GamingOnLinux covers Valve's new foray into VR Gaming on Linux.
Valve have put up SteamVR for Linux officially in Beta form and they are keen to stress that this is a development release.
You will need to run the latest Steam Beta Client for it to work at all, so be sure to opt-in if you want to play around with it.
VR on Linux will exclusively use Vulkan, so it's going to be a pretty good push for Vulkan if VR becomes more popular. Vulkan is likely one of the pieces of the puzzle that held it back, since Vulkan itself and the drivers are still so new.
On NVIDIA, you need to have the 375.27.10 "Developer Beta Driver", which can be found here. There's also this PPA for Ubuntu users. It's likely it needs some newer Vulkan extensions not found in the current stable drivers.
For AMD GPU owners, you need a very recent build of the open source radv driver (Mesa), Valve provide this pre-release on their github page.
Intel GPUs are not supported and it's probable it will be a long time until they are, since VR generally requires some beefy hardware to run smoothly. It's possible they may work in future, but I imagine the Intel 'anv' Vulkan driver needs more work done.
GoL also covered shortly after that Valve's announcement of Destinations & Dota VR Hub now available on Linux..
Destinations lets you explore both real and imaginary places in virtual reality with friends. Visit and learn about different countries, explore your favorite game environment, or play games with other players – invite your friends and go explore!
Dota 2 VR Hub [...] lets you watch live matches, replays and more in your VR headset. You can do a VR theatre with up to 15 friends too, which sounds pretty sweet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @08:30PM
With something like a GPU, shouldn't the software drivers be incredibly easy for the hardware manufacturer to produce?
I mean, the difficult work is already done in the hardware, so it should simply be a matter of following some basic interface like "Stuff data in here, using this format" and "Get data out of here, using this other format". How much effort does it really take for someone like Nvidia to produce high-quality drivers, or at least some kind of proprietary core driver around which the various developers of various OS kernels could build their own userspace interfaces?
(Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Thursday February 23 2017, @08:38PM
> I mean, the difficult work is already done in the hardware, so it should simply be a matter of following some basic interface
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIVA_TNT#Drivers [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @09:35PM
It still doesn't explain why stuffing data into a GPU and gathering the output is some mysterious black magic.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Thursday February 23 2017, @10:08PM
For some reason Nvidia thinks the hardware interface is some kind of trade secret.
Probably because the cores are general-purpose these days: most of what separates one GPU from another is firmware.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @12:17PM
Because there's a ton of game specific hacks in there required to keep lazy game devs enthralled.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Friday February 24 2017, @04:28PM
Or perhaps to cheat a little and entice gamers to buy your silicon because it runs the latest "call of doody XXI: Xtreme war crimes" 10 FPS faster than the competition thanks to driver hacks tailored for that game.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday February 23 2017, @09:42PM
Well, I'm not a driver developer, but as I understand it, some of the work is done in the (complex) hardware, some of the work in done in the (complex) firmware, and these sets of work are painstakingly connected to an OS, whether poorly or brilliantly, via a driver.
If the drivers were written using the "incredibly easy" method, to a simple standard (say, VESA), then the connection is of the "poorly" variety.
The amount of work to raise the driver to the "brilliantly" connected variety seems to be exponential, rather than linear.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 24 2017, @12:10AM
There are so many people who would devote much of their free time and resources to getting that brilliance, if only they weren't arbitrarily restricted from knowing how to proceed. This world could be so much more advanced than it is; alas, people are afraid to work with each other.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Friday February 24 2017, @01:18PM
artificial scarcity of ideas and resources, makes the world go around...