Nvidia To Show Off Vulkan On NVIDIA GPUs & An OpenGL Linux Graphics Debugger

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: ZeloxAah so simple, directx12 and vulcan already "supports it" kind off? I know u said sli is dead or are heading that way. But if u simplefi the it a bit.
The developer have to press the ON button so I can use both gpus and the reselution I want in there game.

And for me as a user, I will be able to have the option in the games setup menu, to change to a bigger reselution, and thats it. If the game supports more then 1 screen / higher reselution.

This is like the main reason I dont use linux 24/7 when I game.
Sry for my english, been a long day.

Multi-GPU support in Vulkan doesn't necessarily mean higher resolutions - it just means that the developer can use the GPUs for whatever he/she wishes. You could use one for computer, another for rendering, a third for off-screen rendering, etc.
If the game actually supports spanning the final output across multiple screens, that's another matter, and I'm not sure it's something Vulkan would be directly responsible for.

I'm assuming Zelox is talking about "eyefinity" or "NVSurround" gaming like in windows. Since I don't use AMD GPUs I can't provide input on how their multimonitor gaming stuff works, but I can chime in on Nvidia.

NVSurround relies on the drivers telling windows there is only ONE monitor. An extra wide virtual monitor, but still just one. As far as the OS is concerned 5760x1080 for example is the size of your monitor. If you look in the task manager while runnning NVSurround you will see something like "Nvidia maximize helper" and that is what allows you to still "fullscreen" some programs to only one monitor even though the windows window manager is only aware of one large monitor.. but it doesn't catch everything. VLC for example will span the whole virtual monitor when going full screen, or youtube videos will take up the whole thing.

You can successfully play games spanning any # of monitors in Linux. I do it all of the time for the older titles or not so graphically intensive titles that a single GPU is enough power for or smooth 60fps is not important to me. I use XFCE for my normal computing and XFWM is passed info about the separate monitors from the NV drivers via randr. I've not generally had good luck manually manipulating randr with the NV drivers.

Openbox however is looking for the information about monitor bounds from xinerama extensions. NV drivers have a nifty option called "nvidiaXineramaInfo". If you set that to false in your xorg.conf(Option "nvidiaXineramaInfo" "False" in the Screen section) then voila! The NV drivers don't tell openbox about the separate monitors and so it only sees one big monitor and games can span the whole thing. Sometimes the option for 5760x1080 for example will actually appear in the game options and sometimes you will have to find the games .cfg and manually enter it. Without telling the drivers to not pass that info probably 98%+ of games will only go as big as the main monitor(1920x1080). Using the nvidiaXineramaInfo option set to false is nice because it allows me to use only one xorg.conf instead of two(or manually editing the one depending on the behavior I need), and I have "normal" fullscreening functionality using XFCE and my "surround" gaming environment when I switch to Openbox.

The last time I tried Cinnamon it was also affected by using nvidiaXineramaInfo set to false and it just treated the three monitors as one large one... but I use OB because of its small footprint and I still find Cinnamon a little too buggy.. I'll probably catch crap for that from someone here.. but any crashing in Cinnamon is a no-go for me when XFCE just always works.. YMMV of course. Plus I would have to keep two xorg.confs or manually edit and logout/login anyways to change the WM's behavior.

So no I don't think Vulkan will have anything to do with multi monitor gaming as far as the resolutions the game is allowed to have or see. That is still up to how the WM presents the monitors to the apps/games. I have no idea if Wayland is going to change that.. it would be nice if it was much simpler.

Many games suffer the same issues that games in windows do when using surround when they are not properly coded for it(bad FOV, incorrect HUD placement etc..). I'm guessing you know what flawlesswidescreen is. There is nothing like that for linux as far I know. If using wine to play a game then you can also use FWS with wine. I played the latest Wolfenstein games using wine and FWS @ 5760x1080. They ran better than in their native environment.

Zelox, if you use nvidia gpu(s) and you want help or any more info on getting games to run on 3 monitors in Linux feel free to shoot me a PM here and I'll be glad to help.


Last edited by EKRboi on 8 August 2015 at 2:05 am UTC

Quoting: Stebs[IMHO the interesting point of the new APIs (Mantle, DX12, Vulkan) is, that they were mainly made by the industry, folks from Dice, EA, Valve etc. and not really solely by AMD, Microsoft or Khronos.

Graphics API do not get designed in isolation from its actual users (i.e. developers). This might have been true for PHIGS and (conceptually similar to it) early retained mode Direct3D, but hasn't been the case since GPU became ubiquitous.

Comments cleaned up.

Ok folks, after some searching I found thta AMD is also on the conference:
http://s2015.siggraph.org/attendees/exhibitor-tech-talks?hootPostID=5d89d68b3308c38380f3e719033f29f6
"The Future of AMD’s GPU-Accelerated Rendering Solutions"
but it is difficult to find the abstract of the talk -- all i found was:
http://www.3dtotal.com/index_news_detailed.php?id=14552

"MD's Developer Technology Team will be hosting a Tech Talk presentation at SIGGRAPH on the Future of AMD's GPU-Accelerated Rendering Solutions on Tuesday, 11 August from 2-3 PM, Room 501

Several emerging technologies will be discussed. AMD's FireRays, a high efficiency and highly optimized GPU solution for ray intersections, and FireRender, a real-time cross vendor ray tracing API, will be presented along with real-time demos. A brief presentation on Khronos’ next generation graphics API Vulkan will be given and its applicability to the professional graphics space. AMD's FireTess API, a compute based GPU solution for surface trimming and tessellation, will be presented as well. Lastly AMD's RapidFire technology will be shown, which provides a cross vendor, high efficiency solution for streaming. The Tech Talk will be presented by Sean O’Connell, Jason Yang and Takahiro Harada. "

So there is a little bit about Vulkan too, so maybe that will calm down some AMD owners :)

Quoting: Zelox

Quoting: vulture

Quoting: ZeloxI hope vulkan can and will support sli and multimontor setups.
At the moment linuxs is useless when it comes to sli and gaming with more then one montior.

