Valve Developed An Intel Linux Vulkan GPU Driver

[blackout23]

Looks like Windows drivers exist already, too.

https://twitter.com/scottwasson/status/573558438120181760

[eydee]

And hopefully wine devs will replace their OGL wrapper with Vulkan

Probably not, they usually hold on to supporting old hardware and backwards compatibilty. Something Vulkan probably won't do.

Who's going to use this? Most game devs can barely be bothered to port to Windows, let alone OpenGL.

So that leaves Valve.

And Valve doesn't make any games anymore.

So that leaves nobody.

Major game engines will probably support it, so game developers don't even have to care.

[justmy2cents]

Who's going to use this? Most game devs can barely be bothered to port to Windows, let alone OpenGL.

So that leaves Valve.

And Valve doesn't make any games anymore.

So that leaves nobody.

Unreal, Unity... already stated this is one of priority tasks. Especially since both Vulkan and DX12 support older cards. Vulkan works on any 4.3 GL or 3.1 GL ES card. same as DX12 works on any DX11 card. It is much much easier to target one spec than multiple core profiles

[xeekei]

Who's going to use this? Most game devs can barely be bothered to port to Windows, let alone OpenGL.

So that leaves Valve.

And Valve doesn't make any games anymore.

So that leaves nobody.

You have really taken the roll as Phoronix's resident cynic, haven't you?

What does "most game devs" mean? Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo first party devs? Because everyone else make Windows ports. Some ports have issues, especially Ubisoft games, but most work fine.

Valve does make games, they just don't release a new sequel every year like other devs do. Granted because of the steady income from Steam, they have the privilege to be able to take their time.

OpenGL have nothing to do with this, this is a Vulkan driver. A ton of devs are excited about Vulkan, so I'd guess they want to "be bothered" to support it.

[Kano]

Very impressive that Valve pays for development of a Vulkan driver. Must be a LunarG project, would really like to test it myself. Better now than tomorrow Is it the "standard" DOTA2 beta?

[bakgwailo]

Why would it be based on Mesa? Since Intel has side-stepped the API-agnostic Gallium3D infrastructure, their entire Mesa driver is completely OpenGL specific. I doubt there'd be anything useful to repurpose.

That is some revisionist history right there. How did Intel sidestep Gallium? Intel already had a massive investment in the legacy Mesa driver styles before Gallium came out, looked at Gallium, and decided that it would be way too much work with little benefit to them to drop all of their (working very well) old driver code and port to Gallium. Seems fair to me, its not like they don't contribute a ton to Mesa/X anyways.

[duby229]

That is some revisionist history right there. How did Intel sidestep Gallium? Intel already had a massive investment in the legacy Mesa driver styles before Gallium came out, looked at Gallium, and decided that it would be way too much work with little benefit to them to drop all of their (working very well) old driver code and port to Gallium. Seems fair to me, its not like they don't contribute a ton to Mesa/X anyways.

That's all true, but that was almost 8 years ago. They've had plenty of time to do it since then. And now they are missing out on or independently developing features because of it.

[-MacNuke-]

Any informations about how Gallium3D is useful for Vulkan?

As far as I understand it, Gallium is a framework for "classic" graphic APIs. To build Vulkan on top of Gallium it had to read the SPIR-V code and transform it to its own IR so the driver can execute it...

Sounds rather stupid to me. It would be more effective to put Vulkan under Gallium3D.

[duby229]

Seems to me like an LLVM implementation of SPIR-V is what the gallium drivers will wind up using.

[starheap]

I don't know for sure but is Gallium3D even low enough level to implement Vulkan? You can probably throw the state tracker code out as there won't be much state to track...

If that is the case, that may be why they could have chosen intel's driver stack over other cards. Perhaps intel's drivers are more ogl abstract than one may first assume?