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NVIDIA's Proprietary Linux Driver Adds Support For Wayland, Mir (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: After being desired by NVIDIA Linux users for years, the proprietary GeForce graphics driver natively supports Wayland and Mir as an alternative to an X.Org Server. It's been a long time coming for the proprietary GPU driver stacks to support Wayland/Mir, but with today's 364.12 beta driver there is now the necessary DRM KMS kernel support and EGL extensions for being able to handle these next-generation display solutions. The new NVIDIA Linux driver also provides integrated Vulkan support, PRIME rendering support, and other additions.
While a popular point of rhetoric, there exists ZERO evidence SteamOS (Linux) is slower than Windows. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rISRVeJxhnE Very improperly, most people and articles are attributing poor performance to SteamOS when the real issue is sub-par ports of applications. Also note in the video you can observe a couple of glitches (texture loading) in the Window's demo whereas it's silky smooth on Linux ( - which is believed to be superior Linux file caching).
To be clear, not that I'm ignoring your last sentence, but your first two sentences are misleading; though I don't believe that's intentional. If a game's performance is lackluster, you can completely blame the game developer as it has absolutely nothing to do with SteamOS. SteamOS has all of the foundations to provide FASTER performance than Windows. There exists no evidence to substantiate a claim that SteamOS is slower than Windows and all evidence points to platform performance deltas being that of lazy ports and developers who lack platform knowledge to optimize for Linux as they have done for Windows. Hell, once again we have games running under Wine which are starting to outperform native Windows. Which is pretty profound when you consider they are frequently doing DX to OpenGL translations to boot. Meaning they are faster even with an additional abstraction layer. Bluntly, there is every evidence that SteamOS/Linux (with NVIDIA anyways) is faster than Windows and where applications falter, you can squarely blame the developers.
Additionally, the Vulkan comment is not true. So far, developers who are learning to use a new API, without redesigning to properly leverage Vulkan, and running on beta drivers, have performed worse than DirectX; which is a highly optimized and well understood framework. Furthermore, there are specific guideline recommendations for when Vulkan should be used and when it's possible to provide ideal performance. The current use cases are not even known if these satisfy the recommendations. As such, the examples people commonly use may not even represent ideal candidates for the newer DX12/Vulkan APIs.
In summary, while you have accurately parroted the rhetoric and FUD, it is not supported by any available evidence. That said, I believe the spirit of your comment can be accurately rephrased to say: Many games running on SteamOS have lackluster performance because developers have failed to optimized their games for the new platform (OpenGL vs DX9, DX10, DX11). As such, many games will run slower on SteamOS than Windows, through no fault of SteamOS. This is a subtle yet profoundly important distinction. And it's a distinction which is directly contrary to the common FUD.