Steam Client Adds Vulkan Support, Controller Improvements

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Steam Client Adds Vulkan Support, Controller Improvements

Alongside today's SteamOS Brewmaster update adding the NVIDIA Vulkan driver, Valve has put out an interesting Steam client beta update...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Steam-Client-Vulkan-Controller

[sarmad]

Nice. The momentum around Vulkan is very promising.

[dimko]

I was reading about issues with controllers on Windows for Street Fighter 5.
If not mistaking Xinput was needed by the game to support more than one controller on PC. Again, may be mistaking, but Xinput is a bad solution, as per user rants.
So looks like controls of Street Fighter 5 are going to be bad on Linux now too.

[eydee]

Client is ready, SteamOS is ready, games are still not coming though. Still, nice chat client, could beat linux Skype any day...

[haagch]

Interesting there actually is a vrcompositor binary now. Unfortunately:
./vrcompositor: symbol lookup error: ./vrcompositor: undefined symbol: VR_InitInternal

Anyway, nice that they added vulkan support, but since both of my Vulkan capable GPUs remain without working driver, I guess few people will get any use of Vulkan enabled Steam games.

[boffo]

That was fast.

[humbug]

Client is ready, SteamOS is ready, games are still not coming though.

??
it's been just 3 days since Vulkan release

[rabcor]

Client is ready, SteamOS is ready, games are still not coming though. Still, nice chat client, could beat linux Skype any day...

No actually games are coming, various ports are being worked on. No new games announced vulkan yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if croteam is already working on their Vulkan support in Talos Principle.. Also, I bet some source games will be making the switch soon (like Dota 2 which was one of the games used to test and demo vulkan early on)

Haven't heard of any DX12 games yet though (not released anyways, many games with upcoming dx12 patches and some early access, but no complete ones), seems like Vulkan is gonna catch up to DX12 fast in terms of games supporting it... actually seems like vulkan has significantly more momentum than DX12 ever got; so few games are announcing DX12 support.

Also haven't really heard of Nvidia nor AMD showing DX12 much interest beyond just "sure we'll support it", but they seem pretty interested in Vulkan. Especially nvidia, all those vulkan presentations, sheesh.

http://www.pcgamesn.com/khronos-and-...rated-graphics

http://www.dota2.com/reborn/part3

[zanny]

Also haven't really heard of Nvidia nor AMD showing DX12 much interest beyond just "sure we'll support it", but they seem pretty interested in Vulkan. Especially nvidia, all those vulkan presentations, sheesh.

Both of them have markets beyond just Windows now, but as long as developers on their products keep using proprietary single vendor APIs they are losing revenue when software is locked to the one platform, while their products are used in systems running all kinds of operating systems (consoles for AMD, mobile for Nvidia). Nvidia in particular with their whole Shield ecosystem would probably be the most upset about DirectX's continued existence, because it means fewer games end up in their Tegra Zone. Microsoft effectively cripples their collective potential as long as the means by which developers use their hardware is dictated by a single company who uses the API as a lock-in mechanism.

[rabcor]

If that's the case the game would be pretty simple, provide support for DX12 (as they are) so you don't lose Windows customers (although if both of em would boycott DX12, it would be pretty funny, MS wouldn't be able to do a thing, so they could agree to do something like that behind the curtains, albeit it's a bit late for that. But we've seen Nvidia do such things (no vesa adaptive sync/freesync support, lameos)), but provide very bad DX12 support, preferably so bad that DX12 applications will perform worse than DX11 ones. But they are obviously not doing this, e.g. they are not sabotaging DX12 which they could both very easily do, which is why Nvidia and AMD apparently don't see DX12 as a threat.

Although I do hear DX12 benchmarks aren't going all that well... but then again this would have to be just a ruse to pretend they're not sabotaging it: https://developer.nvidia.com/dx12-dos-and-donts

Then again, boy would I laugh to see these corporate giants sabotaging the living shit out of each other; they sure have sabotaged us.

No seriously, they might be doing this. Look at that Nvidia benchmark go! http://www.windowscentral.com/sites/...?itok=RQkob9AJ

AMD isn't playing thsi game though (and look at them go! finally competing with nvidia's hardware!)

Can also see software rendering results here: http://cdn.techfrag.com/wp-content/u...enchmark_1.png (As expected, underwhelming, although I hear vulkan is not as underwhelming in this area, I mean they did showcase dota 2 running on intel intergrated gpu as early showoff for vulkan's capabilities)