Valve are definitely up to something. For a little while, Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais has been tweaking steamcompmgr, the SteamOS session compositing window manager.
After being quiet on SteamOS development for a long time with no update since July last year, it certainly seems now like some parts of it are being revived either for the next major SteamOS release or Valve's other Linux gaming projects. Work on steamcompmgr seemed to stall back in 2018, with it suddenly seeing activity on GitHub in October last year.
In fact, it's no longer named steamcompmgr and seems to be expanding to do a whole lot more. It's had so many tweaks and changes, Griffais has actually given it a new name. Meet Gamescope (GitHub), which Griffais said when renaming it that "We're a superset of steamcompmgr now, but have a wider scope, so new name to reflect it.".
Going over the project there's a few things that stick out. It seems that they're going with Vulkan and Wayland (what's supposed to eventually replace Xorg in most major Linux distributions). Exciting!
Once they talk more about what they're doing and their plans, we will let you know. With all that Valve's doing including Steam Play, the Linux container system, this Gamescope and various other projects they're certainly still giving Linux gaming plenty of attention.
I like the idea of wayland even tho its still too early, apparently it could allow freesync to work on multi monitor setups and also within windows (on freesync screens). That would almost put it on par with windows freesync flexibility.
QuoteIt seems that they're going with Vulkan and Wayland
Newbie question: I know Linux games today relies on X.org and xWayland doesn't have hw acceleration, but what about games running with wine/proton? Can they use hw acceleration once wine start to use wayland?
QuotexWayland doesn't have hw accelerationWat?
XWayland generally does work with native games and wine, but there are a ton of issues, especially related to the Vulkan WSI, so you sometimes get weird performance, Vsync may or may not be broken, etc.
Last edited by YoRHa-2B on 15 January 2020 at 11:20 am UTC
Still, always nice seeing some investment into Wayland, it is the superior tech.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to this. I'm a steamos-compositor fan. I still use it to this day, on top of Ubuntu.
Last edited by Mohandevir on 15 January 2020 at 1:42 pm UTC
Last edited by gustavoyaraujo on 15 January 2020 at 1:40 pm UTC
Intel has announced the Ghost Canyon NUC, which uses a modular approach to building a mini-gaming PC, something Razer already appears to be ready to use as the basis for their Tomahawk gaming PC..
There's already third party support for Intel's idea, too. Cooler Master has introduced their own case for the new gaming NUCs, and Asus has unveiled a mini RTX 2070 2070 "specifically designed" for Intel's new tiny, gaming rig.
Last edited by Nanobang on 15 January 2020 at 1:45 pm UTC
Quoting: YoRHa-2BWat?
XWayland generally does work with native games and wine, but there are a ton of issues, especially related to the Vulkan WSI, so you sometimes get weird performance, Vsync may or may not be broken, etc.
Good to know, I've read somewhere that one of the problems with wayland and games is the lack of hw acceleration with xwayland, so the performance would be terrible
But of course, I'm far from being an expert in this subject
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