Steam Client Adds Vulkan Support, Controller Improvements

[Pecisk]

I just love every time people say "Steam Machine/Vulkan is dead on arrival", Valve just silently pushes updates to Steam Machine, new games comes out, etc.

Hypersensitive, overstimulated Internet crowd....it is not hot in 5 minutes, it is DOA. Kids.

[altarius]

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

having everything in place definitely increases the posibillity for new games in the not too far future

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)

Fable legends is the first DX12 title afaik, but it's also from microsoft studios, so no real surprise there.
Regarding all the DX11-DX12 performances: nvidia has a very good optimized DX11 driver, therefore it performed faster than amd in many situations under DX11 and therefore they do have less performance gain when going to DX12 as they are already closer to the actual limit by the hardware itself. apart from that, only maxwell2.0 supports dx12_1 feature level (aka this async-stuff), which your linked benchmark relies heavily on

[Passso]

Regarding all the DX11-DX12 performances: nvidia has a very good optimized DX11 driver, therefore it performed faster than amd in many situations under DX11 and therefore they do have less performance gain when going to DX12 as they are already closer to the actual limit by the hardware itself. apart from that, only maxwell2.0 supports dx12_1 feature level (aka this async-stuff), which your linked benchmark relies heavily on

Yes, and add to this that with DX12 threads must be managed "manually", there is no more auto thread creation by the driver.

On NVidia dev site concerning DX12 :

[LIST][*]Don’t rely on the driver to parallelize any Direct3D12 works in driver threads[/LIST]

So without work all DX11 -> DX12 basic ports will naturally be slower

[clementl]

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)

Actually, there already is a (Windows) Vulkan beta of Talos Principle on Steam. There are even some benchmarks. And as you'll see, there is some optimization needed. Still it already performs better than the OpenGL renderer, so the Linux version will already benefit without any optimizations.

[1ace]

"adds libvulkan aand the Vulkan ICD loader to the Steam Linux Runtime"
libvulkan *is* the ICD loader

[V10lator]

Actually, there already is a (Windows) Vulkan beta of Talos Principle on Steam. There are even some benchmarks.

The article you linked says it's early Alpha, not Beta. Also the article links to http://steamcommunity.com/app/257510...7331651720139/ which might be better for english users (and which tells that benchmarking Vulkan is a waste of time atm).

//EDIT: BTW, love Croteam:

Q: Wait, what? No support for 32-bit?

A: No. 64-bit is the future. And present!

[Kano]

haagch

You mean the few people with Nvidia Kepler or Maxwell cards? Kepler is really old, GT 640 or newer (and some GT 630) are only required... Broadwell/Skylake may not be that much used. Did you expect a day 1 driver from AMD?

[mike4]

Wait DX11 faster than Vulkan? I guess we need to wait for Dota2 tests and better drivers to compare against DX12.

[haagch]

You mean the few people with Nvidia Kepler or Maxwell cards?

I mean that nvidia is the only vendor who managed to get drivers out that work for (almost?) all Vulkan capable GPUs.
AMD - no driver.
Intel - only for newer generations.

Did you expect a day 1 driver from AMD?

Maybe. But I did expect day 1 drivers from intel.

To be fair, I just tried vkcube on Ivy Bridge and it actually works.
Yay, I can render one simple Vulkan application!

[log0]

Wait DX11 faster than Vulkan? I guess we need to wait for Dota2 tests and better drivers to compare against DX12.

Talos should not be seen as representative of Vulkan performance. To really benefit from Vulkan they have to rewrite their engine.

What they've got so far is:

Make it work as fast as possible just by wrapping current engine design around Vulkan. Avoid all pitfalls and bottlenecks. This is what we did by now and released as patch for Talos.

steamcommunity.com/app/257510/discussions/0/412447331651559970/#p2