Valve Posts Updated Steam Deck FAQs To Address More Community Questions

[skeevy420]

Care to elaborate? Because both I and my son are frequently gaming. On a 20.04. The kernel is pretty much irrelevant (you get 5.11) with NVidia you should get the most recent driver via an "official" repository. Mesa comes at 21.0.3 (which isn't exactly a showstopper) and if you really need more recent drivers - kisak's Mesa repo with 21.3 is not exactly rocket science to integrate.

That's the key phrase. "with NVidia" means you get your driver from the vendor. "with Anyone Else" you get your driver from the kernel and supporting userspace software. Long story short, that means using Ubuntu "with Anyone Else" you end up with subpar performance and drivers compared to someone using a distribution that pulls in updates from the kernel and supporting userspace software faster.

[skeevy420]

Dude, discussions with you is a complete waste of time. I wish there's be ignore button here. Go read what layers are for. And then re-read it again.

The worst part is it doesn't even have to be Vulkan layers. It could "simply" be added to Mesa or X so something like xrandr could use FSR over other scaling methods which would have the benefit of working with anything from desktop environments to graphics APIs like OpenGL and Vulkan.

Vulkan is not a magical fucking bullet.

[Tuxee]

Wonder if valve will only support SteamOS moving forward, saw the other day this guy saying they only officially support ubuntu 20.04 LTS.. which no actual gamers use probably

Care to elaborate? Because both I and my son are frequently gaming. On a 20.04. The kernel is pretty much irrelevant (you get 5.11) with NVidia you should get the most recent driver via an "official" repository. Mesa comes at 21.0.3 (which isn't exactly a showstopper) and if you really need more recent drivers - kisak's Mesa repo with 21.3 is not exactly rocket science to integrate.

[uid313]

Has KDE, X.Org Server or Wayland seen any contributions from Valve?

[cl333r]

Dude, discussions with you is a complete waste of time. I wish there's be ignore button here. Go read what layers are for. And then re-read it again.

I knew you'd dodge this question as well, facts are stubborn things.

[shmerl]

How much functionality was implemented in Vulkan in the last several years thru layers vs extensions? Will you dodge it just like with the question what is WSI?

Dude, discussions with you is a complete waste of time. I wish there's be ignore button here. Go read what layers are for. And then re-read it again.

[cl333r]

There is nothing new with such idea. It's been called hooks for ages. Vulkan provides official way to implement hooks called layers. So functionality can be extended in such way. Clearly not only for debugging so check your sources.

How much functionality was implemented in Vulkan in the last several years thru layers vs extensions? Will you dodge it just like with the question what is WSI?

[shmerl]

Layers are a means of hooking into Vulkan functions, which is why almost the only use for them is validation or trying to hijack some behavior. Therefore what you're pointing to is more of a hijacking situation.

There is nothing new with such idea. It's been called hooks for ages. Vulkan provides official way to implement hooks called layers. So functionality can be extended in such way. Clearly not meant only for debugging.

I'm not really interested in debunking this.

[cl333r]

That's simply wrong. Vulkan layers can be used for overriding and augmenting features. They aren't limited to debugging by any means.

Case in point - something like VkBasalt is a Vulkan layer: https://github.com/DadSchoorse/vkBasalt

So I wonder why can't FSR work in a similar fashion.

Layers are a means of hooking into Vulkan functions, which is why almost the only use for them is validation or trying to hijack some behavior. Therefore what you're pointing to is more of a hijacking situation, if you read the readme it says:

Will vkBasalt get me banned?


Maybe. To my knowledge this hasn't happened yet but don't blame me if your frog dies.

Which is also why every new official functionality to Vulkan is provided as extensions.

[theriddick]

It would be nice if Valve did a little more work on gamescope to support passing variables into the game environment a little better instead of passing them to gamescope AND the internal window environment. There is also stutter bugs in some games and mouse performance issues.

Gamescope has made some games run much smoother for me vs native desktop kwin environment where I'd see these weird nano-stutters when panning around in some games, often this doesn't happen in gamescope
(which currently can't use FSR due to fullscreen limitation under xorg, wayland has a special wine build that may work with it however)

PS. Gamescope works by making a fullscreen window; that is NOT exclusive fullscreen.