Ashes of Singularity Moves Ahead With Vulkan, Door May Open In Future For Linux

[salsadoom]

The state of Vulkan on windows is far superior to the state of Vulkan on Linux. On windows all modern discrete GPUs got fast, stable working vulkan drivers early on. Which creates the right environment to attract devs to release Vulkan games.

On Linux Nvidia seems to have good support.
But for AMD you need to use amdgpu-pro which only works on a narrow range of distros and kernels and means you have to sacrifice openGL performance. And the open alternative apart from being slow only work on the latest gcn parts by default unless you are a non-typical user who is willing to configure the kernel yourself to force amdgpu kernel driver. Plus many modern distros like Fedora 25 don't even support Vulkan out of the box.

Nothing you have said is wrong, its just that AMD is taking a VERY LONG TIME to follow through on their promise to open source their Vulkan implementation, and making a graphics driver (RADV) isn't easy to do. RADV is pretty good considering, honestly.. the point is, everyone is doing the best they can. Its not like the mesa guys know but don't care. Its a bit of a bummer for AMD owners, because Vulkan is where our hardware is supposed to really shine over nVidia, but right now that really isn't the case at all. But patience..

[humbug]

Nothing you have said is wrong, its just that AMD is taking a VERY LONG TIME to follow through on their promise to open source their Vulkan implementation, and making a graphics driver (RADV) isn't easy to do. RADV is pretty good considering, honestly.. the point is, everyone is doing the best they can. Its not like the mesa guys know but don't care. Its a bit of a bummer for AMD owners, because Vulkan is where our hardware is supposed to really shine over nVidia, but right now that really isn't the case at all. But patience..

Yep I will keep waiting. And I know people are working on it including AMD and I appreciate that work. I also appreciate that AMD devs communicate clearly with the community on this forum in a no-bs, non-marketing manner. My post was just a statement of fact about the current ecosystem 14 months after vulkan was launched.

For now windows is a much easier place to roll out vulkan applications; everything works for your entire userbase as long as they have decent hardware. Hopefully we will get there within the next 4-6 months and thereby start attracting devs too.

[shmerl]

Its a bit of a bummer for AMD owners, because Vulkan is where our hardware is supposed to really shine over nVidia, but right now that really isn't the case at all. But patience..

Is there a way to speed it up by crowdfunding? I don't mind supporting a campaign for faster development of radv. It was done before for some OpenGL Mesa features.

[M@yeulC]

How can you make such a conclusion? Is there some statistics what Linux users have?

Btw, my hardware is mostly fairly old, Phenom II X4 with GTX 460 and Core 2 Duo with HD6670 and that's how it has been past five years or so. Fortunately, at least the Core 2 Duo is going to be replaced soon with some recent Ryzen and Radeon hardware. I'm also planning to replace the GTX 460 at some point, because it won't have Vulkan support, but the Phenom is going to stay for now (I could get an FX, but that wouldn't be much of an upgrade). So, yes, I'm also upgrading them, just not every year.

I used to have a Core2Duo, I upgraded for a cheap Xeon some time ago (2 years) with a socket mod. I personally got a E5472 for quite cheap off Ebay, but you can get better off ebay/aliexpress quite easily. I'm quite happy with it so far.
I just had to inject an updated microcode into my motherboard Bios and reflash it to get all the goodies (including sse4.1). That was not too complex, and was working without, anyway.

[audi.rs4]

How can you make such a conclusion? Is there some statistics what Linux users have?

Btw, my hardware is mostly fairly old, Phenom II X4 with GTX 460 and Core 2 Duo with HD6670 and that's how it has been past five years or so. Fortunately, at least the Core 2 Duo is going to be replaced soon with some recent Ryzen and Radeon hardware. I'm also planning to replace the GTX 460 at some point, because it won't have Vulkan support, but the Phenom is going to stay for now (I could get an FX, but that wouldn't be much of an upgrade). So, yes, I'm also upgrading them, just not every year.

I was also running a Phenom II X4 but just upgraded last weekend to the Ryzen 5 1600 (6 cores, 12 threads). I guess I'm not the only one stretching out the hardware. I have seen in so many forums of people not recommending AMD cause they are not reliable, run hot, die out. I had an Athlon XP system, Athlon X2, Phenom and Phenom II X4. All still running, but some are retired now, but were running at that point.

If you do go for an upgrade, I highly recommend the Rzyen 5 1600 as it offers good IPC now, but then 12 threads for the future as games move more to Vulkan. For me, I also have videos I encode from time to time with Handbrake, so the 12 threads will speed that up.

As for the topic on hand, I badly want Ashes of Singularity. I currently play Planetary Annihilation: TITANS as it is currently the best RTS game on Linux. But I would love this game and with Vulkan, it can make use of my new Ryzen 5.

[Tomin]

I was also running a Phenom II X4 but just upgraded last weekend to the Ryzen 5 1600 (6 cores, 12 threads). I guess I'm not the only one stretching out the hardware. I have seen in so many forums of people not recommending AMD cause they are not reliable, run hot, die out. I had an Athlon XP system, Athlon X2, Phenom and Phenom II X4. All still running, but some are retired now, but were running at that point.

If you do go for an upgrade, I highly recommend the Rzyen 5 1600 as it offers good IPC now, but then 12 threads for the future as games move more to Vulkan. For me, I also have videos I encode from time to time with Handbrake, so the 12 threads will speed that up.

I already ordered the parts and chose Ryzen 5 1500X (4C/8T). It is already plenty expensive for me. Also I don't see myself needing that many threads any time soon. It's probably true that games are going that direction in the future, but I have not been after the very latest games before either, so it's probably not a big reason for me to buy a hexacore. Hopefully, if I will need more cores later, I can just upgrade the processor and not touch the motherboard. And there is always the question of replacing the Phenom, but for now it's enough for me.

[Tomin]

Just read the official steam hardware marked share statistic and OS market share statistic.
then you can find the amount of ram Linux users have and the amount of cores linux users have and the amount of vram linux users have ... compare this to the windows statistic....

it is a fact that windows users are DOOMED in this comparison.

I'm not sure if these statistics give any reason to believe that there is significant difference between Steam users and Steam users on Linux: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
I should probably try to make some statistical tests to see if there is real difference there, but IMO there probably isn't enough evidence to support that. But I can be wrong here!

One interesting remark is though, that Linux users with Intel processors seem to either overclock them more or their systems report higher clocks speeds for some reason. Also memory is reported somehow differently on Linux, since there are so many users with 7 GB and 3 GB of memory although I would imagine that 8 GB and 4 GB are more common (that could also be explained by GPU taking part of it, but that'd be only with IGP, which is not exactly high end graphics). Well, that's enough, this would really need some actual statistics and testing to see if there are differences there.

[vortex]

AMD did the initial Vulkan port, which is interesting as well, one wonders if this was Graham Sellers' work?

[audi.rs4]

AMD did the initial Vulkan port, which is interesting as well, one wonders if this was Graham Sellers' work?

What do you mean by "AMD did the initial Vulkan port"?

AMD created an API which they called Mantle. This then, when clear that it wasn't going to take off (cause no API made by a graphics card maker does), they gave the source code for it over to the Khronos Group who then made some modifications and released Vulkan, a product now that any graphics supplier can support.

[smitty3268]

Linux users just spend much more money on new hardware than windows users.

I doubt linux users spend more than the top 1% of windows users do, though, which is a fairer comparison than including the average of the entire set. How many even have dual GPU cards?