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Latest Comments by STiAT
GNOME 47 'Denver' released with Accent Colours and various System Enhancements
20 September 2024 at 10:52 pm UTC

"we finally killed and replaced mutter"

oh no, didn't happen.

God of War Ragnarök released and Steam Deck Verified, needs a launch option for Desktop Linux
20 September 2024 at 10:51 pm UTC

Slow down there, I didn't even finish the first one yet :-D.

KDE Plasma 6.2 adding a pop-up for donations, plus they want to make a next-generation KDE OS
30 August 2024 at 11:18 pm UTC Likes: 1

Fair enough, if it's not asking every time you log on that's fine. Once a year or on any new install is very fair, and it's just a notification.

Argonaut Games announced a return with a remaster of Croc Legend of the Gobbos
28 August 2024 at 10:45 pm UTC Likes: 2

I remember I got this game as a present to my birthday. I was sad because I couldn't play it, I didn't have a PC for it (had an old win311 black/white PC). My aunt meant well... but didn't know about computers.

My parents got my neighbors to build me a PC which I can play it on.

I'll certainly buy the remastered version. Nostalgic, but I don't have the original anymore.

Mesa 24.2.0 released with a new shader cache implementation
19 August 2024 at 6:45 pm UTC

There are a lot more important nvk improvements than this actually highlights (while some for D3D12 support are still missing, but more complex too). I like to see how much it's evolving with each release. Keep up the good work!

NVIDIA talk up their transition to open source GPU kernel modules
20 July 2024 at 10:46 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: TactikalKittySo is it safe to stay with NVidia at this point or should I still consider buying an AMD card if I upgrade from the RTX 3070?

It's safe to say it's still better to buy AMD if you're on Linux. I have high hopes in NVK and Nova to get rid of the client-side proprietary implementation by Nvidia, but that's probably a few years down the road to be really in feature complete full usable and competitive state compared to proprietary.

That said, opening up the kernel drivers actually enabled all the open source development in mesa (GPU clocking and similar), it's a step in the right direction. So it was an important thing for open source they did, but it's still a safer bet to go with AMD in Linux. For now at least. I still hope they throw some resources behind the open source effort, but Nvidia was always slow on that end.

I for my part think I'll stay with Nvidia for a few more years as my rig perfectly gets my gaming needs done (3070 as well). And I hope to be able to switch to open source drivers in that time completely (currently, with open drivers DX12 support is still an issue with D3D12 and NVK and some DX11 games suffer from real performance issues, games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance are a real slide show, I think due to missing features or improper implementations on the end of KCD - the game is known to have really bad implementation :D). That all will take time and resources. But I look forward to the day.

NVIDIA driver 555.58 released as stable bringing Wayland Explicit Sync
27 June 2024 at 6:05 pm UTC

Quoting: stephenseiber420
Quoting: Vortex_AcheronticYES! Finally!

I mean I am running nVidia + Wayand close to two years now. But the lack of explicit sync in certain applications made me sometimes switch to X11 just for these apps. While I feel like especially Gnome has long time abandoned X11 all together as the X11 experience is in fact even worse than Wayland without Explicit Sync on nVidia.
this has been my experience too. despite the weird glitches on wayland, logging into kde x11 feels like everything is stuttering. maybe its because i have 2 monitors at 2 different refresh rates. but the experience on wayland has been way smoother. just havent been able to play most of my games for last 8 months. im also hoping this fixes a weird issue where VLC stutters like crazy playing any videos

Gnome on X11 still has massive input issues with devices too simulating key presses (as naga or m907). That causes the render pipeline to stop for up to ~250ms causing massive lags using those side-buttons on X11. That issue does not exist on Wayland and was one of the reasons I really wanted to switch to Gnome Wayland (and that I'm so used to the workflow to press the meta key to swtich windows... that workflow just works so great for me that unless other desktops provide that I can't switch).

NVIDIA driver 555.58 released as stable bringing Wayland Explicit Sync
27 June 2024 at 5:22 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: pilkSo glad to hear it's finally made it to the stable branch, just waiting for RPMFusion to come out with it, then no more of that flickering that's been bothering me the past month or so.

I switched to NVK and mesa meanwhile. Some games (especially DX12) don't run due to missing NVK features, some DX11 have poor performance and become a slide show (while others are just fine, so I guess missing features or just bottlenecks too), and you can feel that the graphic card heats up more, which isn't fun if you passively cool your card with just heatpipes.

Mesa and nvk will get there eventually, but not yet. It's a huge undertaking they started, and I'm actually surprised how well mesa+nvk actually work on so many titles and especially for daily use without gaming (which may even get better when Nova hits the streets and Zink goes prime time - which I've tried, is still too slow for daily usage especially on youtube videos in Firefox or similar the whole desktop becomes "laggy"). It will take quite some more time for them to get on-par, but good to see how far they've come, actually very impressive comparing it to 2-3 years ago where nouveau wouldn't even boot my graphics card :D.

I'm not sure I'm fine with switching back to Nvidia driver though, it gave me plenty headaches in the past, and with Mesa and NVK I at least know what to expect (and what not).

NVIDIA exploring ways to support an upstream kernel mode GPU driver
17 June 2024 at 3:19 pm UTC Likes: 1

Step by step, until there is no turning back. (c) Jean Claude Juncker, quoted by Dirk Koch, 27 December 1999

I think it's valuable that they start looking into proper GPU support for Linux out of the box. They probably have seen too what current projects achieve with NVK and a RedHat backed nouveau on the GSP stack, and that it can be valuable to customers (if you don't need CUDA or similar).

It's not as if AMD or Intel have a "huge" team behind the linux drivers. And Nvidia certainly would have the resources to sponsor at least the same amount towards a proper open source support (especially since that builds upon already implemented infrastructure - mesa).

The proprietary drivers won't go away, and some will use them for support by Nvidia especially on commercial use or other complex use cases. AMD still got them too - but I think nobody actually uses them :D.

I am happy by the development we have seen, but it's mostly sponsored by Valve and RedHat. The patchsets are nice, but not by any means the main effort.

I hope Nvidia steps up the support. Not only since I use Nvidia at the moment and don't plan to replace my gaming rig any time soon, but since it would highly benefit a large user base.

You may want to avoid NVIDIA driver 550 if you're on a laptop
16 June 2024 at 9:22 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: STiATI just got mesa 24.1 on Fedora 40. And I dumped the Nvidia proprietary driver.

Performance is a bit less, but actually not bad, for my needs and games I currently play more than satisfying. Seems I'm finally done with the nvidia crapware.

As a side-note, there are features missing required for a lot of modern games, and partially necessary for performance.

It's on the mesa issue tracker:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/9479

Some of those, as VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations is an issue for some games. So some games will struggle, some just won't depending on their engine (in example, KCD has huge performance issues - but it always was bad :D, WoW works perfectly well).

Horizon and Bannerlord 2 just crash due to an other issue which should be fixed in 24.2.

I expect we will see more and more features and better performance for more games over time. But not all is "perfect" now, for sure not in a state if you "just want to play", if you can live with just not playing some games for now it's fine.

Since I have a huge backlog on old titles - that's fine for me :D.