Does anyone have a firm grasp on where the issue lies? Some spec that isn't implemented by Nvidia? Some out-of-spec behaviour from Steam that happens to work on Mesa? Deliberately taking a slow path? Since it's been an issue for so long, it seems like no one knows, and they're just blindly poking.

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Quoting: GuestThis is 100% a patent trolling company.

Of course it is. But that's a not-yet-illegal-in-the-US and very lucrative line of business to be in. Although I believe they prefer the term "Non Practising Entity."

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Quoting: MayeulCI believe patents to last way too long for software

Patents on software are prohibited, although that hasn't stopped patent filers and the CAFC from trying to slip them through anyway - generally with the figleaf that a machine that's running software is an entirely different machine to one that's running different software.

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Quoting: elmapuli know that will sound like conspiration theory, but.. who else thinks microsoft is behind this?
that seems like an familiar situation, microsoft funding someone else to sue...

Microsoft have helped out with legal attacks against their rivals before, but it's not really necessary in this case: Immersion are plenty aggressive already. Sony tried to front out that "customers don't really want rumble anyway" with the first PS3 controllers because they were being sued by Immersion, before ultimately caving. At most it would take "that Steam Deck is doing quite well" to some Immersion executive.

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The Deck is definitely hitting success milestones: the Steam Controller and Index didn't hit the levels that were worth suing over rumble (although the Steam Controller hit the level where it's worth suing over back paddles). Onward and upward!

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Although if you're on desktop Linux, you might want Proton Experimental which recently enabled the NVAPI for it (for NVIDIA GPUs).

For those that aren't aware, you can enable NVAPI for those games that don't have it automatically enabled with
PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 %command%
as the launch option.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPWhen you officially support Proton, then yes, that means you'll have to figure out why something doesn't work in Proton and can't just say "screw those guys". Duh?

That's entirely the point. I'm glad you agree, despite your attitude.

So you need a Linux test machine, and you need to fix bugs in your game for running on Linux exactly as you would if you had a native build, except you don't get to pick your own cross-platform libraries, nor the environment it's running in: those are chosen by someone else.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPNot true.
For Proton, they just need something that can run their game via Proton. That is decently easy to find a guide for, set up and - more importantly - does not require any dev to have knowledge about the platform.
It's more or less a "run and test if it works" kind of deal.

Nonsense.

If it works, great; you're providing no more support than ProtonDB does. If it doesn't work then you're either saying "works on Windows, screw those guys", so no support, or you need to figure out why it doesn't work. And developers don't want to test in the first place.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPDoes Proton lead to less native versions? Of course. Well, at least I'm fairly certain it does.

Not according to the data. I ran the numbers for a comment on a previous article, and the introduction of Proton had no significant effect on the number of native builds that are released. It provides a handy excuse for developers that weren't going to make a native build anyway, but they already had plenty of those (fragmentation! tiny market! hackers! Oh, hey, the Roblox devs used all of these as well).

Making a native build is trivial compared to literally everything else in game dev. That isn't the part that developers don't want to do. Testing and supporting the build are the time-consuming (and therefore expensive) parts that developers don't want to do. But if a developer is "supporting Proton" rather than "supporting Windows and hoping for extra money from Linux users" then they need a Linux testing pipeline anyway for their Windows build in Proton. Proton saves them hardly anything, and is just a mechanism to be able to say "Wine won’t ever be something that we guarantee will work" when they aren't doing that testing.

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Quoting: elmapulDXVK already exist, and supporting RayTracing on vulkan + using DXVK seems to be an better option for then than writing their own translation layer to translate to dx12.

They wouldn't need to write their own: Microsoft already translate lower versions into DX12, and Microsoft and Collabora made one to translate OpenGL into DX12.

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