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. :/

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I've said this before, but personally I don't care about performance on other platforms. If a game doesn't work well on my hardware on Linux, I don't buy it and I don't play it. Simple.

It is beyond cool that we get so many great games these days, but if it came down to it, I'd rather give up on games than on Linux. In fact I pretty much did just that for a few years. But now I can call myself a Linux gamer with a straight face and that tickles me pink.

I don't doubt many people who call themselves gamers are more willing to use whatever OS gives them (subjectively) the best game experience, and these differences will undoubtedly keep them from switching to Linux. They won't care about reasons or explanations though, valid or not.

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The artwork is beautiful. Too bad if that's all there is to it.

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Yeah, the video doesn't tell me much. I like the style though, and if the writing's any good, there's a decent chance I'll enjoy the game. Many of my favourite adventure games are a bit on the silly side of the spectrum.

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Quoting: dubigrasuThey do look the same if you do enough runs. The hair, the dog's fur, general color tones, lights etc, all get to look the same eventually, but is a bit time consuming to keep recording until you get both version to match.

OK, there's more randomization going on than I guessed then. I thought the hair and lighting differences were shader-related.

Quoting: dubigrasuEdit: Ah, the driver version makes little difference, at least for the ones I tried (367.57, 375.10 and 370.28)

Right, thanks for testing.

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Quoting: dubigrasuYou can make the game to look the same, but not from presets.

The videos do not look identical to me, but I don't know if the minor lighting or detail related differences affect performance. I don't mean the randomized stuff you mentioned. I guess some of it might be due to video compression.

Feral could probably give further details on what exactly is missing or different in the Linux implementation, if it even matters. No real effect on the quality of our game experience, I'm sure.

Do later driver versions affect performance at all? Might not be easy to test on SteamOS.

EDIT: One very visible difference is the protagonist's hair after 1:50. Also sunlight seems a bit warmer in tone in the Windows version at times. You wouldn't even notice things like these if they weren't running side-by-side.

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