The trailer looks great, still. Reviewers seem to love it as well. Now just a bracing shot of FNA and the owl will be ready to meet the penguin.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: IncandescentThe triggers have far too much spring pressure, making them uncomfortable to use for any length of time, and the right trigger is now flaking out after only 1 year of serious use.

True, it took several months for the trigger springs to loosen a bit (or my fingers to adjust?) so that I'm not in agony after a longer racing game session. Although I'm so used to them now that a Dual Shock 3's triggers felt too small and loose for comfort when I tried one a while back.

Quoting: IncandescentThe top right bumper's plastic leaf-spring spring snapped (you mystery plastic, perhaps?), making it loose.

It was just a tiny black fragment of plastic rattling inside the controller. I couldn't see any place it could have broken off, hence the mystery.

I bought the F310 for about 20 € when it was on sale at a local supermarket. The quality is what I'd expect for a cheap controller, so I'm not too bothered by it. I wouldn't buy MS hardware even if I had the cash and I've never liked Sony's gamepads since the original PS, so the Steam Controller would be pretty much my only real choice.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: cxphergmailcomXbox 360 controller is by far the best out of box experience.

The Logitech controllers are pretty much straight up clones with a slightly different design. Don't know about relative quality as I've never tried an Xbox controller, and my F310 is barely working after a couple of years of use (had to fix a broken cable and remove a mystery piece of plastic that was jamming one of the triggers), but at least they're just as compatible.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Comandante oardoWhen You gonna add a Game Tracking feature?

Why would we want that?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

This looks too good to be true. What's the catch? There must be a catch, right? :)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: mitcoesAnd about drivers a lot of the work they do to adjust games, improve also the general driver use for any OS, including GNU/Linux.

Sure there are generic optimizations, but there's also tons of hacks that activate only for specific game binaries or when the driver detects problematic call patterns.

Vulkan and DX12 with their "thinner" drivers will hopefully make some of this unnecessary, but probably won't completely eliminate these hacks. The hardware vendors will still want to do all they can to make their GPU's perform better than the competition in the latest AAA games, and they might still do that by hacking around known bottlenecks on the fly. It would be better if they helped game developers fix their graphics code, but that might end up helping the competition as well and where's the fun in that. :/

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: STiATWe will continue to see it that way:
DX11 things will be ported to OpenGL
DX12 things will be ported to Vulkan

Maybe so, although the only reason for porting DX11 to OpenGL in the future might be the porters' existing shims and wrappers. And their inexperience with Vulkan I guess. OpenGL's feature list might be very similar to D3D 11's, but that doesn't mean they're a good match.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Thanks mirv, this was a nice read. You should write articles more often. I admit I come for the Linux gaming news and the community banter, but I still enjoy the more technical side of it all.

Actually I'm a software developer myself, but graphics is way out of my comfort zone. Despite this I spend hours reading technical articles and discussions on this stuff... go figure.

Quoting: NaibSo the article goes on to explain that OGL structure is inherently slow thus games using it will be slower then says vulkan won't make things faster

You are oversimplifying. Or maybe you just skimmed the article, because that's not what mirv says.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: tuubiYour comment about multithreading is also basically true, but the implementation is different enough that an engine designed with D3D in mind won't be able to take advantage without some serious refactoring. It also requires equally serious OpenGL expertise, and that's pretty rare in the industry.

Curious, why has one of the major features of Vulkan been touted as multithreading, if OpenGL already had it? As far as I knew, OpenGL didn't really do it, which is why Vulkan can spread things across your cores nicely.

We've seen plenty of videos showing this, where OpenGL is locked down to one core.

While thought has been put into parallelism in the later OpenGL versions (I think 4.3+, maybe?) and some modern vendor extensions, it is certainly limited and hard to use. Also due to driver issues the result might or might not work or might be slower on some vendors' GPU's. You know how messy this is. But basically there's almost always some stuff the graphics engine could be doing on additional cores and if it isn't, threading in general being really hard to do is a more likely roadblock than the API itself.

In the end you need Vulkan/DX12/Metal to make optimal use of your CPU cores, with some (hardware) limitations still.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: devlandOpenGL has feature parity with DirectX, and that includes multithreading.

In fact OpenGL 4.5 seems to have features DX11 does not. Your comment about multithreading is also basically true, but the implementation is different enough that an engine designed with D3D in mind won't be able to take advantage without some serious refactoring. It also requires equally serious OpenGL expertise, and that's pretty rare in the industry.

View this comment - View article - View full comments