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Latest Comments by STiAT
Khronos gives an official update on Vulkan
19 Dec 2015 at 10:02 pm UTC

Quoting: tuubi
Quoting: XzylI'm insulted this site never tests nvidia with the open drivers they're getting really good. Linux is about choice and openness and these Windows refugee clowns love to thump their e-peens about >60 fps or a 10~20 fps difference above it...
Yes. Choice is good. Yet you feel personally insulted when people choose to use Linux in ways you don't support. Go figure...

Go refugees!
Not long ago, on this very site, there has been a test.

I have regular freezes on the desktop/kwin with the open drivers, thats why I dont give them a chance yet.

Khronos gives an official update on Vulkan
19 Dec 2015 at 2:17 pm UTC

For the Vulkan-Release. I certainly don't see it happening in January - at least not very likely, but my bet still lies in Q1/2016.

Khronos gives an official update on Vulkan
19 Dec 2015 at 2:13 pm UTC Likes: 1

Well, we're seeing a more and more shift to open source, even in drivers and game engines for the reason that they started to adopt different business models (share of the revenue of a game instead of a fixed license cost, and very low monthly payment as the $10 for UE4).

As long as we don't see a working business model for Games, we won't see them open source any time soon, because creating them is not cheap.

I understand that people want to make a living out of their work. In Linux, RedHat shows how that works. A lot of kernel developers come by hardware producing companies as well. Of course, we've a good share of volunteers, but there is a good amount of people making a living of this.

I personally see no business model you could run for opensource games which reliably works (yet), but maybe some smart person will come up with something. The kickstarter / early access thing is one way to go, but you still have the risk what you could do when you need more cash? Today, the game developers are bridging that with funds from investors to finish their product, and get the money in of the extra-sales after release.

For me, it's not so important if something is OpenSource or not. Yes, I develop OpenSource out of ideology. For me is important that those products use open standards for my data, so I can easily replace them once some better product comes along.

Khronos gives an official update on Vulkan
19 Dec 2015 at 1:49 am UTC Likes: 1

Yet another delay. Shouldn't be too hard, since graphics engine engineers (if they want) certainly already have access to Vulkan and beta drivers, and have had for quite some time.

I'm looking forward, and wonder how fast graphics drivers will support it. I think the engines will be pretty fast adopting it, since it's what they've been waiting for pretty some time now. With being Windows, Android and Linux I hope there will be some interest in it, even though, the killer feature would be Sony supporting it too, and Apple jumping their shadows allowing it. Just that I need a company to allow an API is somehow .. strange :D.

Anyway, I don't see the delay as a deal breaker. Though, I hoped for a big-bang release before christmas. But companies are only (if even) 50 % operative anyway over the christmas season, so december, january ... who cares :D.

GRID Autosport released for Linux & SteamOS, port report, video and review included
11 Dec 2015 at 7:06 pm UTC

Ok, got the game... how to get my wheel and pedals working. Going to be a loong night :-).

Sunken, an impressive looking action RPG with roguelike elements planned for Linux
9 Dec 2015 at 10:55 am UTC

Looks interesting, have to keep that one on my radar.

Unity 5.3 released, hello modern OpenGL system for Linux gaming
9 Dec 2015 at 10:29 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Tak
Quoting: YaakuroWhat? ROFL, didn't know that Unity was still using OpenGL 2.1 which came out 2006. OpenGL 3.2 came out 2009 and they used it in their engine? OpenGL 4 version started 2010 and they didn't change their engine all the time?
OpenGL 2.1 was used as the baseline. Newer features were used where available via extensions.
OpenGL 3.2 came out in 2009, but it was years before the majority of cards and drivers supported it. (Example: the driver for the Intel GPU in the prototype steam box sitting under my desk, running SteamOS, reports that it supports OpenGL 3.1.)
The issue there is / was Unitys support for Mesa/Intel drivers, who completed 4.1 Support in the September release. Though, I think intel still didn't implement the GL_ARB_vertex_attrib_64bit extension in their driver (yet?), which Mesa supports since May 2015, but besides that they should fully support the OpenGL 4.1 spec now, even though, some features of 4.0 are missing as well (as the base function for GL_ARB_vertex_attrib_64bit, namely GL_ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 and GL_ARB_tessellation_shader). But we see a lot of work on OpenGL 4.x support in Mesa as well as in the intel drivers recently, but the issue there (as well) is the drivers / kernels shipped by distributions. Because Mesa and Drivers theoretically support it does not really tell anything about the features being available in the supported distributions. That's why Valve created SteamOS - to be able to support exactly that. They're usually packing newer intel drivers and by now switched to a 4.x and have pretty recent libdrm and xorg-video-intel packages.

Mesa is evolving pretty fast now due to Valve sponsoring some development on it. Even all 4.2 extensions are implemented already, 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5 parts are still missing, but not too many. The only company being always on edge with OpenGL specs is NVidia as I know it. Though, they and AMD write most of the specs, so that was to be expected ;-).

[edit] good source for GL Support / driver support for mesa drivers is http://mesamatrix.net/ [External Link]

Feral about AMD driver support
7 Dec 2015 at 3:16 am UTC Likes: 4

Well, porting D3D code to Vulkan is probably even more complicated than porting it to OpenGL, I rather expect that DX12 code will be ported to Vulkan, since that would be much easier. They're really one of the first companies really going to the limit of OpenGL in Linux, and of course there are a lot of issues and untested features. It's good to read they are actually doing that, since it's necessary.

For AMD. I have some love for the company, but to be true, they can't get even close to NVidia proprietary drivers. Even if it's binary blobs, for me NVidia is one of the first hour Linux-Supporters, and the support has been good. There is a lot of work in the drivers they provide for Linux, so therefore as well a pretty good financial investment. And they've done that for years now. I guess the most game developers support only NVidia in Linux because of their very good proprietary drivers.