Today NVIDIA put up a rather exciting blog post talking about RTX - with Arm. Not only that, they've showcased it using Linux too which is pretty amazing.
Shown off for the Game Developers Conference, NVIDIA has announced an expansion of their RTX SDKs to support to Arm and Linux. What they've added in includes support for:
- Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), which uses AI to boost frame rates and generate beautiful, sharp images for games
- RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI), which lets developers add dynamic lighting to their gaming environments
- RTX Global Illumination (RTXGI), which helps recreate the way light bounces around in real-world environments
- NVIDIA Optix AI-Acceleration Denoiser (NRD), which uses AI to render high-fidelity images faster
- RTX Memory Utility (RTXMU), which optimizes the way applications use graphics memory
What they presented was an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GPU paired with a MediaTek Kompanio 1200 Arm processor, setup with Arch Linux (likely something like Arch Linux ARM) along with testing out the likes of Wolfenstein: Youngblood.
“RTX is the most groundbreaking technology to come to PC gaming in the last two decades,” said PC Tseng, general manager of MediaTek’s Intelligent Multimedia Business Unit.“MediaTek and NVIDIA are laying the foundation for a new category of Arm-based high-performance PCs.”
Multiple companies sounded quite excited by it including Epic Games, Machinegames and Unity.
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There's also a separate post from NVIDIA to properly announce the new NVIDIA DLSS SDK, which adds full Linux support including for native x86 Linux games and Arm too. Quite an exciting move for the future of Linux. The DLSS SDK is also easier to get now, with no application to NVIDIA required as you can do a direct download now.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Well Microsoft's huge advantage is the enormous software catalogue, which is 100% x86, so to be able to maintain that advantage they have no other choice than go full on QEMU-type emulation and things will be slow.
Don't forget the progress software like Box86 is making. And software is a fast moving landscape that can change overnight, even adobe a windows/x86 stalwart is moving to ARM and runs okay with Apple's Rosetta 2 technology.
Sure your obscure programs from the early 2000's might not be there but given that most popular software is web based or cloud the gap isn't as wide as you would think.
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Considering how quickly they managed to port Wolfenstein Youngblood to not only Linux but also ARM Linux shows that those rumours that they had DOOM running natively on Linux way back where highly likely true.
Yes exactly, having the driver ready for ARM is one thing, showing an ARM port of an AAA game is at least equally impressive (and serves indeed food for lots of rumors :)).
Last edited by jens on 19 July 2021 at 6:30 pm UTC
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What I'm wondering is if industries like say animation might be looking at moving towards ARM and that might be part of what's driving this kind of thing.
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Suddenly arch seems the new standard ! that's an amazing time to be a linux gamer.
Nah, Arch just makes sense to use here.
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I'm surprised this is running and id Software game. I guess Linux Gaming really is becoming a big deal finally.
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I'm still just trying to put my head back together after hearing NVIDIA and Bethesda working together on an Arm Linux project running on Arch... and so soon after the Steam Deck announcement! I am shook I tell you, shook!
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What I'm wondering is if industries like say animation might be looking at moving towards ARM and that might be part of what's driving this kind of thing.
I think Apple M1 showed that it is possible to live without x86 and it created some appetites ... Imagine if Nvidia does manage to buy ARM, then make some kind of laptop, with Nvidia GPU inside. They do not have to pay either for CPU, not even a license, neither for the OS. So they can capture much more value than if using x86, or third party ARM, and losedows. (a losedows OEM license costs around 50€, so it is nothing to laugh at). If you have good x86 compat layer, relying on custom ARM chip with good HW accel for it, and you ride on Valve's proton for the rest, it seems awfully possible now. From business perspective at least, it makes sense.
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What I'm wondering is if industries like say animation might be looking at moving towards ARM and that might be part of what's driving this kind of thing.
I think Apple M1 showed that it is possible to live without x86 and it created some appetites ... Imagine if Nvidia does manage to buy ARM, then make some kind of laptop, with Nvidia GPU inside. They do not have to pay either for CPU, not even a license, neither for the OS. So they can capture much more value than if using x86, or third party ARM, and losedows. (a losedows OEM license costs around 50€, so it is nothing to laugh at). If you have good x86 compat layer, relying on custom ARM chip with good HW accel for it, and you ride on Valve's proton for the rest, it seems awfully possible now. From business perspective at least, it makes sense.
And we're left with a system that runs with a graphics driver blob only.
*meh*
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Considering how quickly they managed to port Wolfenstein Youngblood to not only Linux but also ARM Linux shows that those rumours that they had DOOM running natively on Linux way back where highly likely true.
