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Latest Comments by lejimster
Valve have hired another developer to work on Linux graphics drivers
14 March 2017 at 7:08 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: ziabiceIMHO the MESA development seems stalling a bit: ok, they are making everything more robust and faster (and that is very nice and welcome, of course), but, apart from the Vulkan related efforts, there isn't new development regarding all those missing OpenGL extensions. A quick look at MesaMatrix shows that only the 34% of the "Other extensions" for radeonsi (54% for Mesa in general) are finished, and that is holding for two major releases of the library, which means not less than 6 months without new developments...

I don't know this for sure, but I believe AMDs Linux team have probably refocused on getting DAL/DC ready for Vega launch since the big names at AMD have gone quiet lately and other developers outside AMD have been picking up the slack.

I believe second half of the year we will see more progress on missing extensions. But I think more important is focusing on bring performance up in general.

Also while I'm happy to see VR being worked on I was hoping to see radv being ahead of opengl by now.

So, I played... Black Mesa
13 March 2017 at 7:59 pm UTC

I bought black mesa to support it's development as I loved what I had heard and seen over the years. But I haven't actually played it. I was hoping they would have finished the Xen chapter by now.

Feral Interactive have pushed another patch to Mesa to help fix up the 'radv' Vulkan driver
11 March 2017 at 2:41 am UTC Likes: 2

Surprised to see people complain about no pro support. AMD have put in very little effort into keeping the pro drivers up to date. I think they wanted to push the mesa for gaming and pro for industry use. Its took time but the mesa driver is almost on par feature wise and performance is better in many cases.

Of course there are many bug still, but the final pieces are falling into place. Shader cache, multithreaded opengl support are arriving and performance continues to improve.

We need AMD to get DAL/DC in a good state for it to be accepted upstream. I have a feeling this is their priority right now and it will make a massive difference for the mesa driver when it's complete.

I think in the next few years the mesa driver will be very stable and fast. I think its already very good, but with Valve and now Feral and other companies including Croteam getting involved, the support is impressive. This is what I love about open source and why its going to be the best going forward.

A look at how much RAM you might need as a Linux gamer
6 March 2017 at 6:37 pm UTC

This is why I need a new PC. I only do the occasional light gaming and I have to close pretty much everything. I'm gaming with 4GB ram. I'd agree with 16GB over 8GB for future proofing and so you don't have to do what I do and kill all non-essential apps when running games.

The 'System Shock' remake has switched from Unity to Unreal Engine, Linux still aiming for day-1 release
3 March 2017 at 11:31 pm UTC

The game will be potentially faster on Unreal engine. But they are annoying the hell out of me with the slow progress with Vulkan. They have been prioritizing mobile version of Vulkan and it seems like one community member submitting patches, testing and submitting bug reports regarding desktop support. Meanwhile DX12 is in much better shape. I hope this all changes by the end of the year.

Unity may have Linux bugs? (Idk) But it seems they've put more effort into Vulkan support at this time. We need to see more engines fully supporting Vulkan tho. The announcement from Bethesda at the AMD event was encouraging specifically mentioning Vulkan.

NVIDIA have announced the 1080 Ti and it's a beast
1 March 2017 at 2:44 pm UTC

I really just want to enjoy playing some or the latest games on Linux above 60fps for once. I'm half tempted to go the nvidia route as it still has the performance lead. But I'm enthusiastic about the open source drivers for AMD, they make huge gains every year it seems. And there is no waiting for compatibility with the latest updates to xorg. It just works.

I think I need to look to the future though. Vulkan is almost mainstream and AMD hardware works really well on Vulkan. Also I can't afford £500+ just for a good GPU. I'm hoping Vega will be much more affordable.

Watch the video Samsai put together that utterly roasts me
28 February 2017 at 8:11 pm UTC Likes: 2

Watching you fail over and over is oddly satisfying hahha.

Mesa now has a shader cache in Mesa-git for r600/radeonsi
23 February 2017 at 4:12 am UTC Likes: 1

It's about time! Much needed, hopefully it has been implemented properly. Looking forward too seeing benchmark comparisons. Not expecting fps gains, but it might help with stuttering and fps dips when compiling shaders that some titles suffer badly with.

I'll be interested to see if UE4 games benefit.

AMD officially announce Ryzen 7 CPUs for launch on March 2nd
22 February 2017 at 4:25 pm UTC Likes: 3

I haven't run an AMD CPU since my X2 3800+.Has to be 10 years ago. Looking forward to seeing benchmarks. But at these prices and good performance I can't imagine not going AMD, and quite possibly all AMD if Vega is a winner.

Serious Sam 3: BFE with the 'Fusion' engine and Vulkan could arrive next month in Beta
20 February 2017 at 6:26 pm UTC

I could never play Serious Sam 3 in opengl in the past. The performance was just too poor. So with Vulkan support I might finally be able to enjoy the game.