I haven't looked into it more than what's written here yet, but

Flags to enable motion support in an acceleration structure

seems really interesting to me. Acceleration structures are computationally expensive to build (it's one of the things that the RT cores provide hardware acceleration for) and choosing when to modify an existing one and when to tear it down and build a new one is quite a difficult optimisation problem. If this makes it easier to have some parts of an existing acceleration structure behave sanely under motion, that could be really handy.

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Quoting: tuubiUse whatever you find interesting and/or practical, but don't go around telling people that their choice is wrong.

Yeah, that is the most harmful thing people can do to Linux adoption. People think that by trash-talking distros they'll make their own favourite distro seem better, and they get in the habit of doing so in whichever distro-bubble they frequent.

If you're coming from something like Windows, OS X, Android or iOS where the only version choice is "current version" or "old version" just the idea of having to choose between distros is completely overwhelming and stress-inducing. The phenomenon is generally referred to by names like, "the tyranny of choice."

Having people going around sneerily saying "oh, you mustn't use Ubuntu, noob," or click-bait listicles of "$obscure_distro that you must use" - just the idea that it's possible to make the wrong choice - won't make them choose whatever it is you're pushing, it will just make them flee back to what they're used to, which doesn't make them choose.

It's so frustrating to see members of our community sabotaging us like that.

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Quoting: LoftyWould this improve older earlier Linux ports that used openGL and had poor performance like DeusEX mankind divided?

excuse my ignorance on the matter, this is new to me.

Not directly.

The OpenGL model is a single threaded state machine. At the time, for the uses it was created for, the hardware itself was a single threaded state machine. Fairly quickly, though, that stopped being the case - programmable shaders and multicore processors being the big deviations from that model, but others too. So OpenGL drivers lied through their teeth about what they were doing: they'd reorder instructions, and batch draw calls, and cache things or not cache things as they saw fit, for better performance; but as far as the application is concerned it was all "single threaded immediate rendering, honest guv," since that's what the spec calls for. Applications have no way of knowing WTF is actually going on.

Vulkan makes all this stuff explicit. The application has to handle the scheduling and the memory allocation and so on, and Vulkan provides the means to find out what the hardware can do and what it's actually doing. No more lies from the driver, but more work for the developer.

Automatically implementing OpenGL on Vulkan (which is what Zink does) means that the driver can provide consistent state-of-the-art lies to the application, but the application's still restricted to the OpenGL model, and was written in the context of the OpenGL driver lies of the time it was written. So Zink might make performance a bit better by providing better lies than average, but an OpenGL driver that provided the lies that the application writer was expecting and testing against would be just as good.

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Hmm. My little one loves machines and loves puzzles. Showing a five year old how to pick locks couldn't possibly have negative future consequences, right?

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Quoting: whizseStill not too fond of the colour arrangement. Too much brown. Like Quake 2 mixed with early Ubuntu.

You're thinking of the first Quake: that was the brown one. Quake 2 is grey with whoa! coloured lights slapped everywhere. The early Ubuntu versions were also very brown, though.

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Quoting: Eike"One problem is that OpenGL is a big API with a lot of legacy stuff that has accumulated since its initial release in 1992."

Yeah, OpenGL was driven by the needs of CAD software when programs were single-threaded and hardware was a fixed-function rendering pipeline. Modern software and hardware aren't really like that at all.

There's an interesting set of articles [External Link] from one of the PowerVR people that describes how Vulkan does things differently to OpenGL.

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Quoting: ajgpQuestion I always assumed that Zink was a similar project to DXVK in that it was simply a translation abstraction between OpenGL and Vulkan. But the wording of the above makes it seem that it is a MESA specific. I.e if Im using Nvidia drivers then I cant use Zink to translate to Vulkan like I would DXVK. Or am I missing something.

You can use Zink on Nvidia. But native OpenGL from Nvidia's driver will be faster.

The motivations for Zink were laid out quite well in its initial announcement [External Link].

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Quoting: whizseOverall, I'm glad Valve is bringing demos back. But please, keep them in place after the festival is over. There's no way I have time to try out even half the titles that catch my fancy!

This came up with another recent article. A lot of game devs believe that if a potential customer is able to satisfy their curiosity with a demo, the dev won't be able to pick their pocket for the full game price. I think that's an abhorrent attitude. But by enforcing the demos being unavailable on launch day to placate the devs, Valve can get them to actually make a demo in the first place.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeI'm hoping the 'SteamPal' has some sort of modularity to the controller though, being able to hot swap buttons and control sticks around like the Thrustmaster eSwap controller would be amazing!

Yeah, that could be awesome. Having button blocks, D-pad blocks, touchpad blocks, and stick blocks that you can swap out, to suit your taste (not having to choose between GameCube-style and PlayStation-style) or for easy replacement when they get sticky or whatever. They might find that it adds too much cost to the build, or are too fiddly at the size they need to be, though, so that's in my nice-to-have list rather than something that I'm particularly expecting.

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