NVIDIA Talks Up RTX Capabilities On Arm - Showcased Using Arch Linux

[Dawn]

They had announced a partnership with MediaTek, but I'm a little surprised to see a MediaTek platform with a RTX 3060 up and running quite so soon. I wish we had more details on the SoC!

I fully expected to see this using one of Nvidia's own ARM-based SoC's, some of which have PCIe lanes for connecting a dGPU.

It's an MT8195 (Kompanio 1200.) That's quad-A78 + quad-A55, similar to the Dimensity 1200 smartphone processor. It's a fairly powerful piece of silicon.

[F.Ultra]

I don't believe so, this would be a waste of resources.

Welcome to the wonderful world of AAA gaming where wasting resources is the name of the game. As we have seen with Stadia there exists a lot of native Linux ports that the companies keep internally. ID had an internal build of Doom 2016 on Linux and that they so quickly managed to port Youngblood now somewhat asserts those old rumours. I would not be surprised if the game engine devs port the code to Linux to be able to test it under different circumstances in order to catch bugs that would normally not be seen on Windows (I'm sure about this because that is how things have worked in the places where I have worked as a dev [never worked in game studios though]).

[coder]

It's an MT8195 (Kompanio 1200.) That's quad-A78 + quad-A55, similar to the Dimensity 1200 smartphone processor. It's a fairly powerful piece of silicon.

Thanks. How do you know? I didn't see it in the screenshot or mentioned in their blog post. What little info I can find on the web mentions PCIe 3.0, but not anything about lane-count.

BTW, I always find your comments very informative and well-informed. Thanks for contributing.

[CochainComplex]

How does one obtain a Linux / ARM64 version of Wolfenstein: Youngblood?

It seems to me that game companies have internal Linux builds, but they don't bother with releasing them to general public.

That's what I hate about companies like nvidia they take advantage of all the open source projects like Linux but do never contribute back.

[coder]

ID had an internal build of Doom 2016 on Linux and that they so quickly managed to port Youngblood now somewhat asserts those old rumours.

I think ID Software is somewhat of a special case. They've had a culture of doing cross-platform development and UNIX ports since the days of Quake, if not before.

I would not be surprised if the game engine devs port the code to Linux to be able to test it under different circumstances in order to catch bugs that would normally not be seen on Windows

Yeah, this is what I'd do. Even if the entire game didn't build & run in Linux, I'd try to maintain cross-platform support to find more bugs and ensure it ports easily to consoles and phones.

[coder]

they take advantage of all the open source projects like Linux but do never contribute back.

They do contribute patches, even if they're all self-serving ones. That's okay though. GPL doesn't restrict the motives of contributors, it works in spite of them! Then, it's the jobs of the kernel maintainers to accept patches that don't only benefit Nvidia.

[lumks]

@Michael Arch Linux is x86_64 only. Arch Linux ARM (ALARM) is not Arch Linux, but a port by completely different people and not affiliated in any with Arch Linux.

https://archlinuxarm.org/about

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch-based_distributions

Please correct this.

[Dawn]

Thanks. How do you know? I didn't see it in the screenshot or mentioned in their blog post. What little info I can find on the web mentions PCIe 3.0, but not anything about lane-count.

BTW, I always find your comments very informative and well-informed. Thanks for contributing.

"Both were demonstrated on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GPU paired with a MediaTek Kompanio 1200 Arm processor." That's MT8195, which is something of a known quantity. I can't currently speak to lane count.

[kpedersen]

Then, it's the jobs of the kernel maintainers to accept patches that don't only benefit Nvidia.

Don't many of them get star struck and just accept any code from a large corporation?

I feel the open-source community could have weaponized Linux a little more. Strengthening freedom and all that whilst weakening some of these larger leeches.

[torsionbar28]

I think ID Software is somewhat of a special case. They've had a culture of doing cross-platform development and UNIX ports since the days of Quake, if not before.

For sure. And long before Quake. I remember playing Wolfenstein 3D and Doom on Slackware Linux (version 1.2?) on my 486 in the early 1990's thanks to id's native Linux ports. They even ported a few games to Linux on non-x86 platforms, like the DEC Alpha.