With The International 2021 tournament fast approaching Valve has given an update on the future of Dota 2 with some major underlying tech changes planned to come in.
For most players you won't see many issues, since the vast majority of machines are already 64bit and support Vulkan. Valve say they're making changes to " keep the game and the Source 2 engine fresh". For Linux it means Vulkan by default, no 32bit and they're also swapping from XAudio over to SDL Audio. Windows will also be bumped up to DirectX 11.
There's no date set on when other than in the coming months.
As for the upcoming TI 2021, tickets will go on sale on September 22 and will require attendees to by fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and you will need to bring a mask too. There's more outlined in the FAQ. When open, tickets will be available from this link.
The International Dota 2 Championships at National Arena begin with Group Stage October 7 - 10, with the Main Event at National Arena October 12 -17.
Some other in-game changes are coming too with free access as of now to the The International 2021 Compendium, allowing everyone to collect Player Cards and check out the Talent roster, with more of it unlocking as the event gets closer plus there will be some special event items too. On top of that Valve also updated the Spectator HUD, the Camera, some improvements were also made to Graphs as well.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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14 comments
Interesting,
That might explain why the vulkan cache feature has been broken for the last 3weeks... Something is in the works
It's a bit annoying having to play with cache disabled at the moment as it takes a good few minutes for the interface and game to smooth out, but this is all completed before stuff really happens
That might explain why the vulkan cache feature has been broken for the last 3weeks... Something is in the works
It's a bit annoying having to play with cache disabled at the moment as it takes a good few minutes for the interface and game to smooth out, but this is all completed before stuff really happens
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SDLAudio? Not FAudio? 
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If they are going through the effort with Vulkan on Linux and upgrading Windows to DirectX 11, why not just use use Vulkan on Windows too? Figured having to target one renderer would make things easier.
4 Likes, Who?
@t3g you took the words right out of my keyboard! Why not Vulkan use everywhere and maintain one renderer going forward...
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If they are going through the effort with Vulkan on Linux and upgrading Windows to DirectX 11, why not just use use Vulkan on Windows too? Figured having to target one renderer would make things easier.well for one there are more GPUs supporting officially DX11 than Vulkan. It would be stupid to loose player base/income stream just because you feel like it. On Linux it makes sense because GPUs that can run DotA with proper framerate usually have already vulkan support(plus they can experiment more with us
)Last edited by Skipperio on 17 September 2021 at 3:16 pm UTC
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If they are going through the effort with Vulkan on Linux and upgrading Windows to DirectX 11, why not just use use Vulkan on Windows too? Figured having to target one renderer would make things easier.
I suspect they are using DXVK for the Vulkan support (like the previous version used ToGL rather than native OpenGL support).
3 Likes, Who?
Even now the mentality of Mesa devs is problematic because well they care only about academical tests and surprise surprise nobody in the gaming industry gives a coin on their engine following academical papers...
And you start to wonder what is the purpose of Mesa when almost nothing follows the academical papers...
From a pure engineering point of view, they are right: implementing quirks inside graphics drivers is not convenient and complicates maintenance, which is even more of a problem for an open source project. You take the example of Windows but even in that case, there are many workarounds in games depending on your GPU type, so you are looking at two moving targets
That's where Zink and DXVK enter the scene.
My understanding is that you can't make a non-standard implementation of Vulkan, so it has no workarounds in-driver. The translation layer, on the other end, can maintain all those quirks. To me, this is the best solution from a technical point of view: Mesa takes care of implementing the latest standards, and Zink and DXVK take care of maintaining compatibility.
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pskosinski Sep 19, 2021
I am using Manjaro and proprietary driver for NVIDIA GTX 1660Ti. On OpenGL I have 140+ fps (not really sure how many because I limit fps to 144). On Vulkan I have 15-30 fps. The difference is huge and Dota 2 on Vulkan is unplayable for me.
When comes to shader caching: it's not broken for last 3 weeks. It's broken for a year and it was being reported multiple times to Valve on GitHub, they didn't change anything in a year to fix shader caching process leaking memory until the operating system gets unresponsive. And now they want to force people to use it.
Edit. Okay… I just tried Vulkan again and it seems to work much better than 2 months ago, last time when I was trying it out.
Last edited by pskosinski on 20 September 2021 at 12:05 am UTC
When comes to shader caching: it's not broken for last 3 weeks. It's broken for a year and it was being reported multiple times to Valve on GitHub, they didn't change anything in a year to fix shader caching process leaking memory until the operating system gets unresponsive. And now they want to force people to use it.
Edit. Okay… I just tried Vulkan again and it seems to work much better than 2 months ago, last time when I was trying it out.
Last edited by pskosinski on 20 September 2021 at 12:05 am UTC
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You are assuming here again that the game was developed when Mesa was at some sort of use. Back in fglrx times Mesa was not usabled.I am not assuming anything. Of course it comes with a lot of inconvence for the end-user, what I am saying is that whether it's Mesa devs who are wrong is debatable.
You are assuming that games developed during those times still have the people that worked at those engines alive. Sorry to inform you that some of them are dead.
About DXVK, it is now used in native Linux gaming, with great results. Also, Zink is used for native software as far as I know. This is not only about Wine gaming anymore, even if it is still DXVK's main use-case by far.
Last edited by omer666 on 20 September 2021 at 6:31 am UTC
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Still the large majority of Linux ports use an API translation layer (Valve uses ToGL and Feral have their own technology for this.)About DXVK, it is now used in native Linux gaming, with great results.
That's not what I call native Linux client.
Translating the call will increase the system requirements considerable compared to a decent native implementation.
About kernel compatibility, the only game I had trouble running recently is Enemy Territory Quake Wars. I honestly don't know how good Mesa support is in general, and I get your argument about compatibility, but it sounds more like a rant against Linux development model than a real discussion about graphic APIs and how they are handled in Linux.
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pskosinski Sep 21, 2021
Just tried playing a full game on Vulkan and it's pretty much as bad as it was a year ago. On OpenGL 144+ fps, on Vulkan around 40 and sometimes dropping even to 1 frame per 3 seconds. GTX 1660 Ti and i5-9400F. Additionally, I noticed that when I alt+tab out of Dota to other window then Dota starts leaking memory and my system freezes, but only when using Vulkan, it doesn't happen on OpenGL. Seems like I will need to leave Dota when they drop OpenGL.
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It's not used "often," it's used, like, almost all the time.Still the large majority of Linux ports use an API translation layer (Valve uses ToGL and Feral have their own technology for this.)
The fact that it's often used doesn't make it a good thing...
It's not only the kernel. Even compilers are a problem. There have been cases when compiler xyz in version .13 (minor version) was failing to compile the code for it's prev version something that sorry to say but it's totaly dumb.I'm aware of this, but binary and/or compiler compatibility come at a price too. Take Windows for example, there is an even greater deal of bugs, quirks and outdated technologies that are carried from revision to revision for the sake of binary compatibility. If that's what matters to you, you are free to use Windows, it is the best OS in that respect.
The problem i talk about is not Mesa only, the entire Linux enviroment is affected by it. And it's actually a big problem.
Last edited by omer666 on 22 September 2021 at 3:17 pm UTC
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