Quoting: Raaben

Quoting: CatKillerA game that isn't native but deliberately works in Proton (so the developer tests in Proton and fixes their game if it stops working) is worth something like 50%.

I'm honestly curious, mostly because of how I often see people claim that's all we need/don't need native ports, are there any devs that have actually done that? As in actually support the game through Proton and bill Linux as officially supported, not them just saying to give it a try or that people got it working.

No Man's Sky is the well-known one: they've had specific things in their changelog about fixing things for the game in Proton.

Every game, if you look at their Steam forum, will have a thread of people asking for Linux support. If a dev responds there you can get an idea about their familiarity and testing regime. Some just wash their hands of the whole thing, but others are more supportive.

Some devs will chime in on Proton's github, or there'll be feedback there from another channel.

Having devs engaged like that, and proactively looking for solutions even if they aren't quite ready to make the step to fully supporting a native build, is still worthwhile, I think. Not full price worthwhile, to me, but significant.

The only mechanism currently for having front page Store support for something running through Proton is to have it whitelisted, which means that Valve's taken over support instead of the dev. Testing in Proton and having a not-entirely-supported-but-tested Linux build available don't show on the Store page. Perhaps we'll get another category if Valve release their rumoured handheld. Unfortunately, the "we just hit the export to Linux button but don't actually test anything at all" does show on the Store page, and those aren't games that people should buy.

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Quoting: DorritIt's good to see Proton going from strength to strength, but I still play mostly native Linux; both as a matter of principle and because there are so many good titles available.

I've mentioned my sliding scale before, but I'll quickly run through it again.

A game that isn't native and doesn't work in Proton is worth nothing (obviously).

A game that isn't native and accidentally works in Proton is worth maybe 10%. It could stop working at any time.

A game that isn't native but deliberately works in Proton (so the developer tests in Proton and fixes their game if it stops working) is worth something like 50%.

A native game is worth full price.

The games that I buy (or wishlist) all count as Linux sales, so the dev gets feedback that there's a market. The sliding scale incentivises better support from the dev. More tux more bucks.

I'll also add that I've already got more games than I've got time to play, and a relatively long wishlist, so the non-native games also get pretty low priority.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeI kind of hate that most motherboards have completely dropped PCI support. I still have a decent amount of PCI cards that are good enough backups for some purposes (like my very first video card, the Matrox Millennium II).

RIP my M-Audio Audiophile 2496.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeThere are some dedicated PhysX cards on eBay. Weirdly PCIe, my memory through the years would have insisted that they were PCI!

I think the early Ageia ones were PCI. I also seem to recall some cards having PCI connections on one side and PCIe connections on the other. Ah, technology transitional periods. No AGP ones, though, because that would be taken up by your graphics card.

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QuoteLife is Strange: True Colors will be launching for Stadia on September 10.

I wonder if that means they'll release a native version? Some (but not all) of the Life Is Strange games were ported by Feral. This one only currently lists Windows support. Already having a Stadia version's got to encourage a native version at some point, right?

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QuoteIntel have open source drivers too for their graphics so that will be great.

And critically they manage to get support lined up well in advance of the launch of their hardware, which AMD have historically struggled with.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: CatKillerThe PPUs definitely existed. I doubt that many got sold, because the business case for them was rubbish, but you could get pre-built gaming machines with them in. The technology was also in a bunch of console games before Nvidia bought Ageia.

I googled and found some... on Geocities. (So that's the age we're talking about. :D )

http://www.geocities.ws/nagaty_h/hardware/asus_physx_p1.htm

Well, not quite Geocities' heyday, but it was a while ago. It was the PS3 era, and MySpace was the world's biggest social network. AMD had a really terrible open source driver and a really terrible proprietary driver (I won't say the name in case it triggers flashbacks), and were selling off their fabs because they'd run out of money. Intel was switching to the Core architecture after the failures of Netburst and Itanium. YouTube was full of videos showing off Compiz, and Ubuntu had released a "Long Term Support" version called Dapper Drake.

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Quoting: TheRiddickHowever gamedevs still need to send off textures to NVIDIA for processing, but maybe one day developers will have access to those tools themselves and NVIDIA won't need to be involved (we can only hope).

They don't.

The AI for DLSS 1 needed to be trained on "what this game should look like" to provide its results, and the per-game magic numbers were included along with the per-game optimisations in the fat Windows driver.

The AI for DLSS 2 is trained on "what games look like" and the one set of magic numbers is used for everything.

Devs need to include motion vectors and the previous upscaled frame in their engine to use the DLSS mechanism for the next frame.

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Quoting: x_wingIIRC, the first sample of Physx I saw was on 2005 and it was from the former company that created the tech, using dedicated hardware, which was in a very early stage (I'm almost sure that their dedicated solution never got to the market).

The PPUs definitely existed. I doubt that many got sold, because the business case for them was rubbish, but you could get pre-built gaming machines with them in. The technology was also in a bunch of console games before Nvidia bought Ageia.

QuoteIn the moment that Nvidia bought that company, their strategy was to implement that solution into the GPU. So, Nvidia wanted to move physics calculation into GPU as use case of GPGPU.

Of course they did. Buying an extra PPU was silly, but GPGPU is great. And of course they wanted it to be a market differentiator to make back the purchase price, particularly as Intel had just bought Havok at the time.

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Quoting: x_wingSo, the idea was to accelerate physics execution using the GPU but their reluctance to make a standard made them fail and 15 years after they first release of Physx we are still using the CPU.

No, the idea was that you'd buy a separate card just for accelerating physics calculations. But that was silly: no one was going to buy a card just for that, and no one was going to put support into their game for something that no one had. So Nvidia bought the company and made it so that you could run those calculations on the GPU that you already had. Then they open sourced it some time later.

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