It's time for the Sunday Section once again here on GamingOnLinux, going over some Linux gaming topics and other miscellaneous Linux topics we missed recently. Grab a coffee and enjoy a little read.
Collabora have written up a new blog post about their continuing work with virglrenderer, a virtual OpenGL renderer. The idea is to get OpenGL performing well inside virtual machines to help with all sorts of workloads (like gaming!). Collabora has been using Perfetto, an open-source project for performance instrumentation and tracing, to analyse virglrenderer and they've managed to give a number of applications a nice little bump in performance like the Unigine Heaven benchmark seeing a 6.2% increase in FPS.
Mike Blumenkrantz. currently under contract with Valve, has another blog post up on their work with Zink, the OpenGL over Vulkan driver. Blumenkrantz mentions a huge amount of work went into it recently to reduce the driver overhead, a working disk cache implementation and more. The work has resulted in a huge performance boost of Zink being "100%-1000% faster" where "in most scenarios where it was previously much slower than native GL drivers". Quite a big win there then.
A quick shout out to the Linux Hardware Project, who announced recently they've now seen 100,000 computers in their hardware database. It helps to find "hardware configurations with best Linux compatibility"
Do you find yourself using community-built versions of the Proton compatibility layer? Want a possibly easier way of updating them? Have a looksie over at the open source Proton Community Updater project on GitHub.
While we've seen plenty of evidence about Steam coming to ChromeOS and Chromebooks using expanded Linux support, we now know that at least normal (non-gaming) Linux applications will be supported on ChromeOS soon! In the "What's new in Chrome OS" keynote from Google IO, they confirmed the Linux Development Environment will be "out of beta" very soon. This brings with it increased stability, faster updates, better USB support, a new Terminal application, Port Forwarding and much more.
Need a job? Fancy improving Linux? Red Hat are currently hiring in their Desktop team! This includes graphics drivers developers which sounds like quite an exciting role.
Mozilla has detailed how they've been focused on ensuring the stability of Firefox on Linux, with thanks to their crash reporting system that people have actually been using. Sounds like quite a bit of work was involved due to distributions packaging differently, but in the end they were able to scrape "debug information for Firefox builds and their dependencies from the package repositories of multiple distributions: Arch, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu" and hook it up with their debugging tools which has resulted in the ability to analyze ~99% of crash reports (up from previous only 20%). They also gave a shout out to tech-savvy Linux users and their good reports, which helped find issues that also then helped Firefox on Windows and macOS too.
I do have to say, Firefox has been wonderfully stable!
Love relaxing gaming-inspired tunes? Check out the new Prescription for Sleep: Stardew Valley album that just released:
Scarlet Moon Records is pleased to present the 11th album in the Billboard-charting jazz album series with Prescription for Sleep: Stardew Valley. This album has been largely produced by Stardew Valley creator and composer ConcernedApe with its themes of nature and the four seasons making for a perfect pairing with GENTLE LOVE's therapeutic music approach. ConcernedApe not only hand-picked all 11 tracks that are covered on the album but also wrote commentary and conducted the interview found in the extensive digital booklet. As always, the album features an original theme by GENTLE LOVE in which every two bars of music represents a month of the year, telling the passing of seasons in an innovative and musical way.
Paradox / Colossal Order worked with more modders for Cities: Skylines, and put out two new content creator packs that were announced during PDXCON (along with Victoria 3, Crusader Kings III: Royal Court and Prison Architect: Second Chances):
Bridges & Piers Content Creator Pack
- 7 regular traffic Bridges:
- 3 one-way Train Bridges
- 2 Pedestrian Bridges
- 8 new Quay styles
- 2 new Piers
Train Stations Content Creator Pack
- 6 Metro Stations
- 6 Train Stations
- 4 Public Transport Hubs
Plus Cities: Skylines gained new radio stations to go along with them. More info on the Cities: Skylines website.
Freenode has seen something of a "hostile takeover", leading to an exodus of projects to various other IRC networks, mostly towards the new Libera.Chat. We've moved too, so be sure to switch on over.
Hope you all had a good weekend!
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
life_is_pleach May 23, 2021
developed together with ValveAs far as I've seen, Valve has not been directly involved? All the work so far was Google upgrading their Vulkan pass-through stuff to get it into the state where it performs well for games. Unless I missed something big?
life_is_pleach May 23, 2021
developed together with ValveAs far as I've seen, Valve has not been directly involved? All the work so far was Google upgrading their Vulkan pass-through stuff to get it into the state where it performs well for games. Unless I missed something big?
As far as i know and read (see link) they work together on it. But maybe i'm wrong. Personally i think Google is not able to develop a Game Mode/Steam container or sandbox without Valve. And i think Valve is much situated to bring Steam to ChromeOS because it looks like that ChromeOS could be the future for many user that won't grapple with a classic PC. And that Nvidia will bring their dedicated GPUs to ChromeOS (in a near future) will help Valve to be one of the first on the market for real gaming on ChromeOS. But that's only my opinion.
https://chromeunboxed.com/developers-made-a-cleaner-way-to-install-steam-on-a-chromebook/
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