Valve looking to contract experienced Mesa developers to work on the open source AMD driver for OpenVR

Finally! I always wondered if Valve will take steps to either directly supporting studios to port games or support the development. Now they do! I guess to have a fully working steam machine they'd need to promote VR as well. (:

This is really nice. I love it when companies are offering developers the opportunity to further improve an open source stack. Even more when they are not directly related to this stack, nor major players in the OSS world.

As a side note, I very, very seriously considered applying there for the year-long internship I am doing right now, but was ultimately deterred by their notice that they needed 5 years of professional experience in the industry. I so much wanted to help with their SteamOS efforts. And I am here, doing a slightly boring internship where I don't really learn anything new (but, granted, where I acquire experience).

Sorry for ranting and exposing my personal/professional life here, but that's how Valve job offers make me feel, and I expect I am not the only one :/.

now we're talking!

What happened with contracted LunarG/Valve Intel drivers? Where is Valve contracted GFX debbuger? Where is finished SteamOS? Years are passing...
Valve making good presentations with ZERO deliveries. Last 7-8 years Valve only knows how to take 30% from someone elses work.

Last 7-8 years Valve only knows how to take 30% from someone elses work.

Bitter much? You think building and maintaining the Steam infrastructure or supplying the 2 terabit/s bandwidth is free?

Last 7-8 years Valve only knows how to take 30% from someone elses work.

Bitter much? You think building and maintaining the Steam infrastructure or supplying the 2 terabit/s bandwidth is free?

Not only that, but progress takes time. One of the only reasons Vulkan has been pushed so quickly is Valve. Valve also hired the SDL creator, created SteamOS which is one of the major reasons we have all the games we do and the list goes on.

Valve aren't perfect, and can be slow to react to things, but let's not bite the hand that essentially opened up a lot for us eh.

For my part, it proves that Valve needs AMD to create a new price bracket for the Steam Machines.

I really do like Nvidia (I have a GTX960 4gb) but objectively, their products are more in the higher end of the spectrum. AMD is always cheaper and a little under Nvidia, when it comes to performances.

This is probably one of the reasons why the original Steam Machines launch was so "underwelming". I wouldn't be surprise to see a "Steam Machine launch 2.0, VR Ready" when AMD will be all set.


Last edited by Mohandevir on 13 Oct 2016 at 12:38 pm UTC

Last 7-8 years Valve only knows how to take 30% from someone elses work.

Bitter much? You think building and maintaining the Steam infrastructure or supplying the 2 terabit/s bandwidth is free?

I didnt say that and I didnt say anything wrong, why are you defending them? Do you think running Microsoft, Oracle, EA is free? They dont make new games, they destroy old ones (latest CS:GO pay spray 50 uses; in 1.6 CSS it was free and you could make your own, even CSS was not made by Valve, all that time CS:GO bugs are not fixed for years). They said games run faster on Linux (their games), in practice all games run slower or/and look worse plus we get whole new set of bugs that dont exist on Windows. They together with AMD/Nvidia said OGL AZDO can increase performance, nobody has used it. They said it is possible to have lower latency/input-lag on Linux, in practice it isnt. Pretty much everything Valve said about Linux is false in practice. Everyone that is saying that they are going to support Linux are doing everything on Windows from ground up and usually after product is released some of them then do half-assed Linux support.

Why they did not pay Mesa devs 3-4 years ago? Compared to Windows graphic stack Linux one is crap and still is to this day, you cant have bad drivers and bad graphic stack on the platform that is "Future of gaming". Mesa still does not support 4.5 fully.

Mesa and graphic stack development is not easy, it is niche, I wish them luck in finding good developers, LunarG guys are obviously terrible when Valve needs new people, VOGL is crap Alpha 2 years later, bright future indeed.

Like any relationship there are ups and downs. Linux gamers were starting to reach a low place with Valve on Linux in recent months. They may have been silent but once again brought us flowers & chocolates. Even though Gabe eats 30% of those chocolates I don't think that makes them a bad, after all a relationship is about sharing.

they will probably only contract 2

Like any relationship there are ups and downs. Linux gamers were starting to reach a low place with Valve on Linux in recent months. They may have been silent but once again brought us flowers & chocolates. Even though Gabe eats 30% of those chocolates I don't think that makes them a bad, after all a relationship is about sharing.

