Valve is sponsoring Collabora’s early experimental work to port the open-source Mesa RADV Vulkan driver to Windows (relying on AMD’s proprietary kernel driver), with Counter-Strike 2 already running…

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Valve-Sponsors-RADV-Windows

51 points · 8 comments · view on lemmy.world

8 Comments

warmaster@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 5d (5 replies)

Why?

django@discuss.tchncs.de · 8 pts · 5d (4 replies)

An open source Vulkan driver on Windows opens up a number of possibilities: a shared codebase across platforms, easier debugging and experimentation, faster turnaround on fixes, and a path for the community (e.g., game developers) to report problems or contribute improvements that benefit everyone regardless of operating system.

warmaster@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 5d (3 replies)

But what does Valve gain from this?

Also, this is only for AMD on Windows, so... How much of an impact would it make? Why would anyone on Windows voluntarily install this instead of AMD's proprietary drivers?

fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works · 7 pts · 4d (2 replies)

Devs have another incentive to target Vulkan first rather then need something like vk3d

warmaster@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 4d (1 reply)

Unfortunately AMD has very low market penetration, on top of that, the user has to be aware of this Vulkan in Mesa driver for Windows and have the will to install it only to perform likely worse than the widely tested proprietary driver.

If anything, we are looking at a project that will take several years to reap marginal benefits.

I'm still missing the point in all of this, Valve isn't stupid, they are seeing something I don't. I guess I'll have to wait some time and let them show me.

fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 1d

"will likely perform worse" is a maybe. Sharing a popular open source code base could produce a better driver set then, as you said, a proprietary one with limited market penetration.

bright_side_@piefed.world · 5 pts · 5d
cAUzapNEAGLb@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 5d

Neat, i only knew Collabora from their libreOffice/nextCloud integration, but it seems they do much more than that

https://www.collabora.com/about-us/our-work.html