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Valve's SteamOS Now Supports Vulkan, The Cross-Platform Alternative To DirectX 12 (pcworld.com)
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.
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.
Cross Platform? Please tell me that it means more than just Windows + Linux, and that I can install & run it on FreeBSD