Steam's Hardware Survey Shows Not Much For Linux

[motorsep]

Carmack could not make ray tracing work well at 640x480 on modern hardware. UE4 does not have true ray tracing, it has voxel cone tracing at a limited resolution, far less than the screen's. If you read the voxel cone paper, it could barely do 30fps at 1024x768 on a high-end gpu.

Tim Sweeney said that voxel cone tracing is used to calculate lighting only in UE4.

[canezila]

I'm skeptical that Wayland (or Mir) would be able to provide any significant performance improvement over DRI2 in X.

Not saying there aren't other advantages, however.

oh noooo The Mir/Wayland war has found its way to this thread!

On a serious note, and it may end up being a lame question, but why deal in numbers that are not concrete? Steam has every member's info. Why cant it query their members profiles and have specific numbers regarding what platform they are using?

I am damn thankful for the work porting games over to Linux. Kidney stone operation kept me sidelined for a few weeks and I have been killing quite a few zombies from Killing Floor.

[DDF420]

So after a month the world will just be a hole in the ground?

Obviously, with the plan to make every piece of the world fully destructible,the world will heal itself over x amount of time,or be replaced with user created content with there EverQuest Landmark (Landmark allows players to claim land then build whatever they want) thus not to render an area useless.

[johnc]

I'm skeptical that Wayland (or Mir) would be able to provide any significant performance improvement over DRI2 in X.

Not saying there aren't other advantages, however.

[AJenbo]

EverQuest next mmo is meant to be a fully destructible voxel environment how wil they overcome network restraints ?

So after a month the world will just be a hole in the ground? Any way aske them how they solved the network issue.

How does GeoMod Technology (old redfaction games) or Havok physics/destruction work ?

By carving holes and updating the bsp, it has a good chunk of limitations, but it is a bout the best you can do with the current tech.

[dee.]

Thank you for your informative and helpful response. I assume I will not need to edit my xorg.conf file any longer either after installing any Linux distribution, correct? I am referring to this issue that I have every time I install a Linux distribution anew.

You won't have to edit xorg.conf because it will be Wayland that will be talking to the hardware, so there will be no need to touch xorg at all (instead, you'll just have XWayland, which provides backwards compatibility for X applications, but it runs as an application-specific rootless X server over Wayland). Monitor handling is probably also going to be improved in Wayland, at least I've heard it should make multi-monitor setups easier to handle.

[AJenbo]

Still, if open source is so great, then why are the open source AMD graphcis drivers still lagging behind the proprietary Nvidia graphics drivers?

Because it has less developers and have been developed for a shorter periode...

[DDF420]

. The reason MMORPG have very simple physics is mostly due to network constraints.

EverQuest next mmo is meant to be a fully destructible voxel environment how wil they overcome network restraints ?

If you want a completely destructible world with internals, you need voxels, again this doesn't dictate what render you use. Animating voxel models is still in the early phase of development and current hardware isn't optimized for handling it on a large scale. With voxels you could also more accurately simulate physics in certain areas.

Both voxel and polygon rendering have there strengths and drawbacks (unless you take voxels to the atomic level). Blends of voxels and polygon meshes are also possible where destruction happens on a voxel level but is then transfered to the polygon model for visual representation.

.

How does GeoMod Technology (old redfaction games) or Havok physics/destruction work ?

[FutureSuture]

I'll try to answer your questions the best I can, although I'm not a developer.

Wayland will come to KDE by next summer, to GNOME probably earlier, not sure about other desktops. It'll be on mobile earlier (the first Jolla phone will have Wayland).

What it will do is provide a display system where every frame is perfect, with no tearing or glitches ever, and better compositing. It solves many of the problems inherent in X. A good example is when you watch youtube videos and scroll the page at the same time. Go try it now if you haven't: the video is slightly out of sync with the browser scrolling. This is because X has no good way of keeping them in sync. This will be fixed in Wayland. Also things like resizing & moving windows will be much smoother on Wayland.

Wayland also gives much smaller overhead compared to X, native Wayland applications will run faster, and even X applications are likely to run faster under XWayland, because they don't have to worry about compositing which is done more efficiently by Wayland. Less overhead means faster and smoother gaming experience. Also fullscreen applications can practically write their frames directly to the hardware, since in the case of fullscreen, the Wayland compositor won't need to do any actual compositing.

EGL is a display API, similar to OpenGL, but designed mainly for purposes of windowing systems, OS interfaces and compositing. Wayland compositors will be using EGL for rendering, so we need drivers that support EGL to be able to use Wayland with hardware acceleration. The open source drivers already have EGL support, but Nvidia and AMD have yet to release EGL versions of their proprietary drivers. They most likely will as soon as Wayland starts being used in production systems.

Thank you for your informative and helpful response. I assume I will not need to edit my xorg.conf file any longer either after installing any Linux distribution, correct? I am referring to this issue that I have every time I install a Linux distribution anew.

[dee.]

Excuse my ignorance, but can you tell me more? When is Wayland actually coming? What will it do for gaming on Linux that cannot currently be done? What you say sounds a bit too good to be true for someone like me who isn't in the know. What's EGL driver support?

I'll try to answer your questions the best I can, although I'm not a developer.

Wayland will come to KDE by next summer, to GNOME probably earlier, not sure about other desktops. It'll be on mobile earlier (the first Jolla phone will have Wayland).

What it will do is provide a display system where every frame is perfect, with no tearing or glitches ever, and better compositing. It solves many of the problems inherent in X. A good example is when you watch youtube videos and scroll the page at the same time. Go try it now if you haven't: the video is slightly out of sync with the browser scrolling. This is because X has no good way of keeping them in sync. This will be fixed in Wayland. Also things like resizing & moving windows will be much smoother on Wayland.

Wayland also gives much smaller overhead compared to X, native Wayland applications will run faster, and even X applications are likely to run faster under XWayland, because they don't have to worry about compositing which is done more efficiently by Wayland. Less overhead means faster and smoother gaming experience. Also fullscreen applications can practically write their frames directly to the hardware, since in the case of fullscreen, the Wayland compositor won't need to do any actual compositing.

EGL is a display API, similar to OpenGL, but designed mainly for purposes of windowing systems, OS interfaces and compositing. Wayland compositors will be using EGL for rendering, so we need drivers that support EGL to be able to use Wayland with hardware acceleration. The open source drivers already have EGL support, but Nvidia and AMD have yet to release EGL versions of their proprietary drivers. They most likely will as soon as Wayland starts being used in production systems.