Quoting: BeamboomNo - it's a very good analogy. You're already catering for one market.

It's not a correct analogy. Releasing for Linux is expanding your audience. That wouldn't stop you from continuing releasing for Windows users. Releasing for Windows users more instead, means excluding Linux users, for more profits. That's greed.

Quoting: BeamboomIt looks to me like you're saying that art is only found in indie releases

Not every publisher is one of those backwards thinking legacy anti-Linux types. Not every independent creator is a good artist. I.e. good art is not dictated by those parameters. Good publisher gives creators ways to create good games and reach wider audience. And we have publishers who support Linux releases.

But in general yes, I'm saying that legacy publishers don't care about good art. They care about $$$ only. That's EA and Co. for you.

Quoting: BeamboomIf you by "masterpiece" means very niche work with restricted appeal and destined for a very particular audience, you got a point. This is why many western countries for example support certain segments of cultural work in their contry.

I mean it in wide enough sense. You can tell a masterpiece book from a mediocre one. Same applies to music, films or any other form of art, games included. I'm not saying every work should be a masterpiece. I'm just bringing the point about the inherent conflict in the commercialization of art. Those who run after more money, don't want masterpieces. They want fast produced mass market junk, that will be discarded tomorrow, but will sell due to "mass" part.

How creators approach their users is part of the same issue (more money vs art). And this results in differences in how they approach Linux releases.

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Quoting: GuestMy point is that these "problems" are not interesting for PC gamers.

They are to Linux users. Windows users wouldn't care about them. But you supposedly use Linux.

Quoting: GuestPrime needs supports from the vendor.

PRIME is a standard kernel feature. Nvidia can't play with kernel well (they refuse upstreaming), so they don't support it, or support some crippled variant of it.

I don't even see a point in answering to the rest of your post. Seriously, you sound like Windows gamer who uses Linux by accident. Go figure out how Linux drivers are supposed to work first. Otherwise it's a waste of time arguing with your nonsense.

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Quoting: BeamboomI assume you have a job. Let's say I offer you another job, the same tasks and responsibilities, only I offer you half as much in salary.

Bad analogy. Let's say you have a job. Enough for your needs now. Someone comes and offers you a job of questionable nature (let's say because of this, you'll be excluding a whole range of people from access to your product). It pays more. You can take it, sure (though you don't have to). But you'll also be bearing the result of it. So, what would it be?

Quoting: BeamboomI claim they have other motivations to support our segment than for business reasons.

Good, and I told you, that those who treat art (like games) as pure business, produce garbage art. Because mass market pulp fiction pays. And making masterpieces is too expensive. And by art I mean in all artistic senses there. Same applies to reaching your target audience.

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Quoting: GrabbyYou're probably correct on all those points. But gradyvuckovic's remark was more about Nvidia realizing that a lot of good things can come out an open-source ecosystem.

Nvidia doesn't care. They are like Oracle in this sense. They deal with open source very reluctantly, because they totally don't get the point of it.

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Quoting: MadeanaccounttocommentBut Nvidia's proprietary driver very likely doesn't incorporate LLVM and has probably had a gaming specialized shader compiler from the start.

Nvidia's compiler is using llvm if I remember correctly. At least in some cases.

Their llvm backend: https://github.com/llvm-mirror/llvm/tree/master/lib/Target/NVPTX [External Link]

Not sure if their new blob Vulkan compiler is using it though.

UPDATE:

Related: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-396-nvvm [External Link]

See also: https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/nvvm-ir-spec/index.html [External Link]

NVVM IR is a compiler IR (internal representation) based on the LLVM IR. The NVVM IR is designed to represent GPU compute kernels (for example, CUDA kernels). High-level language front-ends, like the CUDA C compiler front-end, can generate NVVM IR. The NVVM compiler (which is based on LLVM) generates PTX code from NVVM IR.

So, likely they do use llvm to translate PTX into machine code.

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Quoting: gradyvuckovicI'm loving their commitment more than anything. Most companies would have given up by now.

It probably helps, that Valve is a private company, so they can work on long term investments. Public ones are pressured by external investors to rip something off the market quick, and not to care about long term progress.

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I think their plan is to get to the point where it's merged into upstream Mesa, so everyone will get it.

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Quoting: GuestA whole list of problems like 1.

Not sure what your point is. That one issue (not upstreamed driver) is causing everything else. I already explained it above. If you and Nvidia don't care about the progress of the Linux desktop (i.e. Wayland), it doesn't mean Nvidia supports Linux well. It means exactly that - they don't care. The result of not caring is usually garbage.

Quoting: ShmerlMesa is still lagging behind.

How exactly? Mesa is ahead of Nvidia blob in actual compliance to both OpenGL and Vulkan and it caught up in performance. So what is behind?

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Quoting: jensMy best guess would still be a Google Stadia alternative.

Since they also focus on VR heavily, it could be something else too. VR doesn't really fit well with Stadia-like use case.

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Quoting: YoRHa-2BYou cannot multi-thread compilers without sacrificing performance of the generated code. It's just not possible.

That really very much depends on the use case, and how compiler is designed and what it actually does. I'm not sure about shaders use case, but if some stages of the compilation are independent, they can be parallelized in general. That's quite commonly used in compilers to make compilation itself faster.

Example: https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/parallelizing-rustc-using-rayon/6606 [External Link]

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