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

phoronix.com

281–290 of 308 posts

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

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not trying to give voice to every gamer, just pointing out that there's more to gaming than games that rely on this crap, and that some of us accept that. That wasn't what I was taking umbrage with. You dismissing the concerns as absurd was what I was taking umbrage with. > Life is full of quasi-moral choices like this. Yes understand this. > You can choose to support hardware that supports your platform. You c…

My dismissal of the original statement is well explained. While some games with some anti-cheats won't work on Linux, the vast majority work well. There are options for viable future anti-cheats on Linux, between recreating what's been done for Windows, simple reputation systems, community moderation and actual event audits. The reason they'll be contemplated is the continued failure of trusted clients. And the signi…

> My dismissal of the original statement is well explained.

No it missed the point. You can't play the game currently.

> Dramatics: you seem to be a person that understands the problem, understands individuality, but refuses to paint as more than a binary outcome. There are already a million gamers playing games on Linux, there's clearly room in the middle, and positive road to the future.

I also understand what is true and what isn't. With the dramatics I was more talking about the high minded attitude about saving the world by buying the right carrots, or using linux. I used to cycle a lot and many cyclists on there thought they could save the world by everyone cycling everywhere, while buying foreign kit that needed to be shipped over in a container.

As for the number of gamers. "Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics". Saying there is a million gamers sounds like there is a lot. It isn't. Those million gamers are like 1-2% of the whole market at best (you can look up the steam stats which I think are representative).

I game (partially) on Linux and the extra hoops I have to go through to get a game running isn't worth the extra effort when I can just reboot into Windows (which takes seconds with modern hardware).

> E-sports: the elite will continue to happen at real venues, but I think there's going to be significant growth in the every-day teams. Think five-a-side pub teams. They're not going to rent a £15k/d venue like Multiplay can, they're going to play online and need a way to ensure that all players are playing with the same tools.

Never said a pub-team would be playing at a 15k venue (btw local pub footie teams in the UK do sometimes play in the big stadiums). Different levels of competition have a different levels of scrutiny over the process. If I play pool at the local pool club against another team, we don't have a umpire on board. It is done by mostly by gentleman's agreement and each team captain not causing a fuss. If you see a match on a TV they will have an umpire/referee.

> A cloud-rendered system does that and it'll only become more feasible in time. Yes, there's higher latency, but it's a known latency.

The system they have currently is more than good enough and have none of the drawbacks of your proposed system. The latency problem is never going away with cloud based rendering because it is limited by physics. Gamers have rejected Stadia for the very problems I described (it was wildly mocked for it) and other services are expensive when you can buy a decent gaming PC for less than £1000.

Most of them don't care about Linux, they want to play games. On my discord (which has a lot of programmers and people in IT) I am the only person that uses it regularly. I've worked at quite a few places as well (I am a contractor) and there might be another Linux user there. This experience matches up with every other statistic about Linux usage. We are very much in the minority.

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

#282
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low input latency irritates you? That's a new one.

Doom 2016 and eternal have really significant mouse lag on windows. It’s really hard to get used to. It’s most noticeable if you have recently played an actually responsive FPS recently

Wait, so I tried to fix the mouse lag in Windows for days and the problem was Doom? Fuck.

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

#283

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…

> they have to do stuff like restore the original display resolution This is something that I find incredibly annoying: games handling their own resolution and having their own resolution configuration. It's like their reinventing something that the OS already provides. Just use the resolution that's configured: if I wanted to change it I'd change it. Non-native resolutions look awful on LCDs anyway, so apps really s…

> Just use the resolution that's configured: if I wanted to change it I'd change it.

So you're saying you'd want to change desktop resolution each time you want to play a performance heavy game?

> Non-native resolutions look awful on LCDs anyway, so apps really shouldn't change it.

So you're saying developers should take away the options that people actively use because you subjectively don't like how it looks on your specific monitor?

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

#284
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.

At the very least Plagman seems to still be working on Linux stuff inside Valve. There have been lots of other too (may or may not have changed) so it's definitely not just "a passion project by Gabe".

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

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of public companies, such as intel and google, that manage to pursue a long term strategy, to commodotize their complement: https://www.gwern.net/Complement

Google's habit of killing any product that isn't search or Gmail suggests otherwise

Yes and Intel's example is also not good either.

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

#286
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unreal is working on their own game store. This is so sad. Just fragmenting the market more merely increases the influence of MS. > PS and Xbox has had exclusives for years. These don't really compete with PCs. People stick to one, another, or both. Seldom do gamers suddenly switch from PC to console and completely drop their PC.

The Epic store is the first significant competitor to Steam. They take a lower cut of game sales than Steam does. I wouldn’t lose sleep over market fragmentation.

Consumers gain nothing from "competition" if they are forced to use both providers due to exclusives. If Epic would actually compete on features then that would be a good thing, but right now they are just dumping money into developers to gain marketshare while not actually improving anything for end users.

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

#287
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly, Valve started doing this some time ago as an "insurance policy", when Microsoft spoke about locking down Windows (before they introduced Windows Store). It is amazing to see how far Linux gaming has come since then. 10 years ago almost none of the big games worked, 5 years ago lots of games worked after fiddling with wine config, and now most of the games I have tried work out of the box afte…

Does anyone have a good write-up on the history behind Linux gaming? Would love to learn more

I don't have a writeup but the main highlights have been

1. Loki Entertainment [0] (1988-2001), a third-party porting company that licensed games and released them for Linux

2. Linux Game Publishing [1] (2001-2009), basically continued what Loki was doing

3. id Software used to release their games for Linux and open source the engines [2]

4. Others (mostly Indies) also had Linux ports, but it was still rare: Frictional (Penumbra series, Amnesia), 2D Boy (World of Goo), ... and Wolfire Games who created:

5. Humble Indie Bundle [3] (2010-) incentivized many popular Indie games to be ported to Linux - initially all Bundles where 100% cross-platform between Windows, Linux and OS X.

6. Steam for Linux [4] (beta 2012, 2013-) - with the lure of Steam Machines many more developers jumped onto Linux ports, including some larger Publishers as well as porting companies: Aspyr, Feral Interactive, Virtual Programming (eON)

7. GOG.com Linux support [5] (2014-)

8. DXVK, Proton (2018-) making it easier to play Windows games

There was also Kickstarter where for a while most big ones had Linux support promised in some form. Also Unity adding Linux exports has made it possible for tons of games to be ported (although not without issues). I probably forgot some things, but at least that should be a lot you can read up on.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki_Entertainment

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Game_Publishing

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Software#Linux_gaming

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_Bundle

[4] https://store.steampowered.com/news/9943/

[5] https://www.gog.com/news/gogcom_now_supports_linux

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

#288
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kernel anti cheat rootkits meanwhile server doesnt even perform the most basic sanity checks, like is client entity running at the speed of light? is client entity teleporting all over the map? is client entity allowed to fly? or asking really "hard" questions, like should server really send detailed position and model data (animation frame, items equipped etc) of players not in a Potentially visible set to client en…

That last part is what really annoys me. Do visibility checks on the server not the client.

But then you need to pay for hardware to run those checks! (Unless of course you let players run their own servers, but then you loose control and might have your old game that refuses to die compete with your newer ones.)

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

#289

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 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

Feral Interactive has also contributed to the OSS AMD drivers.

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Yeah, really sad to see this. When Aspyr released Farenheit and KotOR 2 I was really excited for getting more older games ported but it seems they dropped that.
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