I was hoping for some questions and weighing in on VR, whether they have SteamVR dev environments setup, whether they're seeking any contracts to port VR games or port over the VR features in a more standard game, etc. I think a porting contractor giving VR a lot of attention will be pretty critical for VR's success on Linux.

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Quoting: ison111I heard that you can use Vulkan in UE4 only by using the "mobile rendering pipeline" or something like that.

Is that what he's doing? Or is this full blown Vulkan support we're talking about?

People keep missing this -- SteamVR can be used from OpenGL. It's just very slow for the time being, probably due to a fairly dirty and unoptimized first pass at transferring framebuffer data out of an OGL context into the compositor's Vulkan context; they'll be bringing it up to speed over time. This could be in OGL and he's just dealing with the performance hit for now.

I probably should watch the video before I post, eh?

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Quoting: GuestI can't help but mention r200 drivers here. Before proprietary blobs, there were insanely fast open source drivers. Graphics hardware a good deal simpler back then, so it's not a good comparison to today's options. Thing is though, it was nvidia who introduced "The Blob", and if they hadn't been so obsessed with hiding everything behind a proprietary wall back then, it's likely that the entire graphics stack on GNU/Linux would be in better shape today.

I think, if it weren't for The Blob, then Linux wouldn't have been a viable platform for intensive 3D applications at a critical moment, and even its emergence as a viable desktop OS would have been delayed by a good decade or more. It was the crutch needed to keep up with Windows on the performance front and allow it to compete until it had enough momentum to attract professional developers to FOSS drivers.

At the time, interest in desktop Linux was minimal and Windows held an even stronger dominance than they do now. This meant the pool of hobbyist man-hours available for driver development was very limited. Without so much as a datasheet on nV silicon and lacking data on ATI hardware combined with the explosion in GPU complexity, that tiny spark would have been utterly snuffed out, and Linux would've been dependent on software rendering solutions for everything outside of really old hardware that wouldn't be to keep up with software rendering on CPUs available at the time those GPUs gained accelerated Linux drivers. Microsoft would've stayed complacent about DirectX development, in effect donating their entire slice of the gaming market to consoles. PC gaming would have then become restricted to hobby developers with little aspiration of making ANY money on it, and Linux gaming would've been the exclusive domain of open source projects relying entirely on software rendering.

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Quoting: hardpenguinWell, that's exactly what they did with DX10 and DX11 (available only for Windows Vista and newer).

That also didn't work out quite as well as they wanted. Developers responded by maintaining two renderers, one for DX9 and one for DX11. This was standard practice for years, even for a while after the release of Windows 8. Game developers are all too aware that graphics APIs do sweet FA for end user OS adoption, and even then, supporting only the latest and greatest shuts them out of a pretty significant chunk of the market.

Because adoption of 10 has been relatively stunted, DX12 is so different from what came before, and current graphics code still works on 10, people are loathe to implement it at all.

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I dunno... I'm a bit shameless in that I'll gladly run any proprietary blob that didn't come from Microsoft or another company known to do sleazy anti-consumer things at a software level. Anything to get away from Windows. Anything.

People easily forget that The Blob was for a long time the ONLY performant hardware 3D solution for Linux, period. It's really awesome that we have more and open source options now, but their hardware under their proprietary drivers is still far and away the most powerful Linux solution.

As a VR gamer, that's all but necessary due to how insanely demanding current VR hardware and software is. SteamVR supports radeonsi with certain versions of the RADV driver, but it's questionable whether it can achieve even halfway acceptable performance, even on the R9 Fury or RX 480. On the other side, my 1070 meets that critical 90fps mark with room to spare.

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