Valve Developer Andres Rodriguez Lands First Patches Into RADV Vulkan Driver

[eidolon]

good arguement, and good job cutting out the rest of my reply.

I honestly didn't feel inclined to make further comment.

Steam is not the gatekeeper to your PC.

Steam is the gaming platform here. The underlying operating system, and the hardware that operating system is installed upon, is merely the delivery mechanism for Steam. Valve is the gatekeeper of Steam.

The availability of something on a few operating systems doesn't make it open, it makes it more accessible. The ability to bypass something doesn't make it open, it makes it avoidable.

By your definition, Origin is open.

[humbug]

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.

correct me if I am wrong but what I heard is that on windows the vrmonitor.exe can be launched without steam allowing non-steam games to use steamVR without using the steam client. In addition the HTC Vive and other VR headsets are not tied to steamVR. You can have an application that talks to openVR just like steamVR talks to it.

[humbug]

I honestly didn't feel it merited further comment.


Steam is the platform here. The underlying operating system, and the hardware that operating system is installed upon, is merely the delivery mechanism for Steam. Valve is the gatekeeper of Steam.

The availability of something on a few operating systems doesn't make it open, it makes it more accessible. The ability to bypass something doesn't make it open, it makes it avoidable.

By your definition, Origin is open.

so your problem is that the steam store is closed just like the ubuntu software center? You want any person to be able to submit any application to these places without registering or going through the process?

[eidolon]

so your problem is that the steam store is closed just like the ubuntu software center?

I don't remember saying there was a problem. I believe I said, "Valve already has a closed ecosystem. Valve sees business reasons for this..."

PS Sorry about saying "I honestly didn't feel it merited further comment." Reading it afterwards, I felt it was snippily worded, and I reworded it, but failed to do so before you read the post.

[humbug]

By your definition, Origin is open.

GOG is closed, Origin is closed, Ubuntu software center is closed, steam store is closed. I consider the operating system to be the ecosystem. It's obvious that canonical has to the gatekeeper of the Ubuntu software center, I don't have a problem with it because I am not limited by it when I use linux.

[shmerl]

correct me if I am wrong but what I heard is that on windows the vrmonitor.exe can be launched without steam allowing non-steam games to use steamVR without using the steam client.

And where is SteamVR supposed to come from? Can games distribute it without Steam? I doubt that. So you can may be launch it without Steam in the best case, but you need to be Steam user to get SteamVR runtime itself first.

In addition the HTC Vive and other VR headsets are not tied to steamVR. You can have an application that talks to openVR just like steamVR talks to it.

In theory. But no one implemented OpenVR besides for Steam (yet). So de-facto it's tied to Steam.

[humbug]

I don't remember saying there was a problem.

ok cool

[shmerl]

GOG is closed,

No, GOG games are all DRM-free and their developers can release them through any other store.

[Hi-Angel]

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 !

I might miss something, but you seem to me, to be exaggerating the maintainability cost of the closed part of the driver. See: you admitted that they have to maintain it anyway for Windows. So by testing it on GNU/Linux too they're catching more bugs, thus ensuring in a code quality, and code quality is important for further improvement.

[Geopirate]

It seems a lot of people on this forum are out of tune with Windows world. Microsoft released the Windows store as a direct competitor to Steam and they are actively pushing it. They are trying to lock people into buying games in the Windows store to play them on Windows (and pay for Windows). Steam just wants you to buy their games.

They aren't going to lock out people on other distros using Steam because it makes literally zero sense. They still built Steam on top of Debian/Ubuntu because they aren't trying to Android it and reinvent the wheel, they just want people to be able to run the games so they buy more games. If they keep things on SteamOS they are probably referring to Linux as a platform and not locking it to only SteamOS the distro because of the reasons I already outlined. They are using the SteamOS name instead of Linux because of the PR problem Linux has. They are putting work into the drivers so people can play. Once they have Wayland and Vulkan stable on Linux it will be a dream come true for them and we can really talk about a platform that rivals Windows for regular people.