Quoting: chelobakaThere must be a good practical reason for this project if Valve puts their money in it. Upcoming Steam Deck doesn't need it so it must be something else. Well, Vulkan is supported by Android and there's no OpenGL there, but x86 emulation on ARM should be expensive... or maybe not that expensive?

The Steam Deck needs it because it contains AMDGPU.
There is no fast opensource opengl implementation for AMD. And the closed ones suck.
So doing this opens up 20 years of opengl applications on any vulkan hardware.
To be clear: anything of GCN 1.0 and higher has a superb vulkan performance, but opengl performance in opensource is "lagging", and you don't want proprietary if you already have everything open. And I think the proprietary opengl implementation is also not that great.
Valve is actively fixing Vulkan drivers. So if they can fix the OpenGL legacy and make the implementation open, or even keep OpenGL as an easy interface to Vulkan layer, they will still have all access to all layers.

And for me personally it means that opengl will be coming to arm hardware :-).

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Quoting: AsciiWolfProton is great and will surely help Steam Deck from a shorter time perspective, but I really hope that this won't lead to no new native ports of AAA games. Native ports are (almost) always better, at least in my opinion.

Soldier is for native games.
The problem with native is that there are so many different distributions with each their own problems. It's worse than windows.
Soldier should be like a virtual env where nothing changes so games should work in 5 years too.
Most linux games I have are not worth to try to get running these days unless the engine is open source. I just buy the windows version again and use proton.
But at that time it was better than nothing. And enough to show Lord Gaben it is viable.
So once it's worth it's while, bigger or more tech savvy software houses will make a linux build targeting soldier with even better support, like CRO-team.
In the mean time, proton will attract the windows users.
Why? well, this is why:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSQn4OIsXqw [External Link]
Games run better on Steam/Proton/Linux than on Windows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05Z8wvnJM3Q [External Link]

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Quoting: scaineIncredible progress. It was only in April that he blogged about getting a simple cube to raytrace. Now if I could only get my hands on one of those fancy 6x00XT cards that actually support hardware ray-tracing, I might be able to take advantage of the next iteration of his work!

I don't want to call it hardware ray-tracing.
The RDNA-2 cards just support a new primitive to detect/calculate intersections, which is very handy for ray tracing, but you can use it for anything I guess. Like hitbox testing.

Source: I am not a graphics engineer, just trust me

Anyway:
AMD cards have always been capable of ray tracing, unlike Nvidia cards, because the CU's of AMD are more more beefy than that of Nvidia.
And with RDNA-2 they added helpful primitives, still keeping the CU generic. I mean, that's how it sounds like to me.
It sounds like the good old days of the TIGA34020 are still not over. If I take some time, I can have a lot of joy from this technology.
I had a TIGA34020 *ISA* card in my 486. I could download a complete 3d render program to the card, and only send camera positions to the card, and the card would just render a "city" on it's own @1280x1024

I now have an RX580 connected only with a 500MB/s bus (PCIe2x1), and it still works the same. It can drive a 4k screen while gaming because everything is on the card. PCIe3x16 is so overrated.
Except of course GTA IV, but that seems a problem with GTA IV.
GTA V DX11 / DXVK rendering on 4k is much faster than GTA IV DX9(?) / DXVK rendering.

And I am off getting off topic again. Happens when I did not get my dose of coffee.

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Quoting: BeamboomSo I simply ask, do we know this? Or do we assume this based on the little we do know? That's what I try to get to the bottom of here. Not to discredit anyone, but too often assumptions gets repeated and establish themselves as "truths" without anyone actually knowing.

I assume they deliver wine wrapped binaries like porting used to be.
Hmmm, maybe it's like this: the less CPU and GPU your game uses, the less % google will take from your income.
Now *that's* an incentive.

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Quoting: dubigrasuWhile I don't dismiss what Ethan says, I'm more inclined to side with Gordon.
I think valve plays the long game here, we have a saying: befriend the devil until you cross the bridge.

Quoting: Corben

Quoting: dubigrasuWhile I don't dismiss what Ethan says, I'm more inclined to side with Gordon.
I think valve plays the long game here, we have a saying: befriend the devil until you cross the bridge.

I hope the same, but until then, what should Ethan do if devs aren't hiring him for a while? Let's hope there will be enough devs and/or publishers to contract him until the bridge is crossed.

I don't want to turn my back on all those developers that brought out a Linux version. As a matter of fact, they probably have helped showing that Linux is a viable platform to Lord Gaben.
I do think that the way of Lord Gaben is the way. But I am feeling incredibly guilty, as if I turned my back on those developers, and I want this issue resolved.

But long term strategy it is I think a must to first turn the defacto gaming platform to a freedom platform, slashing any hurdles that are needed.
I also thing that the Lord is right in positioning proton not as a compatibility layer, but more as gaming middle ware. If you program against that middle ware it should work.
Once more people move to the freedom platform, it will take more developers with them. When more developers are using the freedom platform, they automatically promote the use of the freedom platform.
And only then can we look at the middle ware again and remake it to platform independent one.
One binary that runs natively on Linux, Windows or OS-X.

But in the mean time we have to take care of our front runners like Ethan Lee, or Feral, or Loki Games. How can we show gratitude and income, because what we actually show is this: if you switch to Linux you will get stabbed in the back.
This really hurts.
But for my sanity, and future work, I do need to follow the Lord's plan, because I need more developers around me that are not held back by windows.
It really is frightening how much computer knowledge developers lack, just because they can't do anything in a normal way on windows.

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I think proton is a very good thing. It does hurt companies like Feral, and I am not happy about that.
Proton delivers a good alternative to Windows, and in some cases it works just a lot better.
No more installation of direct 3d drivers when installing a game and then realize that other games don't work anymore.
No more problems with the libc version that you are running.
People will start using proton, this means more and more people use Linux.
In the end developers will target "proton", and hopefully proton will just evolve in a platform independent layer.

The question is: how can we help companies like Feral?

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Meeh... I am just reading it.

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Yet another laptop with a very short life span due to the lack of proper GPU options.

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Quoting: CatKillerSo, I think the idea is to use the same kind of tech as game streaming; the computer renders the scene based on position information from the headset, and sends essentially a 360° video stream to the headset, which can be freely navigated using the headset. If there's enough bandwidth, that could be quite interesting.

That does sound far from efficient at all.
It means that the host needs to render 360 instead of 100 degrees, so 3,6 times as much on the turn, and then we need a lot more for up down.
However if it would compile the scene to simple objects and can do a lot of the z axis calculations, and compile/precalculate a lot of the textures, it would make it a lot easier for the HMD.

Whatever they do, I want to know. I was discussing scene compilation/simplification and texture downloading to the HMD to get a split rendering system without a lot of bandwidth usage (like X11 does until chrome came, or network opengl) a few years ago. I am at least glad that Valve proofs I was not a fool ;-).

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I hope that would be the Smach Z reincarnated.

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