Quoting: EhvisWas anything achieved in getting the DXR to Vulkan RT mapping to be easier or didn't the notes elaborate on that?

They certainly seem to think so. They have a chart (Figure 5 in their notes) comparing the two, and they say

It is straightforward to port code between the two APIs including re-use of ray tracing shaders written in HLSL

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Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: CatKillerUgh. So they just told everyone not to use it for 8 months for literally no reason. Great.

No, they sought feedback from lots of industry vendors across the board. As part of that, as noted, it was split up into multiple extensions so people could use part or all of it. Plus numerous other smaller changes asked by others.

I was reading through the notes as you were writing this, and already edited my comment.

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Any indication from anywhere what the hold up was? I'd imagine that AMD and Intel not having hardware to support it would have left the aims of the extension fuzzy at the beginning, but they'd have known what was going into their silicon a long time ago. Was it an oversight? Or some tricky problem that needed solving?

Still, I'm glad it's finally here, and hopefully the delay hasn't lost Vulkan critical time with developer mindshare relative to DirectX 12.

Edit:

They've also confirmed that the overall functionality has been unchanged since the provisional release.

Ugh. So they just told everyone not to use it for 8 months for literally no reason. Great.

Edit 2:
So, reading through the notes it seems that the problem was trying to have both easy mapping from DXR to Vulkan and easy mapping of Vulkan to Metal. It turns out that they can't have both, and they've decided to ditch Metal. That makes sense for our use-case, but it sucks for Khronos, since MoltenVK was an explicit target for them. I can see why they wouldn't want to take that decision quickly.

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Quoting: subThis?

https://twitter.com/CyberpunkGame/status/1012760227148587009 [External Link]

That thread, yeah; there's more than the one tweet.

Anyway, sorry for the derail.

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Quoting: PalancaWhat is your problem with CP2077? if i may ask...

I've got no opinion on the game. It might be great, it might be terrible: we'll see when they stop crunching their devs and release it.

CDPR, though, are Linux-hostile, and used the CP2077 Twitter account to mock people for wanting a Linux Galaxy client.

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Quoting: PalancaHave CP2077 in Linux on the same release day with the new version of Proton. It would be incredible.

Nobody buying it, on any platform, so that it's a complete flop, would be a better outcome.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyI have a cunning strategy for dealing with this situation:
Wait.

That's so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel.

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In a move that's sure to raise a few eyebrows, the Blender Foundation has announced that Facebook has joined the Blender Development Fund.

It's not really that big a deal: others have already shown that donating money to Blender is an easy and cheap way to get some positive PR, and I'd imagine that they would like people to be able to make game assets so they can sell them in their games store to run on their games hardware.

More interesting is oomd, which is a proper open source infrastructure product out of Facebook that serves a genuine need in the Linux ecosystem. They had an itch that needed scratching, and everyone benefits, exactly as it should be.

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Oh, also

Quoting: scaineI'm not sure what the release schedule is for kernels - they seem to be every two months or so, although there was a 6 month gap between 5.6 and 5.7.

2-3 months between versions. They switched to a more regular cadence after the trials of the 2.x era. Less than that, and it isn't done, and more than that and Linus gets fidgety.

5.6 was released on 29 March 2020 and 5.7 was released on 31 May 2020, so 63 days between them.

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Quoting: scaineI'm currently running the latest 5.9 from mainline using the low-latency option. It works really well, but I think I might give Liquorix a shot, since it will update automatically, AND includes the fsync patches. Liquorix (https://liquorix.net [External Link] ) support PPA and AUR updates, which is pretty cool.

Bear in mind that the last benchmarks I saw showed the liquorix kernel significantly underperforming compared to the standard generic and lowlatency Ubuntu kernels. You might find that it helps the games that need the newer scheduler patches, but makes everything else worse.

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