Yes exactly, having the driver ready for ARM is one thing, showing an ARM port of an AAA game is at least equally impressive (and serves indeed food for lots of rumors :)).
switch has ARM hardware and it has AAA titles all over
afaik switch runs freeBSD which is kinda linux
so i think its not that hard to make a switch ARM TITLE run on LINUX ARM
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And we're left with a system that runs with a graphics driver blob only.
*meh*
And runs windows games via a compatibility layer. So how much left is running FOSS, not to mention any DRM that gets added to the kernel for compatibilities sake and potentially invasive anti-cheat if it is not handled properly.
The future of Linux gaming is sounding more free and open all the time ..
Last edited by Lofty on 19 July 2021 at 10:34 pm UTC
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Well, it's a FOSS compatibility layer.And we're left with a system that runs with a graphics driver blob only.
*meh*
And runs windows games via a compatibility layer. So how much left is running FOSS
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Erm? Windows games, on ARM and Linux? So they have to go through 2 compatibility layers? Or am I missing something here? Like, did they create a native ARM version for Wolfenstein Youngblood?
edit: ah okay, in the video they state: "An ARM based version of the game is not planned for commercial release"... so yeah, they ported it. Impressive
Last edited by Corben on 20 July 2021 at 8:14 am UTC
edit: ah okay, in the video they state: "An ARM based version of the game is not planned for commercial release"... so yeah, they ported it. Impressive
Last edited by Corben on 20 July 2021 at 8:14 am UTC
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Erm? Windows games, on ARM and Linux? So they have to go through 2 compatibility layers? Or am I missing something here? Like, did they create a native ARM version for Wolfenstein Youngblood?Even if it was the windows version it wouldn't technically go through 2 compatibility layers at the same time but in parallel. What I mean: each line of code would be translated either via the arm emulator or the wine libraries.
edit: ah okay, in the video they state: "An ARM based version of the game is not planned for commercial release"... so yeah, they ported it. Impressive
You know wine is "just" a reimplementation of windows libraries, but this reimplementation can be compiled nativly for arm. So when a windows programm calls a windows library in this case, native arm code is executed, no need to emulate things.
Only thing need to emulated is the programm code between library calls which is compiled to x86 machine code. Here is where the emulation would step in.
Last edited by Matombo on 20 July 2021 at 10:28 am UTC
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Even if it was the windows version it wouldn't technically go through 2 compatibility layers at the same time but in parallel...Hmm... imagine a powerful ARM Steam Deck... with ARM Linux, ARM Steam, ARM Proton... maybe it'll allow for even better performance in a small handheld.
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It's pretty amazing though not crazy to use Linux for this since I think we have better support when it comes to using the hardware then Windows does since we've been shipping Linux on ARM for years (Thanks Android!).
linux was avaliable for tons of architectures since many years ago
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It's pretty amazing though not crazy to use Linux for this since I think we have better support when it comes to using the hardware then Windows does since we've been shipping Linux on ARM for years (Thanks Android!).
linux was avaliable for tons of architectures since many years ago
True. debian-arm mailing list started in 1998...
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And we're left with a system that runs with a graphics driver blob only.
*meh*
And runs windows games via a compatibility layer. So how much left is running FOSS, not to mention any DRM that gets added to the kernel for compatibilities sake and potentially invasive anti-cheat if it is not handled properly.
The future of Linux gaming is sounding more free and open all the time ..
yeah, not an ideal world. Nvidia is on an open source streak though it seems. So one can dream for the driver.
For the compat layer, I think it is a good first step. Espsically, I highly doubt Nvidia will be big enough to suddenly lock everything to their solution, but it might just be the drop that make a dev support linux.
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TheRiddick Jul 21, 2021
Is this showing that you don't need tensor cores to do DLSS? so in other words NVIDIA could allow it to work on pascal or other vendor cards but is choosing not to. FSR I think is going to take over, however I hear you can use both with interesting results.
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Considering how quickly they managed to port Wolfenstein Youngblood to not only Linux but also ARM Linux shows that those rumours that they had DOOM running natively on Linux way back where highly likely true.
Yes exactly, having the driver ready for ARM is one thing, showing an ARM port of an AAA game is at least equally impressive (and serves indeed food for lots of rumors :)).
switch has ARM hardware and it has AAA titles all over
afaik switch runs freeBSD which is kinda linux
so i think its not that hard to make a switch ARM TITLE run on LINUX ARM
The switch port was handled by an external company though, Panic Button, the demo on Linux ARM seams to be inhouse?!
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