Steam Dev Days: VR, VR, VR; Valve Looking To Contract Mesa Developers For AMD Work

[pal666]

nearly all (or maybe all, I'm not sure) software and hardware created by Valve is not open source.

and all of it is owned by valve, not by nvdida, such little difference

Anyway, you absolutely can work on something without sources, though it can complicate things

i said it complicates, you repeated

I don't fully understand how OpenVR works, but I am pretty sure all GPU vendors did not create anything hardware-specific for it. Just like OpenCV, you can get GPU acceleration via OpenCL or CUDA, implying that you can get GPU acceleration without requiring to get through closed-source drivers. Obviously if OpenCV could access the GPU directly and not rely on OpenCL, it may perform better.

so many words and missed one question: who writes opencl driver? if opencl driver does not work properly for valve, who will fix it?

[pal666]

Nvidia Linux driver is as good as the windows driver

imbecile, nvidia has one windows driver for all oses. and it works worse on linux than on windows, which was pointed to you multiple times

[pal666]

The devs are focussing on newer parts and some private individuals are looking more at SI, so the people in the middle with CIK parts are getting royally fucked

from what planet are you from?

[juno]

Exactly, but even if you read the AMD docs, nothing is obvious on how to program their cards.

I fully agree on that.

If they really wanted this, they'd 1) put more money into it, 2) really help with pushing it rather than sitting back and hoping shit'll change.

This is basically one point I tried to make. they obviously don't really put effort in all this.

Again, if they really wanted to,Valve could put actualy money behind the various publishers, this is exactly that M$ and Sony do;

MS/Sony: We want your game as an exclusive to shitbox/PS
Dev: Ok, it'll cost £x, where 'x' is a large amount.

While this is true for some Playstation games, you really can't say that anymore about MS. There are few really great PS games, like Uncharted, where Sony puts a lot of money into. The Xbox doesn't have lots of exclusive games, and most of them are only temporarily exclusive. They also announced, that all future games will be available on the "universal platform" Xbox and Windows 10. But at the moment, even exclusives like Quantum Break get released for older Windows versions (Steam instead of Microsoft Store), too. The funniest thing about QB is that MS is the publisher. Developers have no interest in releasing for Xbox only, and this is not only because it is a shitty platform.

I do. I want as much open as possible[...]

Yes, as I said: me too. But this is not really the problem I have with valve. They'll never open their platform and neither will game devs/publishers open their products.
Apart from that, of course I prefer free drivers and free software in general.

And yest radeonsi is a dead end for modern cards, we should be using amdgpu, but we can't fully, because of lacking patches. More work seems to be happening in radeonsi than amdgpu - er, the future of amd drivers, yet lacking.

radeonsi is not radeon, which is what you are talking about here. radeonsi is the OpenGL implementation. The amdgpu stack uses that as well.

AMD MAKE YOUR SHIT AVAILABLE TO PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT ON UBUNTU AND NEVER WILL BE, FFS!

I thought you are into free drivers? There is no problem with the free stack on non-ubuntu systems. The hybrid stack is more or less still beta. Also, you could do it by yourself and get it up and running somewhere else. I really don't blame them for this, there is more important things to do. Maybe there will be packages for other distributions, but tbh I doubt it's worth the effort.
AMD moves the OpenCL implementation to ROC. They said it will be open sourced, as well as Vulkan. So the only thing left is the proprietary OpenGL implementation, which I really can't care less about with radeonsi moving to be OGL 4.5 feature complete and improving more.

[schmidtbag]

and all of it is owned by valve, not by nvdida, such little difference

Then you see my point?

i said it complicates, you repeated

You literally said in the same sentence "...by the fact that you can't work on something without sources". That implies the complications wholly prevent development, which is what I disagree with. If I were to repeat you, you would have had to say something along the lines of "...by that fact, it is difficult to work on something without sources".

so many words and missed one question: who writes opencl driver? if opencl driver does not work properly for valve, who will fix it?

Uh... they all do? Intel's is picky about which platform you use, AMD's isn't feature complete but performs great in some tests, and though Nvidia's is complete, CUDA is [understandably] a better route. And if Valve is willing to pay AMD Mesa devs for OpenVR, why not OpenCL? If OVR were like OCV and depended on OCL, then there would be a lot less work to do.

[pal666]

Then you see my point?

yes, i see your point of valve sponsoring work on proprietary nvidia shit, but i don't think valve will do it

You literally said in the same sentence "...by the fact that you can't work on something without sources". That implies the complications wholly prevent development, which is what I disagree with. If I were to repeat you, you would have had to say something along the lines of "...by that fact, it is difficult to work on something without sources".

complications will prevent development if you would not be able to get access to sources via nda or some other means

if Valve is willing to pay AMD Mesa devs for OpenVR, why not OpenCL?

i am getting feeling that i am pointlessly losing time with you, since i have to repeat trivial things several times. how fuck can't you understand sentence from article "help us get the open-source AMD stack OpenVR-ready"? they need driver developers to improve driver

[schmidtbag]

yes, i see your point of valve sponsoring work on proprietary nvidia shit, but i don't think valve will do it

Right... which is what I originally said. Look who is repeating who now...

complications will prevent development if you would not be able to get access to sources via nda or some other means

No, they really won't. I already gave examples how that isn't true. If what you said was true, Microsoft and Apple would have crumbled 20 years ago, Nvidia probably would've died years ago, and we'd still be using floppy disks. Having access to source code is not a necessity for something like OpenVR. Obviously it helps. Having access to the source code would likely make it perform better too, but you don't need it. Tremendous things have been accomplished without source code or assistance by HW manufacturers. For something being GPU accelerated, OpenVR is relatively simple.

i am getting feeling that i am pointlessly losing time with you, since i have to repeat trivial things several times. how fuck can't you understand sentence from article "help us get the open-source AMD stack OpenVR-ready"? they need driver developers to improve driver

It's not my fault you get sidetracked by your own emotions. Half the things you're whining about were entirely a result of things you said.
I'm aware what the article is about; what does that have anything to do with what we're discussing? I was questioning why only AMD was targeted by Valve, and somehow you lead us to nitpicking over things you claimed to say but really didn't.

[starshipeleven]

It seems that you have no recent experience of Nvidia Linux driver. On all our Nvidia cards what we have had, Nvidia Linux driver works without problems. We have/had GT 6600, 8400, GT440 and 750ti. I did sold my kids gt440 gaming pc and I am building new one using my A8-7600.

The kid loves to play the Star Stable game, but on LG W1942T the amdgpu driver stack does not give any resolutions of the monitor and the game runs at 1024x768 when video settings are touched. And you have to be a software engineer to use amd open source drivers. .We need to switch the monitor to 20 inch and then the game works with the amdgpu driver without graphical problems. I tested with radeon and amdgpu-pro drivers, same problem.

Nvidia Linux driver is as good as the windows driver, amd drivers are a far cry of it. Despite of of this I did buy rx460 for me, because I am a software engineer and Nvidia cards are pricey.

Debianxfce on NVIDIA

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAGH!!!!!!!


The sky is falling!

The end is NIGH!

We will all die screamingggggggg27424r6q8t18t8!!!!!