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Vulkan 1.2.162 Released With Ray-Tracing Support Promoted
Earlier this year Vulkan ray-tracing arrived in provisional form while with today's Vulkan 1.2.162 specification update this functionality has been promoted to stable and ready for broad industry support.
The Vulkan ray-tracing support is now deemed final and out of the provisional guard. This includes the finalized versions of VK_KHR_acceleration_structure, VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline, VK_KHR_ray_query, VK_KHR_pipeline_library, and VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations.
The Vulkan ray-tracing specification now has the support of AMD, Arm, EA, Epic Games, Facebook, Imagination, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, Unity, Valve, and other stakeholders.
It's official: Vulkan now offers an alternative to DirectX Raytracing
Today marks the moment the Vulkan API is officially ready for ray tracing. The Khronos Group behind the open API has announced the final Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions, and that means there's finally a firm alternative to Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing API used extensively in ray-traced games today.
Integrated right into the existing Vulkan framework, the new Vulkan Ray Tracing is a set of extensions—Vulkan, SPIR-V, and GLSL—that allow developers to adopt ray tracing in games utilising the Vulkan API.
Vulkan is a hot ticket item amongst game developers due to its generally solid performance with fewer legacy or convoluted systems to weigh it down, but it's also popular simply for the fact it's not tied intrinsically to any single hardware or platform provider—unlike, say, its main competitor in the gaming API space, DirectX 12.
See also: NVIDIA Releases Beta Driver With Khronos Vulkan Ray Tracing Support
Valve Now Funding Blumenkrantz - Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan To Continue
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 24 2020, @06:25PM (8 children)
so does this mean more games for GNU+Linux?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 24 2020, @08:14PM
More importantly, can you see the grue before he eats you?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday November 24 2020, @10:51PM (2 children)
Hardware accelerated ray tracing features are likely optional until 2023 or later. I don't think DXR/Nvidia is blocking anyone from running games on Linux (which you'll be doing with WINE/Proton).
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(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday November 25 2020, @04:08AM (1 child)
or Geforce Now if your internet's good enough. I've heard it's been usable with a user agent tweak for a while, but nvidia's officially adding support for Chrome on Linux so it should soon be effortless. Technically the games are running in Windows on someone else's machine, but you don't have to deal with it that way and it lets you use your own games library instead of having to buy things again (like Stadia).
It's not interesting to me since I have GPU passthrough set up and can run Windows games natively if the Linux support sucks, but might be interesting to others.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday November 25 2020, @04:48AM
I remember early on some big publishers were torturing that service by pulling their games (mostly due to greed, and maybe an indie dev or two being hardasses). I don't know if it has settled down since then.
Nvidia’s GeForce Now is becoming an important test for the future of cloud gaming [theverge.com]
Nvidia’s GeForce Now loses 2K Games titles, following Activision and Bethesda [theverge.com]
Full Stream Ahead: PC Community Rallies Behind GeForce NOW [nvidia.com]
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(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Wednesday November 25 2020, @09:20AM (3 children)
As a linux user I wish this was true.
However, despite the already existing capability of using cross platform tools, many publishers do not like to support linux.
Supposedly, a linux port of Doom (2016 version) was made and never released. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/doom-2016-could-have-been-on-linux-id-software-made-a-linux-version-sound-easy-to-do.11465 [gamingonlinux.com]
IMHO, I believe that the publisher did not want to support linux. (Game companies rarely like to support anything because it costs money after the product is sold... Linux is just an easy reason.)
There are plenty of high quality games that do support linux. There is no big reason why it is not possible. Yet the largest game publishers do not support it at all. (EA, Bethesda, Ubisoft.) Epic Games even has a cross platform unreal platform (which can be used for linux game development), yet they do not release linux games themselves. (and rumours that I have not confirmed have said that bugs that 3rd parties have fixed on linux, wait forever to be corrected in their code.)
Google's stadia runs on linux servers... i.e. games on stadia run on linux... yet they are not necessarily released on linux.
Sure sounds to me as if publishers just don't want to support anything, and linux is easy target to not support.
(All this said, there are plenty of good developers who actually do support their products and do support linux... but it seems as if the larger the developer/publisher is, the less likely to see any support let alone linux support.)
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday November 26 2020, @05:26AM (2 children)
Valve/CodeWeavers Releases Proton 5.13-1 With More Windows Games Running On Linux [phoronix.com] (October 15)
Wine 6.0 Release Preparations Begin In Two Weeks [phoronix.com] (November 23)
Valve Now Funding Blumenkrantz - Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan To Continue [phoronix.com] (November 23)
4A Games Still Working On Linux Port Of Metro Exodus [phoronix.com] (November 25)
WINE/Proton is how you will get your Linux gaming, mostly. The sands could be shifting with the prominence of ARM and other developments.
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(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Thursday November 26 2020, @10:38PM (1 child)
I heard about Metro Exodus. Also Valve has ported Half-Life Alyx. There is some very good development for linux.
But as for WINE/Proton, I personally do not consider that linux game development. (While technically it is a great achievement, it does not solve the problem of companies actually supporting their products)
For the record, I think proton is great for allowing people to move to linux and keeping their existing game library... But many devs use WINE as a crutch to ignore linux.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 27 2020, @02:01AM
What you said is true, but it's also the way it's gonna be as long as Linux is around 1% [phoronix.com].
WINE is increasingly well polished (that's clear to me from WINE/Proton running the likes of Red Dead Redemption 2, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Death Stranding), and ideally game developers could put in a tiny extra effort to make sure games cooperate with WINE, maybe submitting bug reports ahead of release if necessary. I haven't heard of that happening though.
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