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Valve's SteamOS Now Supports Vulkan, The Cross-Platform Alternative To DirectX 12 (pcworld.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the live-long-and-prosper dept.

SteamOS just gained support for Vulkan, the cross-platform alternative to Microsoft's DirectX 12 and Apple's Metal. This should make it easier for developers to write and optimize games for SteamOS, closing the performance gap with Windows and encouraging more developers to support Linux. This feature arrived in SteamOS Brewmaster version 2.63. Valve added version 355 of the Linux Nvidia driver, which means SteamOS offers Vulkan support when used alongside Nvidia hardware. Intel's graphics hardware should also support Vulkan on SteamOS in the near future. AMD is still working on its new driver, known as AMDGPU, that will replace the current fglrx driver for SteamOS and other Linux-based platforms. If you use Linux distribution besides SteamOS, you can download Nvidia's Vulkan-ready Linux driver or an experimental version of Intel's Vulkan-enabled graphics driver.

6 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Vulkan could overtake DX12 in adoption! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was surprised to learn that very few games are running on DX12 (maybe 1-3?)..

    Vulkan already has one and it's looking likely to get more. I'm guessing Valve at least will port all their modern titles to it. If so, Valve is really playing the long game on becoming less dependent on MS Windows..

    1. Re:Vulkan could overtake DX12 in adoption! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Valve is really pushing vulkan hard. I think it was at a recent SIGGRAPH that a valve employee basically said if you aren't targeting a 2016 release for a DX12 game, don't even bother with it since vulkan will do just as much across more platforms with higher performance. I'm with Valve here 100%. The moment AAA titles are releasing on Linux and Windows at the same time, I ditch windows forever and I know I'm not alone on that. Gaming is the single thing that keeps me on windows still, and I hate dual-booting so I stay in windows all the time for the few times I game. If I can play BF4, GTAV, , etc on Linux without performance or fidelity loss (compared to windows version) that will be the final deciding factor. I might not wait that long though if Microsoft has its way. I was planning on switching to W10 before M$ went batshit insane with forcing everyone to upgrade and then sending back "telemetry" data even after you specifically disable it doing so. It may not be nefarious or private data being sent back, but the very fact that M$ is going about this whole thing in a shady way has put me off. W7 will for sure be my last M$ operating system. I just hope Valve gets the gaming industry as a whole running Vulkan before W7 becomes inadequate for future hardware generations.

  2. Re:isnt steam a launcher? by tlambert · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I have issues with the statement "the cross-platform alternative to DirectX". OpenGL was a cross-platform graphics standard before DirectX even existed.

    I have similar issues, but for other reasons.

    Once commanding benefit to DirectX is that it attempts to loop unroll shaders and effects, and if it can't do it -- it drops them on the floor. While this may mean that that graphical dust storm isn't as pretty as it might have been otherwise, it also means that you don't crash or hang the video card, and as of DirectX 9 and later, even if you do, to get the compatibility sticker, the manufacture has to make it possible to reset the card and restart pending operations. So if you are able to hang the card anyway, despite the unrolling, the OS can unhang the card, and go merrily on its way.

    One of the big problems with games on Mac OS X or Linux is that they tend to directly target OpenGL, rather than an OpenGL emulation running on top of Direct X, as is done on Windows. Which means it's possible to take down the cards hard, because there's no unrolling layer between the instruction stream and the card to protect it. Apple tries to make this happy by always keeping a spare channel lying around, so it can talk to the card to recover, but it doesn't always work out.

    Vulkan seems to have the same problem that OpenGL itself has, in this regard. So it is *NOT*, in fact, a crossplatform alternative to using DirectX, it's a replacement for OpenGL to make it more difficult to buy other people's graphics cards. Which I kind of could care less about, if it supported the unrolling the way Direct X does, rather than just being different for the sake of being different. To me, it just looks like a handy way to hang your system, instead of using the even handier OpenGL.

  3. Is it available on... by unixisc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Cross Platform? Please tell me that it means more than just Windows + Linux, and that I can install & run it on FreeBSD

  4. Re:isnt steam a launcher? by Barefoot+Monkey · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The statement is "the cross-platform alternative to DirectX 12" - specifically 12, and not DirectX in general. On Windows your options for Mantle-like APIs are currently Vulkan and DirectX 12, i.e. the platform-limited alternative to Vulkan is DirectX 12, and the cross-platform alternative to DirectX 12 is Vulkan. I hope that helps you feel a bit better about the headline.

  5. Re:isnt steam a launcher? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    > it should drop the things on the floor, like Windows tends to

    Different AC here, but no, that is not true on more recent shader models.

    You have been corrected by a number of individuals here on every major point you raised, and you keep saying more bullshit. You should really stop talking about this subject. You don't know what you are talking about.