NVIDIA did a big splash at Computex 2021 with the expected announcement of two new top-end GPUs and quite a big surprise for Linux gaming with the official inclusion of NVIDIA DLSS for Proton. Don't know what Proton is? Check out our dedicated Steam Play Proton section.
They said in their official email press release that this is a collaboration between "NVIDIA, Valve, and the Linux gaming community". Currently DLSS is already in the NVIDIA Linux driver (since July 2020) but it doesn't work with Proton right now but that's about to change, so you'll be able to use "the dedicated AI cores on GeForce RTX GPUs to boost frame rates for their favorite Windows Games running on the Linux operating system". NVIDIA said support for Vulkan games is coming this month, with DirectX titles coming "in the Fall".
An NVIDIA engineer also sent us over the links to the freshly squeezed and juicy Pull Requests to get things moving for Proton and Wine:
- dxvk-nvapi: Add to Proton #4877
- loader: Set default regkey for NVIDIA NGX FullPath #111
- proton: Copy DLLs provided by the NVIDIA driver into prefix #4878
So the upcoming NVIDIA 470 driver series should not only have the Wayland support work in, to allow for hardware accelerated GL and Vulkan rendering with Xwayland but also to extend DLSS on Linux to Proton too. That's going to be their biggest driver release for some time.
As for the new GPUs, their new top of the line gaming flagship is the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti which isn't quite as expensive as the 3090 while still offering up some ridiculous performance.
GeForce RTX 3080 Ti - it will be available June 3rd starting at $1199. Here's a comparison:
| RTX 3090 | RTX 3080 Ti | RTX 3080 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA CUDA Cores | 10496 | 10240 | 8704 |
| Boost Clock | 1.70 GHz | 1.67 GHz | 1.71 GHz |
| Memory Size | 24 GB | 12 GB | 10 GB |
| Memory Type | GDDR6X | GDDR6X | GDDR6X |
RTX 3070 Ti - it will be available June 10th starting at $599. NVIDIA said the 3070 has been their most popular of the Ampere line so they've decided to turbo charge it too.
Here's another comparison:
| RTX 3070 Ti | RTX 3070 | |
|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA CUDA Cores | 6144 | 5888 |
| Boost Clock | 1.77 GHz | 1.73 GHz |
| Memory Size | 8 GB | 8 GB |
| Memory Type | GDDR6X | GDDR6 |
While they both look and sound amazing, the question is: will there be any stock? We're fully expecting them to completely sell out in minutes just like everything else over the last year. NVIDIA announced that both cards will be shipping with a "reduced Ethereum hash rate" to make them less desirable to miners. Will it be enough though?
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Otherwise the amount of titles that will benefit from this is... limited.
Quoting: HoolyWill DLSS work for titles that were written with DirectX and translated via DXVK/VKD3D?That's exactly what this is for.
Otherwise the amount of titles that will benefit from this is... limited.
Native titles could already do it, but none of them did, since Nvidia included the libraries to access the functionality with their proprietary driver.
The new work includes a .dll file that Wine can use to provide those functions, which can be dropped automatically into any Wine prefix that wants to use it.
Quoting: 3zekielPlus, considering AMD did not deem necessary to proprely support VK ray tracing on Linux...
Nonsense. Who told you that?
It may take a lot more work than you think. Have patience.
Quoting: mphuZQuoting: 3zekielPlus, considering AMD did not deem necessary to proprely support VK ray tracing on Linux...
Nonsense. Who told you that?
It may take a lot more work than you think. Have patience.
Joshua Ashton
QuoteIt is really sad to see how little AMD cares about Linux as a platform for Vulkan.
On Linux, it took them 5 months since the ray-tracing spec-launch to be bothered to rebase and release their proprietary driver with ray-tracing support – and we have still yet to see their open-source variant, AMDVLK have any support.
On Windows, this was day 1.
Nvidia had day 1 Linux support, albeit in their beta driver. And they had day 1 support in their main driver when they released the vendor-specific one previously. Intel managed to get Linux support for Vulkan ray tracing before AMD, and they don't even have any ray tracing hardware.
