Quoting: Alm888Which leaves us with the question: "Why do they need DirectX if they have unified OpenGL render and cross-platform input?"

For Windows users, that's an easy question. Some of the OpenGL drivers REALLY suck in comparison to the DirectX ones. Having a DirectX renderer can give higher frame rates or better stability.

Vulkan may change that pattern of development. Both DirectX 12 and Vulkan share similar design principles and drivers that support DX12 and Vulkan should be easier to develop, troubleshoot and provide similar frame rates. If Vulkan is adopted by enough developers, especially engine developers, developers may be able to concentrate on just one render pipeline.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Oh - and a single minetest server can be accessed from Linux, Windows, MacOSX clients and Android devices, which removes my main complaint against Minecraft - tablets and phones can only play against Pocket Minecraft.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I've been running Minetest (initially for my sons, but I've been playing it too!) for a few weeks, starting at 0.4.13 and now 0.4.14.

Initially, I wasn't that impressed - the base game is pretty quiet and basic. It wasn't until I starting trawling through the forums that I realized there are a metric ton of mods for the base game. Any initial concerns I had that the mods might conflict have evaporated - I've been running a mix of homedecor_plus, farming_plus, throwing_enhanced and mesecons, on top of a goodly set of mobs and it plays well. The extreme mod-ability of the game also helps me balance it out - my youngest is most interested in building and exploring, but doesn't want to fight wolves or zombies (although slimes appear to be okay).

I would recommend anyone interested look around at the mods before starting a server - some mods will affect the generation of blocks within the world (moreores, moretrees, moreblocks) and you probably want those active at the initial world generation.

You might also want to ensure that jungle and dungeon generation are enabled for your world before you generate it too - check out the possibilities for ~/.minetest/minetest.conf

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: maodzedunWhere does the bottleneck come from, though? There is about 20% performance difference between 1080p and 4K which makes zero sense.

It makes all the sense in the world? 4k is only EIGHT TIMES as many pixels to calculate and draw for each frame.

Firstly, a correction to your numbers. HD is 1920x1080. 4k is NOT 8xHD pixels - 4K resolutions are typically 3840x2160, despite the implication that 4K has 4000 vertical lines. 4k has 4xHD pixels.

Back in the early days of GPU cards, once you hit the pixel fill rate, that was basically the bottleneck. So 4x the pixels would be 1/4th the frame rate.

Modern cards are highly parallel, typically 100+ pipelines even at the midrange. Pixel rate is no longer the bottleneck, shader texel rates and data across the GPU bus are more critical. If the texture data needed by the GPU fits into the VRAM, along with the compiled pixel and vertex shaders, very high frame rates at high resolutions will run nearly as fast as the lower resolutions.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I've been burning a fair number of hours on Terraria. I also celebrated the arrival of Overgrowth Alpha 210 on Steam with a little Rabbit fury in the Arena.

Just picked up Running With Rifles a couple of days ago, and while I wasn't that impressed at first, it's growing on me. It's far more skill-based than I expected, and learning how to make good use of cover and shoot accurately is critical to make progress.

Road Redemption awaits me tonight.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: KeyrockPlease Project: CARS or GRID: Autosport. Please Project: CARS or GRID: Autosport. Please Project: CARS or GRID: Autosport. Please Project: CARS or GRID: Autosport. Please Project: CARS or GRID: Autosport.

Seriously, I'm starved for a racing game.

Did you pick up DiRT: Showdown when it was 85% off? I've done every trick, lap and takeout in that game and NO ONE dares challenge me (I'm looking at you LiamD, ignoring all my challenges :-) )

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Wow - this looks like a modernized version of Carball (mod for UT2k4). I lost days playing that.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: PeciskAlso Ars Technica reports that Android will move to Vulkan API as default graphics API.

I strongly suspect that is why NVidia is so interested in Vulkan for Linux - having good debuggers, trace factilites and other diagnostics are going to be critical for a lower level API and Android is generally a ARM + NVidia show these days.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: HamishSpeaking of such things, what is the current state of the Enchanted Edition?

The Enchanted Edition runs flawlessly (currently playing on Ubuntu 14.04 64bit via Steam). I'm fairly certain I'm using the beta access for it - whether it is available outside the beta, I can't say.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: FeistHmm...unfortunatly there's not much left to buy.

I have every title with a linux version, except "Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel" and although I bought all the story-dlc:s for "Borderlands 2", I never felt like playing longer than the main-story ending (and barely that long). So that was a bit of wasted money...

If you haven't played Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep, you have missed out on the best of the DLCs. The rest are mildly entertaining but TTAODK actually has an interesting story line. Only the bit in the Dwarven mines feels like a drag (and that is partly because its a run round the map three times exercise).

View this comment - View article - View full comments