Quoting: yahyaDo you have a proof of Quake 2 RTX running natively on AMD GPU?

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1089130/view/2903097291402265206 [External Link]

Added support for final Vulkan Ray Tracing API. The game can now run on any GPU supporting `VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline` extension

I've read reports of people running it on AMD hardware in Windows, although apparently the driver's a bit crashy, but I don't keep up with the state of Mesa/AMDGPU/AMDGPU-Pro enough to know which versions will provide support for that extension.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: rustybroomhandleOk people, educate me.

I was under the impression that games implementing nvidia's own RTX raytracing will not work in this way, but only games that support the platform independent standard.

no?

The only game that uses Nvidia-specific ray tracing is Wolfenstein Youngblood, which already works on Linux on Nvidia hardware.

Quake 2 RTX has already switched to the vendor-neutral Vulkan extension, so works on AMD (and future Intel) hardware that supports it.

This work is to translate the vendor-neutral DirectX ray tracing into the vendor-neutral Vulkan ray tracing.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Purple Library GuyOf course! I'd never thought about the ramifications of those PC Bangs . . . that's probably one reason why China always seems to stampede towards a couple of really popular games: The cybercafes install the most popular games on all their computers, so when you go there that's all you're gonna play.
I suppose this could have some impact on that . . . if the owners are willing to sit still for people using the things.

The machines are going to be re-imaged regularly anyway, so that there aren't bitcoin miners and cheats and things left on their machines, so it's OK from a computer hygiene perspective, and a standard legit thing that lots of their customers might want to use is a more realistic prospect than the one Linux user in China coming in wanting to boot their own distro.

Unfortunately, as we see starkly when they double-count China in the hardware survey, most of those machines are running Intel/Nvidia. Pop gets round the issue by having an Nvidia image (that boots using the proprietary driver) and a non-Nvidia image (that doesn't). So, optimally for this use case, Valve would want to include both images and pick the one to use at boot time, with access to the library configured for both. Which is a pain, but doable.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Valve's primary motivations for things are generally

• Reduce friction for gamers


• Reduce friction for game devs


• Reduce reliance on a single point of failure

so I'd say these features are the good ones from their perspective:

Quoting: eldaking2) A way to play your own games in public computers, like cybercafes (yes, they are still popular in some places). They do have tools already for those, so this could be a very convenient tool.

A portable Steam library that you can update anywhere with a good Internet connection is useful if your gaming machine itself has a terrible Internet connection. Much of the US has terrible Internet connections, but they can otherwise afford good gaming hardware and to buy games. PC gaming in China (which is a market they'd like to expand) generally uses cyber cafés rather than someone's own PC hardware. Those users could take their games with them, rather than having to download them again each session. For both of those scenarios you're reducing the friction of buying and updating large games.

4) Investigating the possibilities of having a full isolated OS, with standardized libraries and stuff, to run the games. Like the extreme version of containerization. This sounds like it is either quite distant, or would be a massive headache for us that already use Linux.

Making it easier for game devs to have a standardised testing target reduces the friction of them releasing their games for Linux. It's never been hard for them to do so, but "there are so many distros to choose from" and "I couldn't possibly afford a Linux machine to test on" are both excuses that game devs have used. Update the library with your build from anywhere, then boot the machine into your testing environment and you're good to test.

5) Just a normal "it is now easier to try out Linux on your computer without commitment, which helps Linux adoption in the long term". Which I don't quite doubt anymore Valve would do, but wouldn't be a big thing in itself.

Valve's plan to prevent Microsoft from killing Steam works better the more credible Linux gaming is as an alternative to Windows gaming. Customers being able to just boot a Steam key rather than using whatever non-Steam mechanism Microsoft come up with reduces the threat of Microsoft using their power to kill Steam and Valve.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Lots of interesting games in the sale. The library backlog is real, though.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Whitewolfe80The difference here is simple though Amazon actively use blender as do facebook i doubt Amazon gaming or facebook gaming use gadot for anything thats not a pop at the engine which looks to be improving with every release. As for the infastructure side i would love to see that funded more but that would really only come from the server side if there was a cost vs deployment benefit it would be funded quicker for sure.

Yeah, I'm not saying that these companies should fund all projects, just that more companies should look at the long-term benefit of funding all the things they benefit from, and throw some coppers at a variety of projects.

Apparently I missed the mark with the Gimp suggestion, since they don't want any money, but there are projects that do, and could make good use of it. The OpenSSL example was because Heartbleed happened when everyone was using the OpenSSL library but the project could only afford two developers. Now that example was sufficiently high profile that a fund for some of those infrastructure things was created, although I don't know how healthy or expansive it is after this time has passed.

I'm just hoping that people that use open source software will come to a wider realisation that, "the more you share, the more your bowl will be plentiful," rather than only funding the same projects.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

What do you think to all these companies announcing their support on Blender over the last year or two? Pretty amazing to see so many companies seemingly just wake up to how important open source is.

I'd like to see other projects being the target of that mutually-beneficial PR boost as well. Yes, content creation is a fundamental aspect of lots of industries, so it's appropriate that Blender get funding from the people that benefit from it, but they aren't the only one. I expect Gimp or Godot could do with a shot in the arm, too, as well as infrastructure things like OpenSSL.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestI mean, I could. But I won't.

You could certainly try.

Getting bored by this now - carry on if you wish, but I'm stopping here.

Bye.

For the benefit of everyone else, let's assume that mirv is correct, and the game rasterises some static shadows for some reason, even though the authors say they don't, and even though they show how they generate shadow rays in their videos and extensive documentation, and shadow rays are just some more ray calculations when you've already set up your BVHs and found your intersection points, and so on; taking the position that those shadows are the important bit and everything else is just "some effects" would be... pretty silly.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestI mean, I'm only going by the talk of the nvidia engineer who was the primary guy behind the port. Obviously you know better, my mistake then.

More than you, it seems. You seem to have misinterpreted the video that you watched.

You could play it yourself, and look at the code, or just go by something like "Q2VKPT [External Link] is the first playable game that is entirely raytraced and efficiently simulates fully dynamic lighting in real-time, with the same modern techniques as used in the movie industry" and read the copious documentation and papers that Nvidia have put out about the renderer and how it works.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestNo, raytracing is overlaid on top of some other traditional techniques still. It does completely replace the lighting pass for example, but not all of the shadow passes.

It is all raytraced. Even the shadows.

That question of performance is also crucial. It's not something that can be ignored, because it directly impacts the code written.

That... doesn't make any sense. The performance issue is important, which is why you're only getting playable performance at 1080p on a game with relatively low scene complexity (given that it's 20 years old), and you're limited to ~10 rays per pixel so you need to use a denoiser. But an entirely raytraced game at "high definition" resolution at 60 fps exists, and has existed for two years.

View this comment - View article - View full comments