That's just Valve's way of doing things, promising nothing and bringig a lot when the time comes... Others just keep promising things and then back away like nothing happened! I think that we, Linux gamers are so paranoid because if we don't hear from Valve for some time we start thinking that they forgot about us like majority of developers do! However it never happened to be the case, Valve is awesome! :)

I didnt say that and I didnt say anything wrong, why are you defending them?

All that stuff you wrote about Valve is irrelevant to the remark about the 30%. In fact, only one opinion matters, that of the devs that use. And from the few bits I've heard directly from actual developers, they're actually quite pleased with Steam. It's not just the store, there is whole backend that manages versions, alpha and beta branches, and who knows what. If devs stop trying to do all that stuff by themselves because the cost is too much, then Valve must be doing something right.

I didnt say that and I didnt say anything wrong, why are you defending them?

All that stuff you wrote about Valve is irrelevant to the remark about the 30%. In fact, only one opinion matters, that of the devs that use. And from the few bits I've heard directly from actual developers, they're actually quite pleased with Steam. It's not just the store, there is whole backend that manages versions, alpha and beta branches, and who knows what. If devs stop trying to do all that stuff by themselves because the cost is too much, then Valve must be doing something right.

Steam is a great platform for both gamers and developers, yeah they have some generic DRM but having all your games from one launcher, even allowing you to add non-steam games is just great place to store them all, also having nice big picture mode for couch gaming. Not to mention the great number of controllers supported and great controller profile settings and allowing user profiles... It's not a coincidence that majority of gamers use Steam, it's awesome! Anyone who says anything different is likely very subjective and has probably had some specific issue or problem with steam.


Last edited by MaCroX95 on 13 Oct 2016 at 2:07 pm UTC

Except actual OpenVR isn't open (i.e. SteamVR). I've just red some news that Collabora are actually working on open replacement for SteamVR.

I really do like Nvidia (I have a GTX960 4gb) but objectively, their products are more in the higher end of the spectrum. AMD is always cheaper and a little under Nvidia, when it comes to performances.

Nvidia is alone on the highest segments mostly because majority of consumers don't make thoughtful purchases.

On HD4000 and HD5000 AMD was ahead of nvidia(GTX460 being an exception), though that didn't made their market share skyrocket as it should have.

HD6000 et 7000 was on pair, but AMD had better prices for the same performance most of the time.

Nvidia is left alone on highest end products only since GTX 1070 & 1080.

Not surprising as card like GTX 960(not talking about GNU/Linux perf obviously), wich was awefully priced, still manage to sell well, while r9 285/380(x) had pretty unbeatable price/perf ratio and didn't had such success.

Or 780 & 780ti vs 290 & 290X. Nvidia sold a lot of those 780ti while 290(x)+third party cooler or customs 290(x) once they were out was the way to go. 100$-150$ more for +5% performance on launch day ? The - 10-15% less performance in 2015-2016 titles must taste bitter for those who wanted a card to keep for 2-4 or more years.

That's a great thing to have Vulkan running on top of open source AMD stack, indeed. As a side note, I think a company like Valve could be the one who could handle some of the cost for OpenGL certification for the open source drivers.

I really do like Nvidia (I have a GTX960 4gb) but objectively, their products are more in the higher end of the spectrum. AMD is always cheaper and a little under Nvidia, when it comes to performances.

Nvidia is alone on the highest segments mostly because majority of consumers don't make thoughtful purchases.

On HD4000 and HD5000 AMD was ahead of nvidia(GTX460 being an exception), though that didn't made their market share skyrocket as it should have.

HD6000 et 7000 was on pair, but AMD had better prices for the same performance most of the time.

Nvidia is left alone on highest end products only since GTX 1070 & 1080.

Not surprising as card like GTX 960(not talking about GNU/Linux perf obviously), wich was awefully priced, still manage to sell well, while r9 285/380(x) had pretty unbeatable price/perf ratio and didn't had such success.

Or 780 & 780ti vs 290 & 290X. Nvidia sold a lot of those 780ti while 290(x)+third party cooler or customs 290(x) once they were out was the way to go. 100$-150$ more for +5% performance on launch day ? The - 10-15% less performance in 2015-2016 titles must taste bitter for those who wanted a card to keep for 2-4 or more years.

