Valve Developed An Intel Linux Vulkan GPU Driver

[liam]

Take notice to many who think Intel is some sort of great supporter of Linux. Valve has far fewer resources to leverage and manage to do this work.

I guess you havent seen the latest kernel activity report...
Your point is fair, though, as far as graphics are concerned.

[sunweb]

If Valve could do it than OSS devs would be able to do it pretty fast as well. So we will have good OSS Vulkan.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

I guess you havent seen the latest kernel activity report...
Your point is fair, though, as far as graphics are concerned.

Intel has a vested interest for server only hardware sales to work with Linux. They know they have no shot with graphics against Nvidia and AMD and their focus shows.

[SXX⁣]

Intel has a vested interest for server only hardware sales to work with Linux. They know they have no shot with graphics against Nvidia and AMD and their focus shows.

According to reports Intel has sold more than 40,000,000 mobile (smartphones, tablets) CPUs in 2015 and those mainly used on Android devices. Intel clearly lose money on that to get market share, but all these Android devices use Linux graphics stack.

Also Intel have like 60+ full time employees who work on Linux graphics stack (calculations from git logs there).
This is likely more than AMD FOSS, AMD Catalyst (Linux) and Nvidia (Linux) have together.
For example last time I count Mesa+Radeon+HSA developers of AMD there was like 15-20 guys.

[Kano]

with ubuntu 12.04.5, 14.04 14.10 you can switch cards (some type of fixed mode) and with intel nvidia card is off.

You can be sure I know how this works, but he mentioned Bumbebee and that works differently. I can configure Optimus with Kanotix Spitfire as well, but it would not work with pure Debian because of a recent xrandr fix in the xserver which would require a newer Nvidia driver than currently available in official Debian repositories or a patched xserver. Bumblebee uses optirun or primusrun which can be configured per game in Steam, just like using a "DRI_PRIME=1 %command%" override with OSS drivers. The official Nvidia way requires a restart of the xserver with different xorg.conf which is done smart in Ubuntu with a lightdm startup script.

[eydee]

@eydee

It would be better it you think before you write. Bumblebee works with an on-demand started 2nd xserver as the Nvidia hardware is switched oft with bbswitch while not used. That's undetectable via glxinfo without preloader, but the officially supported variant has the Nvidia driver active all the time and can not save much energy while you don't run games, vsync is currently not supported as well. But the speed you can get is much higher than via Bumblebee. Btw. the xrandr code that Nvidia is using does not only work with modesetting, but with Intel and even radeon as output device as well. I used a HD 4550 and GT 630 OEM in a Q67 Intel board to check.

What does it have to do with Steam supporting optimus or not? Evasive answers always win arguments, don't they?

[SXX⁣]

According to reports Intel has sold more than 40,000,000 mobile (smartphones, tablets) CPUs in 2015 and those mainly used on Android devices.

Oh damn edit timeout. Of course I mean in 2014.

[Kano]

@eydee

You said Steam would count Optimus as Intel and I just explained the case where this is impossibe if you parse glxinfo (or the OpenGL renderer).

[dungeon]

According to reports Intel has sold more than 40,000,000 mobile (smartphones, tablets) CPUs in 2015 and those mainly used on Android devices. Intel clearly lose money on that to get market share, but all these Android devices use Linux graphics stack.

Also Intel have like 60+ full time employees who work on Linux graphics stack (calculations from git logs there).
This is likely more than AMD FOSS, AMD Catalyst (Linux) and Nvidia (Linux) have together.
For example last time I count Mesa+Radeon+HSA developers of AMD there was like 15-20 guys.

Blah, sorry but that is "China is bigger then Japan" analogy

Divide that by the size of the companies and what percentage per company you get then?

[Kano]

@SSX

Intel mobile SoC are pretty expensive, what you think is much is less than 4% marketshare. The new Atom x3/x5 do not use Intel HD gfx and are not produced by Intel itself, but they are cheaper, lets wait for this years results. Btw. informer Intel often used PowerVR gfx cores for low power Atom chips.