Quoting: gradyvuckovicEvery time I hear a dev say they skipped Linux at launch I can't help but wonder, "Is there something that could be done to make developing software for Linux easier?". Is there some kind of SDK that the open source community should be putting together, something that reduces the burden?

It's not the development: they've already done that. Everyone that's put their game on Stadia has already done that.

It's QA and support costs that scare people away: they fear those costs are open-ended and they won't make them back from sales. Developers that use Linux themselves and are comfortable with how everything works can more accurately gauge those future costs (although they still might judge that the returns aren't there) but to ones that have only ever used Windows Linux is a big, mysterious, scary money hole just waiting to eat their company.

When you get influential devs in a company that fall into the former category they can champion our cause with realistic projections, or they do it as a passion project that isn't expected to make a big profit but isn't expected to make a loss either, and we get native versions. When all the influential devs in a company fall into the latter category we don't.

Games companies want reassurance that they aren't going to be on the hook for costs that will extinguish their profits. Either from someone inside that's trusted and knows what they're talking about with a costed support plan, or from someone outside that strictly limits the amount of future work they need to do as Google does with their only one hardware/software combo with Stadia. Or the prospect of future growth that will outpace future costs that games companies thought they had with Steam Machines.

We need growth, so that games companies feel there's enough potential income to offset the potential costs, and we need more developers familiar with Linux (which we may get as a result of people making Debian/Vulkan games for Stadia) so that they have a realistic idea of what those costs are, and can minimise them, and we need other games companies being bold and successful with their Linux games to show that they don't need to be so terrified.

Feral's attraction for games companies is that they don't need the games companies to do anything and they limit the support costs to their fee and whatever they take from sales they themselves generate. Their ports are great and their support is excellent, but Feral porting a game doesn't give the developers better Linux skills or more Linux mindshare, which means Linux stays as a bogeyman for the developers themselves.

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Quoting: randylIt better be powerful, the die size is enormous. From the blog link in the article, "....with a die size of 826 mm2".

For reference TU102 (2080ti) has a die size of 754mm2 and TU104 (2060, 2070, etc) has a die size of 554mm2.

The Volta V100, which is the predecessor of the part talked about in the keynote, has a die size of 815 mm².

The talk was about their HPC and datacentre stuff, and what they'd done with the $7 billion purchase of Mellanox, rather than GPUs. I'm quite interested in the actual details of the Ampere architecture, which I think are due on Tuesday.

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There never was a statement about opening the source to their drivers: that's just the fevered imaginings of wishful thinkers.

They were going to have a talk called "Open Source, Linux Kernel, and NVIDIA" in which they said

We'll report up-to-the-minute developments on NVIDIA's status and activities, and possibly (depending on last-minute developments) a few future plans and directions, regarding our contributions to Linux kernel; supporting Nouveau (the open source kernel driver for NVIDIA GPUs, that is in the Linux kernel), including signed firmware behavior, documentation, and patches; and NVIDIA kernel drivers.

So maybe they have a plan to eventually stop making things hard for the nouveau people, and maybe they'll start actually making things easier for the nouveau people, but no announcement about open sourcing their own drivers has been made or implied.

I'm sure it would have been quite an interesting talk, though.

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Quoting: eldakingIt's not the entire southern hemisphere, it is Australia in particular which is known as "the land down under".

Where women glow and men plunder. [External Link]

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPI prefer cider, personally. But we don't really have that as software.

TransGaming's proprietary "Wine for Apples" was called Cider.

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Quoting: elmapulis that the SteamOS logo or steam logo? because i dont see the logo for other stores, including their own store, so why its there mixed with a lot of platform logos...

Weirdly, I think it's likely to be neither, but "Steam Machines" instead, as a platform. And likely mostly so they didn't have a visual gap. Although it does means that the Steam logo gets to be on there twice, which is funny coming from Epic.

That selection of icons is really odd in general: they've clearly put the wide icons with text on one side and the mostly square icons on the other so that they all line up visually, which is fair enough, but what's going on with the ordering? Steam gets the top row and Windows is down slumming it with Linux & Android. Very strange.

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Quoting: ShmerlLooking forward to that. They are already investing in Stadia release, so making a proper Linux release on GOG won't be hard for them.

Not hard, but they won't.

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Quoting: CreakI am mostly worried about the reason why they dropped VR for an entire platform that has more users than Linux's. Obviously, financially, it makes little sense.

We can speculate as much as we want.

OK :D

Valve have been the primary driver behind Vulkan, from the glNext days. Apple aren't the least bit interested in Vulkan, using Metal exclusively. When Ubuntu wanted to drop maintenance of 32-bit libraries without a robust containerisation system already in place, Valve opted to only support those distros that could keep everything working. In the same situation, Apple just said "too bad, so sad." Linux doesn't bring Valve a lot of money, but makes Valve's job a lot easier. Apple doesn't bring Valve a lot of money, and makes Valve's job a lot harder. Valve wanted a backup plan should Windows ever be untenable; Apple have made it clear that macOS isn't going to be it. If Valve are going to create a VR future, and they seem to be interested in that, it's too much of an uphill struggle to involve macOS in that.

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I lost interest in the series after the few I played on the PS3, but this does seem like the worst possible way of doing things: go through the effort of porting the game to Linux & Vulkan, but then go specifically with Linux-hostile methods so they couldn't sell it to Linux customers even if they could be bothered to.

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