I really do like Nvidia (I have a GTX960 4gb) but objectively, their products are more in the higher end of the spectrum. AMD is always cheaper and a little under Nvidia, when it comes to performances.

Nvidia is alone on the highest segments mostly because majority of consumers don't make thoughtful purchases.

On HD4000 and HD5000 AMD was ahead of nvidia(GTX460 being an exception), though that didn't made their market share skyrocket as it should have.

HD6000 et 7000 was on pair, but AMD had better prices for the same performance most of the time.

Nvidia is left alone on highest end products only since GTX 1070 & 1080.

Not surprising as card like GTX 960(not talking about GNU/Linux perf obviously), wich was awefully priced, still manage to sell well, while r9 285/380(x) had pretty unbeatable price/perf ratio and didn't had such success.

Or 780 & 780ti vs 290 & 290X. Nvidia sold a lot of those 780ti while 290(x)+third party cooler or customs 290(x) once they were out was the way to go. 100$-150$ more for +5% performance on launch day ? The - 10-15% less performance in 2015-2016 titles must taste bitter for those who wanted a card to keep for 2-4 or more years.

Not going to argue with you, a full priced GTX960 4gb is just too expensive (got mine for 220$, btw), but I was explicitely referring to Linux performances. I'd probably be using an AMD gpu still if it wasn't for the fact that AMD/ATI had problems with Linux when I converted myself to Linux. In my other life, I was using an ATI EAH-4670 512mb and it rocked! Couldn't say the same on Linux, unfortunately. After that, and I'm probably not the only one, I became hesitant to return to AMD.

I purchased two GTX 970's for Linux builds maybe a year or two ago costing me $800 - it was worth it for me and my girl to game on Linux at pretty decent frames and high GPU settings on most games at that time as nothing else was available.

Now I finally decided it might be a good time to go AMD so I bought a RX 480 for $300 and began a 1 week test to see if it could replace my GTX 970.

I kept it and have since seen it outperform my 970 in some games (CS:GO on Linux).

I solely purchased a AMD GPU for the first time in 10 years for AMDGPU & MESA and I have to say it's pretty stable, performs pretty good, and resolves other weird Linux oddities I never knew NVIDIA Blob was causing.

--

I am very thankful to Valve for all they have done for Linux. I expect their future actions to mirror their past actions in bringing more games and new technologies to Linux day by day, month by month, year by year.

Once games are on Linux it's gameover, it will be the easiest system to morph into whatever form factor to play the games.

Thank you Valve, Thank you AMD, Thank you MESA developers, you guys have my appreciation and thanks.


Last edited by ElectricPrism on 14 Oct 2016 at 3:59 am UTC

What happened with contracted LunarG/Valve Intel drivers? Where is Valve contracted GFX debbuger? Where is finished SteamOS? Years are passing...
Valve making good presentations with ZERO deliveries. Last 7-8 years Valve only knows how to take 30% from someone elses work.

Uhm...
https://lunarg.com/vulkan-sdk/

That was what they were hired and paid for by Valve, that's what they did.
That's all what was there when Vulkan was released, the tools by LunarG.

The intel driver patches went upstream and are now maintained by Intel.


Last edited by STiAT on 14 Oct 2016 at 9:38 am UTC

If all these good news continue, in the next coming years, open driver may become more powerfull than official driver and may even beat Nvidia proprietary. If AMD(Ati) feels this is good for them, it will bring a lot of change in the gaming industry. Who knows? Leting people passionate, and creative with open source, may leads to better stuff than proprietary. And if AMD even encourage it financially, they may have a huge reward in the end. We have to keep feet on the ground, but very great news overall!

Spray issue is more linked to hack than anything else. On cs 1.6 how many players there were compared to now? Like 1/100 1/1000? There was already so many hackers and cheaters that you had to play it on lan to be sure to have great games. This you have to take into account. But I agree with the stickers and stuff you can buy, the overall steam market and card stuff are stupid for me. I managed to buy myself some game with it, by selling items but i'm really not proud of it because. People lost a lot of money for actually something they just have to screenshot to possess it. But this is a complete different concern than the AMD open source driver here.