to another: I'm sorry you keep having to deal with people who haven't spent a single minute working on this problem second-guessing your work. I get the same thing regularly and it can be very frustrating.

As you noted: if the solution were so trivial it would have been done and shipped already.

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

#202

Post by na85 »

coding_lobster wrote: post #135
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #134

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?

Cortana.

>Cortana

Agreed, Cortana is a big reason to avoid Windows.

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

#203

Post by forest_dweller »

oliwarner wrote: post #58
forest_dweller wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the point. The games do not work. As you said some install Kernel Level drivers (I believe this is a Ring-0 but I am not an expert in such things) as a Anti-cheat mechanism. These do not work with Wine/Proton. e.g. Doom Eternal worked fine until the first patch and then didn't once the anti-cheat was installed (for the non-existant multiplayer community). Then they removed it only after the fanbase he…

Those games don't work. And it's important to note that occasionally those games also don't work for Windows users. New drivers, strange setups, perfectly legitimate background software, they've all upset the boat at some point, and will again in the future. Trusted Clients are fragile beasts. It was Denuvo's Anti-Cheat and Anti-Tamper that were added retrospectively to Doom Eternal. Denuvo has a pretty awful track r…

Well they defintely don't work on Linux which is the point and I definetely can't play them. I personally left a negative review and removed the game until the patch was removed.

Whether the anti-cheat should be there isn't the issue. The issue is "does this stop the game from running on Linux". The answer was yes it does.

For a lot of people the only reason they buy a PC is to play games. So you might be okay saying "well I don't care about those titles" but for a lot of people those big titles with shitty DRM is literally the reason they bought the PC in the first place and saying the concern was absurd is just incorrect.

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

#204

Post by h2odragon »

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?

You can avoid much of the download suck by making a (steam client) backup of your games from the windows system, then restoring that backup onto the linux system.

AFAIK that will avoid re-download of most of the shared assets where possible. You may have to start the install of things on the new steam client, then pause them, before it will let you restore the backups.

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

#205

Post by forest_dweller »

Cloudef wrote: post #59
forest_dweller wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the point. The games do not work. As you said some install Kernel Level drivers (I believe this is a Ring-0 but I am not an expert in such things) as a Anti-cheat mechanism. These do not work with Wine/Proton. e.g. Doom Eternal worked fine until the first patch and then didn't once the anti-cheat was installed (for the non-existant multiplayer community). Then they removed it only after the fanbase he…

People are insane to begin with to install some rootkit on their system just to play a game.

A lot of the times you won't know unless you go digging through review comments or people have made a fuss over it.

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

#206

Post by coldpie »

xenadu02 wrote: post #201
coldpie wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From one engineer to another: I'm sorry you keep having to deal with people who haven't spent a single minute working on this problem second-guessing your work. I get the same thing regularly and it can be very frustrating. As you noted: if the solution were so trivial it would have been done and shipped already.

Hahaha! Nah, it's fine. Their suggestion was a good one; like I said, we did consider doing it. It's fun to talk about this stuff here on HN because the discussion is usually sensible. You should see the dumb crap they say on Reddit.

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

#207

Post by forest_dweller »

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.

It doesn't work. I've tried it on Arch and I have to force gnome to use X via a GDM environment variable IIRC.

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

#208

Post by tachyonbeam »

Jasper_ wrote: post #143
rasz wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It could also be because it makes economic sense for Valve to make their software portable. Being tied to Direct3D, which only runs on Windows, is not in any way futureproof. I'm not following Valve closely, but they used to be working on the Steam Machine, and they have VR aspirations. I don't think they'd want to have to buy Windows licenses for their custom gaming hardware. I'm not sure how active those projects are right now, but regardless, if your game engines are tied to Windows, it locks down your future options, Microsoft has you by the balls. To maximize profits and future opportunities, you'd want to be able to write once and port easily to Mac, Linux, cellphones, consoles, VR headsets, etc.

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

#209

Post by Alupis »

mhh__ wrote: post #180
marvin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

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

That's unlikely to be true anymore. Even a modestly modern GPU can produce 100's of FPS in CS:GO at 1920x1080 or higher resolutions. Benchmarks for the 3080 were showing 400-500 FPS in CS:GO at 1440p resolutions.

After maybe double your screen refresh rate, all excess FPS don't matter and are effectively wasted. Pro's mostly use 144Hz monitors because 240Hz is indistinguishable[1] - making anything above 288FPS basically a waste (and it's debatable if anything above 144FPS with FreeSync enabled is a waste too).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX31kZbAXsA

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

#210

Post by ricardo81 »

the_only_law wrote: post #181
ekianjo wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I didn't notice a difference to be fair.

Though nowadays I have a dual boot and the battery life while running Windows is 4x better than on Debian.

I think Civ probably consumes more CPU/GPU than it really needs to.

Add me to the "it worked OK on Linux" group, though I suspect that a number of drivers could be improved for performance/power reasons. If of use, the laptop I used had an Nvidia 980M which was what I used to play Civ. The fan was blowing hard and the Desktop with a Nvidia 1080 (on Windows) does play faster (I tend to play 'huge' map). It definitely "worked" but maybe less performant.

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