Last edited by CatKiller on 1 June 2021 at 5:36 pm UTC
Spoiler, click me
Quoting: CatKillerJoshua Ashton
Do you really think that the opinion of some Wine/DXVK developer is very authoritative? His statements are too loud.
Everyone knows that AMD still has problems with GPUs and the software development team. And yes, they are lagging behind with Linux. But to say that they treat Linux as a second-rate thing is wrong and disrespectful. They are trying to move forward, sooner or later they will allocate more budget for Linux. Well, they don't have the kind of money that Nvidia has, you know?
And his last statement:
QuoteAMDVLK and AMDGPU-Pro are pretty much worthless as targets for developers. Waiting between 3-months and half a year for a release with new fixes/features is a complete joke for anyone wanting to ship a game or really anything.
It looks extremely offensive. What kind of features do you need to wait for to develop games?
I'm currently looking at the list of Stadia games, and I see that the porters did not interfere with anything with AMDVLK.
To be honest, Valve and its resources could have already agreed with AMD to work on the AMDVLK, even with the NDA.
But no, it's Linux. Open Source. It was necessary to make a fork of the driver, and then the whole community to cry that it is not much different from the official one.
In order for AMD to start working with Linux faster, they need motivation. And finance. Maybe if they were offered help, they would think about it.
Quoting: CatKillerNvidia had day 1 Linux support, albeit in their beta driver.
Quoting: CatKillerIntel managed to get Linux support for Vulkan ray tracing before AMD, and they don't even have any ray tracing hardware.
What is the point of this, if there were no and almost no games with RT on Linux?
What's the point of chasing a niche (at the moment) technology?
Quoting: mphuZIn order for AMD to start working with Linux faster, they need motivation. And finance. Maybe if they were offered help, they would think about it.
Quoting: mphuZWhat is the point of this, if there were no and almost no games with RT on Linux?What you're saying here is that AMD are too poor and too incompetent to be able to follow standards in innovative graphics technology, which is a way harsher judgement than 3zekiel's (they just don't care very much) that you took exception to.
What's the point of chasing a niche (at the moment) technology?
Quoting: mphuZQuoting: CatKillerNvidia had day 1 Linux support, albeit in their beta driver.Quoting: CatKillerIntel managed to get Linux support for Vulkan ray tracing before AMD, and they don't even have any ray tracing hardware.
What is the point of this, if there were no and almost no games with RT on Linux?
What's the point of chasing a niche (at the moment) technology?
Well, the issue is this kind of behavior will discourage devs from porting RT games to Linux. If you don't have RT support on Linux for your game, then how do you port it ?
And even ignoring native games, this could also reduce the drive of proton/steam play since it artificially disables feature parity with the OS whose name we do not speak.
And overall, this reinforce the impression of potential newcomers that Linux support is sub par.
Comparatively, Nvidia did try to push Nvapi/DLSS sooner in fact with previous code drops, and seeing that it was not enough, instead of just saying "oh well, who cares" they pushed an implementation by themselves.
So yeah, AMD's behavior does bother me. Actually, compared to what I hear from many persons, AMD support is in many way not that great. You often have to wait for months before new GPUs are supported (as in booting), and even more before they are properly supported (All features enabled). Also, most of the effort is actually not done by them but by valve paid people. Yes, their driver is open source, and yes they might not disable features like VFIO for fun like Nvidia used to do - which they did correct, as well as finally marching to wayland albeit quite late -, but if you can't fully use your GPU (or even not at all if you buy at the beginning) then it only has moderate worth.
And they are perfectly able to do it, they also completely have the means, now that they make shitloads of money from Ryzen and sell all their GPU like hot cakes thanks to the massive shortage.
Last edited by 3zekiel on 1 June 2021 at 7:05 pm UTC
But hey, aren't NVidia the baddies? Asking for a friend ;-)
Quoting: 3zekielSo yeah, AMD's behavior does bother me. Actually, compared to what I hear from many persons, AMD support is in many way not that great. You often have to wait for months before new GPUs are supported (as in booting)...
Sorry, but that's BS. All AMD release in the last 3 or 4 years had a proprietary driver release on Linux the same day they hardware was released. And if your point is that kernel and Mesa version releases doesn't sync with the hardware release, I can tell you that this issue is not isolated to AMD.
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