Dota 2 on Linux gets upgraded to use the newer Steam runtime container

So is this the whole "Soldier", "Scout" thing that you sometimes see talk of? The "Steam Linux Runtime" that you occasionally see downloading? I just assumed it was a background process that Steam needed (as a client) to run.

So is this the whole "Soldier", "Scout" thing that you sometimes see talk of? The "Steam Linux Runtime" that you occasionally see downloading? I just assumed it was a background process that Steam needed (as a client) to run.

There are a few different versions of the runtime now yes, and Valve names them like Soldier, Scout, Heavy etc.

Dota 2 client. This included dropping OpenGL support

While I am all for prioritizing support for new technologies (Vulkan, Wayland, Pipewire, Rust...) won't this decision leave out players who don't have a compatible card?

I don't play this game and I don't know if the game is already heavy enough to not run on older setups, but while their main competitor (league of legends) does the opposite (can run on weak computers and have non-english with voice localization) in order to embrace a bigger player base, drop OpenGL will exclude Linux players with non Vulkan hardware (which may not be many, but they probably exist)

Finally!
for quite some time the UI for DOTA2 has been painfully laggy (ingame was fine). Now it's better.

Dota 2 client. This included dropping OpenGL support

While I am all for prioritizing support for new technologies (Vulkan, Wayland, Pipewire, Rust...) won't this decision leave out players who don't have a compatible card?

I don't play this game and I don't know if the game is already heavy enough to not run on older setups, but while their main competitor (league of legends) does the opposite (can run on weak computers and have non-english with voice localization) in order to embrace a bigger player base, drop OpenGL will exclude Linux players with non Vulkan hardware (which may not be many, but they probably exist)

Not sure if you are trolling or not, a Nvidia GTX 970 that I had back in 2014 supports Vulkan.


Last edited by t3g on 31 January 2022 at 6:53 pm UTC

Not sure if you are trolling or not, a Nvidia GTX 970 that I had back in 2014 supports Vulkan.

No "trolling" it's a legit commentary, I presume you probably live somewhere in North America / Europe so the scenery of someone using an Ivy Bridge notebook or something older than "Nvidia GTX 970" might sound absurd to you


Last edited by BielFPs on 31 January 2022 at 7:37 pm UTC

Not sure if you are trolling or not, a Nvidia GTX 970 that I had back in 2014 supports Vulkan.

Well, up until recently, I was considering removing the RX 560 in a secondary computer that I have and replacing it with an R7 270 that I have available.* If I did that, however, I would have to use kernel parameters to force the use of the amdgpu driver rather than the radeon driver to get any Vulkan support. I'm pretty sure that in some places there are people who would love to upgrade to an R7 270. I know there are people on old Intel hardware that doesn't support Vulkan. I don't know if there is any realistic hope of running Dota 2 acceptably on hardware that is that old/underpowered though.

*(This is no longer a consideration since I now have a Vega 56 card available for this machine.)

On reddit you see a lot of people complaining that CSGO don't work in a lot of distros: Ubuntu 21.10, Fedora 35, Manjaro, OpenSUSE, etc. An issue "easily" fixable by running steam on Flatpak.

I hope that they soon use the containerization on CS to fix it.

It's the same system that Steam Play Proton also uses.

Oh wow, because of this my Dota 2 client shows "Runs with Steam Play" in the library now.

It's the same system that Steam Play Proton also uses.

Oh wow, because of this my Dota 2 client shows "Runs with Steam Play" in the library now.

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Good catch. Yep, it's because Steam Play is the system for compatibility layers (Proton, Steam Runtime Container, Boxtron, Luxtorpeda etc).

It was already an option to force using Steam Linux Runtime with Linux-native games in compatibility settings. Is this what this "upgrade" does? In that case isn't it simply removing the option of not using the compatibility runtime?

I'd just love for them to fix all the visual bugs on Linux.

