HITMAN 3 Will Now Launch On Intel GPUs Under Linux After Hiding The GPU Vendor

[phoronix]

Phoronix: HITMAN 3 Will Now Launch On Intel GPUs Under Linux After Hiding The GPU Vendor

While Intel is the company behind XeSS - Xe Super Sampling, under Linux it's an ongoing story of having to hide the fact that Intel graphics are in use when trying to enjoy Windows games running on Steam Play that are XeSS-enabled. The latest example is the HITMAN 3 game that can work on modern Arc Graphics as long as you conceal the fact under Linux that Intel graphics are being used...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/HITMAN-3-Intel-XeSS-Linux-Again

[sophisticles]

Why does this remind me of the old Quake vs Quack scandal?

[Quackdoc]

Upscaling tech shouldnt even prevent games from launching, why the code path is even triggered is stupid, this kind of stuff should be off by default and not care until its turned on

[quaz0r]

Supersampling is very specifically the action of taking multiple samples per pixel. Calling upscaling "supersampling" is preposterous. It should be called whatever the inverse of supersampling is. Under-sampling? DLUS and XeUS. What terminology does AMD use for this, super resolution? Score one for AMD for at least using a made-up marketing term.

[jrkb]

no problem. just have all GPUs announce themselves as: Nvidia/Pascal (Windows; U; SteamPlay compatible; en-US) OpenGL/4.4/Apple (Direct3D, like AMD CUDA) Pi/3.16159 Safari/525.13

[arunbupathy]

Supersampling is very specifically the action of taking multiple samples per pixel. Calling upscaling "supersampling" is preposterous. It should be called whatever the inverse of supersampling is. Under-sampling? DLUS and XeUS. What terminology does AMD use for this, super resolution? Score one for AMD for at least using a made-up marketing term.

Super resolution is the technical term used in scientific literature for increasing the resolution of low-res images through whatever means. But I must agree that "XeUS" does roll off the tongue nicely!

[Quackdoc]

Supersampling is very specifically the action of taking multiple samples per pixel. Calling upscaling "supersampling" is preposterous. It should be called whatever the inverse of supersampling is. Under-sampling? DLUS and XeUS. What terminology does AMD use for this, super resolution? Score one for AMD for at least using a made-up marketing term.

This is only partially true, supersampling is creating a "thing" from multiple samples. It can be pixels, it can be other forms of data. This is how DLSS works,

DLSS samples multiple lower resolution images and uses motion data and feedback from prior frames to reconstruct native quality images.

Supersampling is not just about downscaling/upscaling, you can use temporal data for supersampling too, albiet in the terms of games it's actually not the easiest thing to do. An example of this is TAA. (remeber what I said about it not being the easiest thing to do? lol) so yes. DLSS is indeed a form of super sampling.

[Gusar]

This is why I won't even consider Intel graphic cards, no matter how good the next generation might be. The list of games needing this workaround will only continue to grow, and I can't help but wonder if there's other consequences of doing this, like disabling potential intel-specific optimizations a game might have.

[OneTimeShot]

One of the dirty secrets of popular games is that the GPU vendors add "optimisations" specifically for a game. At that point, developers not only have to deal with hardware problems, but also bugs that only get triggered by undocumented tweaks in the drivers...

It's not surprising that a whole lot of problems go away when you don't tell the game what driver it is using...

[sophisticles]

One of the dirty secrets of popular games is that the GPU vendors add "optimisations" specifically for a game. At that point, developers not only have to deal with hardware problems, but also bugs that only get triggered by undocumented tweaks in the drivers...

Not really a secret, both AMD and NVIDIA have lists of games on their sites that are optimized for that vendors graphics card:

https://www.amd.com/en/gaming/featured-games.html

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/games/

And AMD actually brags that they helped develop the games:

Developed in collaboration with AMD engineers, AMD Featured Games are a collection of the very best titles to pair with the next-generation power of AMD Ryzen™ processors and AMD Radeon™ graphics.

I'm sure that Intel is currently working with some game developer as I type this to optimize a game for their cards.