NVIDIA Shares Wayland Driver Roadmap, Encourages Vulkan Wayland Compositors

[mdedetrich]

"Use vulkan" Is nice in theory, but gl wont die any time soon, and depending on vulkan impl, some devices wont even work anyways.

gl is slowly dying.

No new game is targetting gl anymore, its either DirectX 12+, Vulkan or Metal on Mac. Compositors are also slowly moving away from gl as well and the only reasn they are holding out is because of old hardware which doesn't support Vulkan and that over time will become less and less of an issue.

And similar to how protondb is working for Windows games on Steam, for the applications that still need OpenGL and haven't moved over ZInk will be used which implements OpenGL over Vulkan. I mean its gotten to the point where if a company wants to start making GPU's, then they use Zink on the driver level instead of implementing OpenGL themselves (ergo Ark).

I do not see a end to native GL drivers yet. Zink is like llvmpipe a good stop gap but still way too slow to make a proper GL driver unreasonable.

Man you have a fascinating ability to continously spread horese shit.

Zink is not a stop gap, Intel uses Zink in their actual drivers for Arc because OpenGL is such a shitshow (both in terms of API and how difficult it is to implement) that also happens to be an ancient technology

OpenGL is slowly dying, and by dying it doesn't mean that its not going to be used. By dying I mean its going down the same path as COBOL, but its right at the start.

[hkupty]

wayland should just reject all of nvidias CRs to hurt their marketshare

I sure hope this is irony. It's hard to tell this days and specially in such corners of the internet

[Quackdoc]

gl is slowly dying.

No new game is targetting gl anymore, its either DirectX 12+, Vulkan or Metal on Mac. Compositors are also slowly moving away from gl as well and the only reasn they are holding out is because of old hardware which doesn't support Vulkan and that over time will become less and less of an issue.

This is massively wrong, there are loads of indie games that target opengl, and continue to do so.

Did you try ydotool or wtype? https://github.com/atx/wtype
Potentially also https://git.sr.ht/~brocellous/wlrctl

wtype nearly gave me a data corruption issue once I dunno what it does, but I nuked that shit fast

[ElectricPrism]

I have someone with a Razor Laptop and a Nvidia 2080 on it. After years of dozens of AMD GPUs I assisted doing a Nvidia install. I forgot how much more suffering was involved. 2 days productivity lost dicking around in premade distros before rolling a manual custom install.

That's great Nvidia want's to improve. If they don't they're simplify not even competitive or viable as a product. Why waste money on products that don't work and ruin productivity.

The TL;DR; I had hoped that it had gotten better -- and so far it hasn't.

We're seriously thinking of replacing with a System76 AMD laptop, Framework or something else just to spare ourselves the unnecessary hardships. What's taking them so long. I've never seen anyone make such a strong case for customers to spend their money on competitors. You really gotta have some kind of masochism to willingly subject to their current offerings.

[IsolatedOctopi]

They can't when NVidia does not release documentation. NVidia always is and will be the problem.

and that's why NVidia drivers nowadays are opensource and actually official NVidia installation choose new OpenSource NVidia modules instead of the Closed ones

in which year are you living buddy?

Do you know that something named Ubuntu is out? a distribution based on Debian?

[oiaohm]

No new game is targetting gl anymore, its either DirectX 12+, Vulkan or Metal on Mac.

This is not true. You need to start looking at the indie games particularly indie games with their own game engine.

https://github.com/LeoSery/FrostEngine--OpenGL-2024

You see like above people writing new opengl game engines all the time. Some of these appear in indie games because they are simple to code compared to other options.

There is a barrier to entry issue with DirectX 12 and Vulkan. Yes the explicit sync stuff. For a person attempting to make a basic game engine in under 48 hours of development time Opengl implicit sync is great.

Compositors are also slowly moving away from gl as well and the only reasn they are holding out is because of old hardware which doesn't support Vulkan and that over time will become less and less of an issue.

We are most likely going to see the same problem as we see in indie games. Least programming skill to make a functional wayland compositor what is it. The Least programming skill to make a functional game engine is to make a Opengl game engine. Who cares it not the best performance it works.

So the problem is not just old hardware.

Zink is not a stop gap, Intel uses Zink in their actual drivers for Arc because OpenGL is such a shitshow (both in terms of API and how difficult it is to implement) that also happens to be an ancient technology

The problem here is Opengl Is not great. But having to learn how to track all your resources and not screw it up with explicit sync is quite a huge barrier to entry. Yes Zink implements implicit sync support Nvidia closed source opengl drivers broke implicit sync functionality attempting to force uses to use explicit sync functions.

So some of this is that opengl is difficult to implement others is parties like Nvidia deciding to go here is the opengl specification we are not going to implement it as documented.

There is nothing in the Nvidia slides that say how they are going to make Vulkan barrier to entry knowledge less as long as using Vulkan has a higher barrier to entry to opengl in required knowledge to make item that somewhat works expect custom new opengl wayland compositors and opengl game engines to keep on turning up.

Yes a lot of ways Zink makes opengl applications likely to keep on appearing. No longer having to deal with vendor broken opengl implementations. Yes using opengl will still have it lower barrier to entry knowledge requirement.

Notice I did not put Metal in the same camp as Direct X 12 and Vulkan. The objective C version of Metal does most of the resource tracking bits for the programmer so the programmers knowledge does not need to be as high.

The biggest problem with Nvidia presentation they did not look into what the disadvantages of Vulkan is over opengl.

Well-defined synchronization and memory model

This line is the problem. Using opengl you get away without needing to know opengl synchronization/memory model in detail when starting out(I am not saying this does not bite you down the road). Vulkan you need to learn this stuff at the start this is cause of barrier so making opengl still used quite a bit.. Making opengl drivers has been hard because the resource management is shoved on the driver/zink developer side.

We need the barrier to entry to Vulkan programming to be less of a cliff face so that a person wanting to write their first game engine/wayland compsotor... go the simplest and easy route is Vulkan not the current answer opengl.

[Gabbb]

Anything modern will.

It depends how you define modern. In my mind a 4790k is still a pretty decent cpu for most things, but the haswell ipgu does not have a proper vulkan implementation. (and of course all the popular vintage thinkpads are out of luck)

[reavertm]

The Least programming skill to make a functional game engine is to make a Opengl game engine. Who cares it not the best performance it works.

I would argue the least programming skill to make a functional indie game is to use existing engine that hides all the difficulty from you and allows you to allocate time to more important things.

[varikonniemi]

Pretty obvious, opengl is old and bloated, does not fit modern hardware design.

[remm]

It's a lot easier/cheaper/whatever to encourage people to upgrade to the most recent igpus from Intel or AMD, or getting a discrete AMD card.