Dota 2 client. This included dropping OpenGL support

While I am all for prioritizing support for new technologies (Vulkan, Wayland, Pipewire, Rust...) won't this decision leave out players who don't have a compatible card?

In and of themselves, they won't improve things much. They can force behaviour that improve things, but vk-ing or rust-ing something isn't gonna solve more core issues. For VK, it's against DX, not OpenGL (tho it also doesn't solve some features OpenGL had and VK may be lagging behind for).

I don't play this game and I don't know if the game is already heavy enough to not run on older setups, but while their main competitor (league of legends) does the opposite (can run on weak computers and have non-english with voice localization)

Let's pick things in order and call a cat a cat. My GC is a r9 285/380 AMD card (exactly a R9 380X, which is just the branding on the box, it's basically a 380 with more dedicated ram). It's a 6 years old card already. It wasn't even top notch back then. All in all, it's a rather old card. It's also the oldest series AMD support Vulkan with amdgpu (not amdgpu-pro, this is the opensource driver).

All in all, it's reasonable to think OpenGL can be phased out over time. Valve didn't gave clearcut guidelines, so expect them to not be too hasty (it's Valve working on Dota). We are likely to see a couple of years before the support is fully removed. On the other hand, places like Asia where your point is far more correct have a community far more oriented toward netcafes.

Now for LoL. Well, The game does run on toasters. The client on the other hand is known to bring even colossal rigs to their knees. It's a shitshow, to put it midly, of every-javascript-libraries-under-the-sun-shoved-in-and-some-more-and-several-times-when-different-teams-need-them... You *can* run LoL on low-end computers, but it's an hassle, at best. At worst (ie the so called "supported MacOS version"), it's a royal shitshow of fps drops and performances issues.

If I'm not sold on dropping OpenGL, I'm more OK with dropping OpenGL to work with Valve-actively-backed Vulkan (Valve is a massive investor in LunarG, who do Vulkan). On the other hand, even when community pull all the stops to fill in the blanks for Riot, Riot doesn't even give a flying fuck to non-windows plateform (again, if they did, the MacOS version would either be put down, or actually worked on). For the record, Riot still has a goal to put an Anticheat in LoL, maybe not as heavy as Valorant's one, but as breaking for Wine (remember the shitshow when some Rioter did say he'd not give a shit about Wine users anyway because muh competitive integrity*).

So the Linux gamers? This isn't picking a turd sandwich or a giant douche, we are picking "accepting to move on from an old tech that did wrong abstractions for the current age, even if it mean buying new hardware", or "go fuck yourself soon™©". One of the missed upside is that: Vulkan gonna happen anyway. Phones are supporting it more and more, older rigs are breaking down more and more.

It's moving on for a lot of good reasons, with local gaming cultures offloading part of the issue. It's not going to happen tomorrow either, but trying to stick to OpenGL isn't gonna work, and that's it.

Edit: oops, send before pointing out 2 extra things:

For the record, Dota does have a few extra voice acting (russian and chinese IIRC), which are simply the biggest scenes and communities of the game. So while LoL put a lot more money for localization, an argument can be made of the "reach" they already have and want to hold on, while localization in and off itself of voice acting is unlikely to bring more people in over being different enough.

Other point: muh competitive integrity is a de facto bullshit argument, as it imply any kind of *real* competition over, first, not as real or something, all the while fully disregarding that online competition is just a perfect highway for cheaters (online competition mean until you fully lock down the computer, the network, the servers and everything in between, you can't prove there was no fuckery), hence the best and highest quality competitions either requires in persons attendance, or, something I'm a lot more fond of, being up close and personal with the people in the scene, it's then a relation of trust and can be leveraged to ensure integrity. Anything else is bond to get pwned. The question isn't "if", but "when". It's answer is a set "amount of time" divided by the economical value of the action (knowing cheating is a business, the value here is up high)


Last edited by MisterPaytwick on 4 February 2022 at 11:27 am UTC