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Latest Comments by neowiz73
This years GDC conference will have a very interesting Vulkan & DX12 talk from AMD
13 Jan 2016 at 12:35 am UTC

in some of the initial benchmarks I've read about with DX12 AMD seems to be performing just as good and in some games has been performing better than Nvidia for a change. so there is hope on the horizon indeed for a robust competitive market.

The 2015 GamingOnLinux GOTY award is now over, here's the results!
12 Jan 2016 at 10:24 pm UTC

great job I thought, although the most anticipated for 2016 is not surprising. I'm looking forward to xcom2 and street fighter V myself :)

This years GDC conference will have a very interesting Vulkan & DX12 talk from AMD
12 Jan 2016 at 1:38 pm UTC

I tried to find the original test video footage of Vulkan where I heard them mention the software drivers. but it was from early 2014 and seems impossible to find now. But from more recent videos/documents it would seem like it's referred to as just APIs and binaries.
Nevertheless, Nvidia has already been adding some vulkan libs into their latest drivers. it's going to be awesome to see this come to fruition.

This years GDC conference will have a very interesting Vulkan & DX12 talk from AMD
12 Jan 2016 at 2:16 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: MadeanaccounttocommentKhronos makes drivers? I thought they were strictly into API development and licensing them out. As far as I know the only relation Khronos has with FOSS drivers is that they upheld SGI's decision to allow Mesa to develop OpenGL drivers without purchasing a license.

Or that was my understanding from having skimmed Wiki articles and the such. I'm still very much wet behind the ears.
according to the first couple of videos I've seen on the initial presentations and even the one from SIGGRAPH last august they have mentioned that the software side drivers which are the open sourced drivers will be kept and provided by the Khronos Group. these are the general case drivers that allow software devs to enable most graphical acceleration without any proprietary bits.
this means that programs and most basic games, GUIs, DEs won't need proprietary drivers for acceleration.
Then there is the proprietary bits which will be held with their parent companies, which will be an additional hardware driver to be installed later. which is what Nvidia will provide. I'm not aware if AMD will have proprietary bits. But there is also a hardware driver that has to be installed separate from the software driver.
The software driver will be the common used section for all software running with Vulkan.
SPIR-V is the main component to the software driver, which is also being designed to be backward compatible to OpenGL as well. which should give easier setup for OpenGL programs.

This years GDC conference will have a very interesting Vulkan & DX12 talk from AMD
12 Jan 2016 at 12:46 am UTC Likes: 1

no worries about the FOSS drivers, those will be released by the Khronos Group once Vulkan is officially released. So it should be easy porting for the rest of Linux.

So most likely the usual upstream will happen. Ubuntu and based distros may get it sooner, through their graphics-drivers ppa. Unless they have plans to push these drivers to the official repos sooner and try to get them available by the time 16.04 goes stable. I kind of doubt it though, most likely it will be the 16.10 release.

At least we should consider these newer ports due to come out in March/April for possible first contenders to show off the new drivers. all I know is Linux will be crazy awesome going forward on this. Not just for gaming but overall general performance and battery life on Laptops, plus this will help the adoption of Wayland and Mir that much better.

I'm really looking forward to seeing this available through the Unreal Engine and we see Ark adopt this very soon as well.

Medieval II: Total War Collection coming to Linux & SteamOS on January 14th
12 Jan 2016 at 12:09 am UTC

yep, played this many moons ago when I had a windows partition, will be nice to play it again. I've never bought the expansions though. So yeah I guess I'll have to do that now :)

Windlands, a first person grappling hook exploration game now on SteamOS & Linux
10 Jan 2016 at 11:01 pm UTC

my mind went strait to "spider-man ... spider-man... does whatever spider-man does".

Looks like Total War: Rome II might not be coming to Linux & SteamOS now
6 Jan 2016 at 9:42 pm UTC

it doesn't seem to me that it's dropped from those 2 tweets. seems like a PR person that doesn't seem to have much of a clue on what's going on. I'm sure there were some games put on the back burner for TW: Atilla. We'll just have to wait and see.

New Linux Gamer Survey For January
5 Jan 2016 at 11:16 am UTC

I've gotten the Steam survey more often when I'm distro hopping and when I install steam I usually get the survey. Although this only worked up until late November maybe early December, not sure why. But when January 1st hit I got the survey. so I'm not sure what's going on now.

My Survival Story in Drox Operative
2 Jan 2016 at 1:13 am UTC Likes: 1

sounds like a cool game :)
it has some random elements to the game that allow it to be mostly unique each playthrough.

Explore a dynamic and evolving galaxy
Explore a unique sector of the galaxy in every game, with different "monsters", ship components, quests, and even races
Fight in the galactic war between the various alien races
Battle hundreds of different enemy starships
Build the coolest and deadliest starship in the galaxy
Outfit your ship with thousands of components and crew
Adventure with your friends with co-op multiplayer