Valve Developed an Open-Source Intel Vulkan GPU Driver For Linux

An anonymous reader writes For those wondering when the first graphics driver for the new Khronos Vulkan API will materialize and for what hardware, it looks like the first driver could very well be for Intel graphics and it might not be too far away. It turns out Valve developed an Intel Linux Vulkan driver to help ISVs bootstrap their new Vulkan code, with Valve planning to open-source this driver code. This is yet another reason to love Valve, especially as Intel graphics on Linux don't even support OpenGL 4 yet.

Comments

Easier to support than OpenGL 4.x

[Blaskowicz]

This comes out as a very good point for using Vulkan (which I thought would be called something like OpenGL 5.0, but well)

It's a nice suprise, though the downside may be the need for recent hardware. Article leaves out the minimum hardware feature level : is it restricted to Haswell and up? (that's the plan for DirectX 12). What is the status for Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and even Bay Trail Atom graphics : that is pretty important given the installed base.

Neat, where's HL3?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I wouldn't be making this comment if the OP didn't mention loving Valve. I think it's absolutely lovely that Valve has done this, but I kinda hate Valve.

Valve seems to have problems internally that's lead me to believe that it's not worth hanging hopes that they'll usher in a true golden age era of PC gaming.

First, there seems to be some bizarre drama going on inside of Valve, as evidenced here. The flat structure isn't as idyllic as once thought.

Then there's problems inside of their online market place. Shit just doesn't work. Valve doing a bad job policing Greenlight. I'm not even going to bring up Hatred.

And of course, where the bloody hell is Half Life 3? Or the steambox? Or a stable release ready version of steamOS?

Valve can't be all things to all people and try to spread itself as thin as possible. It winds up doing nothing well and it's all starting to fall apart. I just hope they let us know what happened to Barney Calhoun before the company shits the bed.

Re:Neat, where's HL3?

[spire3661]

I wish people understood how cheaply Valve is doing all this. They are building a gravity well, a potential, not a single machine. Sony and MS spent orders of magnitude more money to get where Valve is in the console process. WE are seeing a console built from the ground up, using what we have lying around. MS spent more money on their controller than Valve has spent on the entire SteamOS project.