Valve Eyeing "Exclusive GPU Access" To Boost SteamVR Linux Performance

[Cape]

Can't they just use KDE and auto disable compositing for gyams?

[Holograph]

Can't they just use KDE and auto disable compositing for gyams?

If you think you have such a simple solution to a problem, most likely you haven't understood the problem correctly.

Consider other uses of GPUs like hardware acceleration for applications like web browsers, or video decoders, or other stuff. Not just desktop compositing.

[GreatEmerald]

I've always thought it would make a lot of sense for games to effectively just be drm_master (minus some things which could make it hard to recover or switch out). No interference from the windowing whatsoever, basically like game consoles.

The bigger problem with that is that it would preclude overlays. And probably wouldn't let you record the game either.

[Adarion]

> exclusive GPU access

Um, what exactly does that mean? If one program has the GPU 100% and hangs up... well. Happy rebooting? They'll definitely need checks and maybe a watchdog to reset things and fall back to the OS in case a program goes boom.

[haagch]

Can't they just use KDE and auto disable compositing for gyams?

That's how they did their early demos at the steam dev days. They even said they specifically ran them on kubuntu because of the easy compositing toggle.

It still leaves one major problem: Tearing. With drm leases you can always rely on pageflipping to not have tearing, much less so in multi monitor configurations on X...

Of course you can always enable TearFree but according to the radeon developers it adds one frame latency, which you want to avoid for VR.

[ldo17]

So, Linux already has nice for managing CPU priorities and ionice for prioritizing I/O contention, now we need a gpunice as well?

[starshipeleven]

So, Linux already has nice for managing CPU priorities and ionice for prioritizing I/O contention, now we need a gpunice as well?

And the underlying infrastructure for that to work at all., yes. Nice/ionice are just interfaces for scheduling systems that exist.

[Hi-Angel]

I somehow missed the pre-history, why are functions prefixed with "amdgpu". Is it supposed to be AMDGPU-only? Why? It's even not just the single company, it's the single driver.

[microcode]

The bigger problem with that is that it would preclude overlays. And probably wouldn't let you record the game either.

In the case of steam, I think the overlay is actually rendered by the game through a library (libsteamoverlay.so) in many cases. I figure this is why it is not possible (in some games) to bring up the overlay in the middle of a loading screen.