Sadly.

no, it won't. sli/crossfire is obsoleted by both vulkan and directx12. with those you can control each and every gpu (even if they are from different vendor).

sli like feature in the game will be up to developer, not up to drivers

Aah so simple, directx12 and vulcan already "supports it" kind off? I know u said sli is dead or are heading that way. But if u simplefi the it a bit.
The developer have to press the ON button so I can use both gpus and the reselution I want in there game.

And for me as a user, I will be able to have the option in the games setup menu, to change to a bigger reselution, and thats it. If the game supports more then 1 screen / higher reselution.

This is like the main reason I dont use linux 24/7 when I game.
Sry for my english, been a long day.

SLI never had some real gains, at least not perf/money. you spent a lot of money for a little more (and then sometimes even less performance). i don't know if this analogy will work, but SLI is more or less like raid device. software only sees partition on which it can write, how this will happen is up to raid driver. but, unlike raid... SLI is far from simple to guess how to work effectively. and game only sees that one SLI setup as its graphic card.

for a driver to guess how to split workload for a game... well, it could as well be driver for each game.

with DX12/Vulkan game can use each GPU and his VRAM with direct control and full power as long as developer made it so and cpu can actually handle workload without creating bottleneck. it is much more efficient, but it also needs more developer work on enabling it.

support for multiple screens is simpler this way and yet... more complex :)

Quoting: vulture

Quoting: Zelox

Quoting: vulture

Quoting: ZeloxI hope vulkan can and will support sli and multimontor setups.
At the moment linuxs is useless when it comes to sli and gaming with more then one montior.

Sadly.

no, it won't. sli/crossfire is obsoleted by both vulkan and directx12. with those you can control each and every gpu (even if they are from different vendor).

sli like feature in the game will be up to developer, not up to drivers

Aah so simple, directx12 and vulcan already "supports it" kind off? I know u said sli is dead or are heading that way. But if u simplefi the it a bit.
The developer have to press the ON button so I can use both gpus and the reselution I want in there game.

And for me as a user, I will be able to have the option in the games setup menu, to change to a bigger reselution, and thats it. If the game supports more then 1 screen / higher reselution.

This is like the main reason I dont use linux 24/7 when I game.
Sry for my english, been a long day.

SLI never had some real gains, at least not perf/money. you spent a lot of money for a little more (and then sometimes even less performance). i don't know if this analogy will work, but SLI is more or less like raid device. software only sees partition on which it can write, how this will happen is up to raid driver. but, unlike raid... SLI is far from simple to guess how to work effectively. and game only sees that one SLI setup as its graphic card.

for a driver to guess how to split workload for a game... well, it could as well be driver for each game.

with DX12/Vulkan game can use each GPU and his VRAM with direct control and full power as long as developer made it so and cpu can actually handle workload without creating bottleneck. it is much more efficient, but it also needs more developer work on enabling it.

support for multiple screens is simpler this way and yet... more complex :)

SLI WAS a bit rough in the past. It is far better for years now. You can see almost double FPS in games with two cards when there is an SLI profile for the game and it was made with SLI in mind(most games where you would need it have it). That said the main problem that is starting to arise with multi gpu now is AFR (alternate frame rendering) which is how multi gpus are typically used. In simplest terms, engines are starting to need lots of info from the previous frame for the next which is a problem since GPU 2 is working on a frame while GPU1 is working on a frame. As far as Linux goes.. OpenGL just wasn't made for it. OpenGL games in windows don't even make use of it.

So the GPU's are NOT used like a pool where they are treated as a single entity. That is how they need to be used to get full benefits and that is how they can be used with Vulkan/DX12 with the "low level" access to the hardware. The downside is that they CAN be used that way but the engine will need to be coded for it, it's not something the drivers are going to be able to handle.

I have a feeling DX12/Vulkan is going to be a step back in regards to multi GPU at first. It won't be until after the most used game engines get mostly polished up for Vulkan/DX12 that they start working on those engines to know what to do with 2, 3 or 4 cards. Hopefully I'm wrong.. I know Square Enix has an engine running DX12 that definitely knows how to make use of 4 cards. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpDdOIZy-4k) That demo is running realtime on 4 GPUs and the detail and lighting is just amazing. Only time will tell.. my GPU(s) and body are ready though :D


Last edited by EKRboi on 8 August 2015 at 4:58 pm UTC

Thanks for the answers guys ^^. Ye iv seen that dx12 demo. That PC is a beast aswell XD. Well my votes are for Vulkan, and lets hope IT shines a bright light on Linux ^^.

Quoting: ZeloxThanks for the answers guys ^^. Ye iv seen that dx12 demo. That PC is a beast aswell XD. Well my votes are for Vulkan, and lets hope IT shines a bright light on Linux ^^.

I hope so too. Multi monitor/multi gpu gaming is pretty much what is keeping a windows install on my gaming PC. No other PC/laptop/device I own have one.

Looks like it will be on video: https://twitter.com/piers_daniell/status/630196144883142656

Quoting: liamdaweLooks like it will be on video: https://twitter.com/piers_daniell/status/630196144883142656

Are there vids up anywhere yet?

EDIT* I've put my best duckfoo to work and have come up empty handed. Hopefully soon.


Last edited by EKRboi on 11 August 2015 at 1:06 am UTC