Valve Developer Andres Rodriguez Lands First Patches Into RADV Vulkan Driver

[eidolon]

Valve has said they will not build a closed ecosystem.

Valve already has a closed ecosystem. Valve sees business reasons for this, just as AMD sees business reasons for maintaining AMDGPU-Pro.

[darkbasic]

Or are you saying we are stupid for pursuing the workstation market in the first place ?

Being intelligent would mean sitting in a table with nvidia and decide to drop legacy from both drivers alltogether. Then all the workstation crap will have to be rewritten and some software houses will finally enter 2017.

[juno]

In the last few months Valve seems to be pretty focused on helping AMD to improve Vulkan and VR performance on Linux.

Obviously they want to get to a point where they can stop including AMDGPU PRO on steamOS, then they will ask their partners and their own devs as well to target the open source drivers exclusively for AMD hardware.

So you are basically saying they developed some common sense?
Obviously the single sane thing to do, they should have started much earlier, not only when it comes to vr.

[shmerl]

Don't forget the workstation market... as long as workstation apps require compatibility profiles and Mesa does not support them we will continue to need the proprietary driver.

Someone can sponsor implementing compatibility profile in Mesa. But I suppose it would still require to have a Windows driver for the same.

Also, can you please give some update on your efforts to open Vulkan and OpenCL from your closed implementations? It's been a while, and supposedly you have a better idea about the ETA now? And may be you can clarify how do you envision to integrate / merge it with radv if at all?

[humbug]

Valve already has a closed ecosystem. Valve sees business reasons for this, just as AMD sees business reasons for maintaining AMDGPU-Pro.

You are wrong. Valve does not have any closed ecosystem.

Valve run a digital store which is known as Steam. The steam store can be run on Mac OSX, Windows and Linux.

Let's take Linux as an example. You can choose to get your games via steam, or you pick a different store. Even in Valve's distro SteamOS you can launch a browser and go to GOG and get a game from there. Or install a debian application. Also non of the games on steamOS are exclusive to steamOS, you can pick a different linux distro and have access to those same games or you can even switch to windows/Mac OSX and access your library.

All of these things are the opposite of a closed ecosystem which would be more like a game console. In a closed ecosystem one player acts as the gatekeeper for that system. i.e. you cannot bypass them.

[shmerl]

You are wrong. Valve does not have any closed ecosystem.
Valve run a digital store which is known as Steam. The steam store can be run on Mac OSX, Windows and Linux.

How about SteamVR being Steam only? Same goes for their new API for Steam controller. And of course an older Steamworks lock-in for their network APIs and such. It's pretty much all closed and locks developers into Steam. Open ecosystem means, that developers can release their games through any distributor and aren't tied to one store.

[eidolon]

You are wrong. Valve does not have any closed ecosystem.

[humbug]

good arguement, and good job cutting out the rest of my reply. Steam is not the gatekeeper to your PC. If it is then so is the ubuntu software center, you can call that also a closed ecosystem. These are one of multiple ways to get software applications onto your pc.

the reason PC is not closed is because we are free to also install applications from other sources. That's why a game console is considered closed.

And also it is known that valve doesn't ask devs for exclusivity. That's why so many pc games are available on multiple stores. I purchased mass effect 1 and 2 on steam windows, years later I was able to enter that key into origin and download/play the game without steam. Because in this case that's how EA chose to manage their keys.

[funfunctor]

Don't forget the workstation market... as long as workstation apps require compatibility profiles and Mesa does not support them we will continue to need the proprietary driver. Remember that was the reason we created amdgpu-pro in the first place - but it was also temporarily valuable in the consumer space until we had GL 4.5 support and decent performance in the open driver.

When we are finished the only significant difference between the two drivers will be the GL userspace bits plus any non-upstreamable kernel code (eg support for legacy APIs which require hard-pinning from userspace without the option of transparent eviction).

Or are you saying we are stupid for pursuing the workstation market in the first place ?

In short, yes its dumb because AMD has limited driver development resources and their is a exploding market right now in and around machine learning while AMD's amdkfd stack is a utter mess. Those workstation customers that have applications that are broken are being propped up by your own doing, that's _your_ (vendor not you personally obviously) fault for keeping it alive. Further, that market share has stagnated and is falling. Most "workstation customers" are most likely using Windows and/or are happy to keep some accident driver going.

Mean while, CUDA has become the de facto standard for all GPGPU related things and AMD don't even have a upstream working and stable driver that can do memory pinning with released ASIC's without hacks and random github half baked source drops every 9 months.

So yea, its pretty darn brain dead sorry !

[shmerl]

And also it is known that valve doesn't ask devs for exclusivity. That's why so many pc games are available on multiple stores. I purchased mass effect 1 and 2 on steam windows, years later I was able to enter that key into origin and download/play the game without steam. Because in this case that's how EA chose to manage their keys.

Doesn't ask, but many of their tools (aka "ecosystem") tie games to Steam making them exclusive. I brought you examples above.