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Latest Comments by slaapliedje
Sky Force Reloaded has a bit of a grind to it, but it's a very good shoot 'em up
29 December 2017 at 4:03 pm UTC

This has the same sort of grind as Jydge does. That game is also fun, but I hate having to do the same levels over and over again just to get all of the possible medals, simply so I can unlock the next level. The one who came up with this concept is some sort of sadist. :P

Reminder: Update your PC info for the next round of statistics updates
28 December 2017 at 10:20 pm UTC

Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: slaapliedjeWell, the open source driver went through many names / iterations. radeon, radeonhd, radeonsi, radv, etc. Nvidia has had nv, nouveau.

I think you are mixing up kernel driver (radeon / amdgpu), and API implementations (radeonsi/r600 for OpenGL, radv/amdvlk for Vulkan and etc.). Having different names is quite reasonable, if they have actually different code for different hardware, or simply different implementations.

Oh, actually I was thinking of xorg drivers. But yeah they split them up into multiple kernel modules/xorg drivers. Instead of just 'radeon'.

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28 December 2017 at 10:18 pm UTC

Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: natis1For starters, Gentoo includes git versions of all packages in its repos so no need to git clone, ./configure, make, make install anything manually. Arch does something similar with its aur.

More importantly though, when you build a package from source using a git repository as the source on Arch that package is tracked by your package manager and can be updated along with the rest of your system (pacaur -Syu --devel). As far as I know, Debian and variants lets you build a package from source, but doesn't automatically keep it up to date. If you install Mesa git but never update it it will quickly fall behind the fixed release version.

I see. But all those methods install Mesa as a replacement for stable one. That's not the goal for me in this case. I like to have experimental / master Mesa alongside stable one, and only use it on demand when needed. So in such case building it and placing it in custom location works best.

Here is an example how to do it: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/wiki/Building_Mesa_from_source

So are you just launching with an LD_PRELOAD? Or do you change the .desktop file? I was going to ask about steam command parameters, but I don't think you use it due to DRM, right?

AMD have now officially open-sourced their 'AMDVLK' Linux Vulkan driver
28 December 2017 at 9:02 pm UTC

Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: TheRiddickpreferably with 7nm we should get significantly lower power demand and a 1080ti competitor.

7 nm Vega refresh is supposed to happen in H1 2018, so I'm waiting for Sapphire to make something sensible with it, and not that 3 8-pin power connectors monster.

Ha, I wonder if we'll ever hit that nice plateau of power, so we can finally start working toward power consumption. Personally I think the companies would serve customers better by doing a raw power version upon release of a new chip/family, then for their refresh, release a card as powerful, but that runs quieter/less power hungry. These should yield higher overclocks for those that tend to go that route anyhow.

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28 December 2017 at 8:10 pm UTC

Well, the open source driver went through many names / iterations. radeon, radeonhd, radeonsi, radv, etc. Nvidia has had nv, nouveau.

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28 December 2017 at 3:50 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Eike
Quoting: ShmerlGood for you. I had constant tearing, and the worst in Unity games (my previous card was GTX 680). That's completely gone since I switched to AMD / Mesa.

I started Linux gaming when I had a GTX 660 and now I'm using a 780. The only games where I remember heavy screen tearing were the Shadowrun games. I had to fiddle with driver settings there. All Unity games were fine I think.

Ha, I actually bought G-Sync displays, and yes it's supported in Linux.

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28 December 2017 at 3:45 pm UTC

Quoting: Phlebiac
Quoting: slaapliedjenVidia seems to want to be friendly toward the FOSS people

Other than Tegra, it's been mostly lip service... don't forget they used to have a (heavily obfuscated) open source nv driver, which they completely abandoned.

Quoting: slaapliedjeDoes AMD even have the firegl drivers anymore?

fglrx is called Catalyst now (the driver package was never separate). I don't think they ever really figured out how to compete with the Quadro line; they were also trying out "FireHD" for a while, targeting "high-end" multi-display users - the same market Matrox was trying to sell into at the end of their run...

I know they renamed the fglrx ones to catalyst, The FireGL drivers were their PRO drivers (though honestly I can't recall if they dropped those as far back as when AMD bought ATI or not).

Looks like they're here;
http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/Workstation-Graphics-Drivers.aspx

I used to LOVE the Matrox cards, they just couldn't compete with the 3D side of things, but still did the best dual-head and triple-head displays. I think their downfall was that they didn't patent that, because I'm fairly certain they were the first ones to come out with single cards that were capable of it. Apparently they now have a card that handle up to 9 displays at 1920x1200.

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28 December 2017 at 4:04 am UTC

Quoting: natis1
Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: slaapliedjeAlso, even with the open source stuff, you have to try and get latest Mesa on your system, and that's generally a pretty major thing to do on many of the binary distributions (not so bad on something like Arch.)

It's only as major as you are not yet familiar with building Mesa from source. Once you learn that, it's noting major, just compilation time.

I personally disagree. It's much harder to build Mesa from source on a distro like Ubuntu or openSUSE than Arch or Gentoo. Thankfully, you can get around this by using PPAs/ "1 click installers" which can provide binary versions of mesa git.

Yeah, I personally have no problems with compiling things and passing parameters to use the non-system installed stuff, but the typical Ubuntu users are used to the PPAs, which in my experience is fine if you use one or two, but once you start using a bunch of different ones you end up with an unstable mess. The same reason why pre-rpmfusion, Fedora and CentOS/RHEL became broken messes if you tried to use the various repos for decent desktop support.

Anyhow, there are definite advantages to either nvidia or AMD. AMD is on the right track though, and nVidia seems to want to be friendly toward the FOSS people, but they also have the bottom line of their Quadro vs Geforce cards. Does AMD even have the firegl drivers anymore?

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27 December 2017 at 10:23 pm UTC Likes: 4

Sorry if this was already covered but;

How to get nVidia to 'just work'
1) use a good distribution that actually knows how to package things and include them in the distribution (pretty much any Debian based one)
2) install the nvidia-driver package, which pretty much installs all the needed bits, including nvidia-kernel-dkms.
3) enjoy not having to ever recompile the driver. When you upgrade it, DKMS recompiles it for you, reboot into new kernel and you're good to go.

I haven't had any crashing/freezing due to the nvidia driver that wasn't caused by a particular game in YEARS. In fact I think the last time I had my Linux box lock up was due to playing around with a beta of SteamVR that decided to go a bit funky.

Reason I stopped using AMD is because they'd deprecate support in their closed source driver way quicker on older cards than nVidia does, and the open source driver was never up to the same performance. That and there are what, like 5 different drivers now?

Plus there was a time (I haven't checked lately) when their catalyst driver wouldn't work with the newer xorg or kernels for 8 months. Maybe the open source drivers are much better performance wise now, but they have been historically pretty crap.

Edit: Also, even with the open source stuff, you have to try and get latest Mesa on your system, and that's generally a pretty major thing to do on many of the binary distributions (not so bad on something like Arch.)

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27 December 2017 at 9:54 pm UTC

Quoting: Phlebiac
Quoting: slaapliedjeThough to be fair, the Opteron system that I had worked great for many years.

Ironically, Nvidia made some of the best AMD motherboard chipsets (nForce).

Yeah, that was before AMD bought ATI.