• 0 Posts
  • 7 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 16th, 2023
  • heartsofwar@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml•It pains me to no end but I'm back on Windows :(
    3·
    6 months ago

    A few nuggets of advice if you decide to try Linux again:

    1. You can not just buy any laptop, computer, or peripheral device and expect it will just work

    Linux has all drivers embedded in the kernel and it can take anywhere from 3-8 months for bleeding edge distributions to catch-up and include driver support for the latest / one-off hardware. Other non-bleeding edge distributions such as Debian could take years…

    1. Depending on the vendor GPU, your mileage will vary with screen tearing / multi-monitor / Wayland / battery life / performance and support

     

    1. Unless you’re running Gentoo Linux or Arch, building from source (ie. unable to install from a package of some kind) is highly unusual and not recommended

    To be quite honest, as someone that has 25+ years of Linux experience, I’d be interested in knowing what you couldn’t find… We might be able to help you find it.

    1. If you want video acceleration for improved speed, DRM to watch Netflix or other streaming services, or zero / reduced screen tearing and you plan to run Firefox, you are in for a world of hurt…

    Firefox is the browser of choice on Linux but sometimes Google Chrome is still a necessary evil. It took Mozilla over a year to give users the choice on whether they would want unsupported DRM streaming via Widevine.

    1. There are other Desktop Environments

    I prefer GNOME 3.x but sometimes what works is preferable, and if KDE / Cinnamon / MATE / LXDE, etc work for you… more power to you; but this also means taking the time and making the effort to try them.

  • heartsofwar@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml•OpenDX: An Open Source DirectX implementation for Linux, providing native support for DirectX-based applications and games!
    1·
    7 months ago

    Nvidia’s OGL driver is a driver. Mesa’s radv backend is a driver. Nouveau, the open source Nvidia meds backend is a driver. An opengl implementation does a driver make.

    No, a driver is kernel code that interfaces with hardware; Mesa’s RADV implements Vulkan and RadeonSI implements OpenGL but both sit at the user level and get called by AMDGPU (the driver in the kernel). Above the kernel at user level is simply software…

    Nouveau is a driver, yes… but it is in the kernel and calls into Mesa as well…

    What GPU did Microsoft’s driver target? Or are you referring to a software implementation?

    You seem to be confused that Microsoft needed to develop a GPU before implementing a version of their own OpenGL… this is flawed for a couple reasons that I’ve already outlined:

    1. when OpenGL was designed, GPUs didn’t exist. Video cards existed, but a video card != GPU
    2. OpenGLs original purpose was to be a 3D CAD (Computer Aided Design) graphics API …
    3. If you’ve ever used MS Windows before Windows 95 or even Windows 95 before Direct X was released, you’d know… MS shipped their own opengl32.dll with Windows

    You literally said that Mantle was inspired by DX12, which is false. You can try to pivot to regurgitating more Mantle history, but I’m just saying…

    AMD Mantle was inspired by Direct X 12… it was inspired by all of Direct X and the current next gen in development at the time which was Direct X 12.

    take it from someone who literally wrote them for a living

    For someone of your calibre, I’d expect a better understanding of what a driver is then. “above the metal” or more commonly “bare metal” should give that first clue. implementation of OpenGL a graphics library != driver…

    I will refrain from posting any further… this is going no where…

  • heartsofwar@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml•OpenDX: An Open Source DirectX implementation for Linux, providing native support for DirectX-based applications and games!
    1·
    7 months ago

    Nvidia ships their own opengl implementation with their drivers, because that’s what a driver is.

    Including OpenGL does not a driver make… ie. Nvidia doesn’t have to ship their own implementation of OpenGL. They could do what AMD does on Linux and rely on the openGL upstream implementation from Mesa; however, they choose not to do so because of the reasons I outlined among others.

    Microsoft doesn’t ship “opengl binaries”, they don’t have any hardware.

    There was a time they did, yes, before Direct X existed

    Maybe you mean they published their own fork of the ogl spec before giving up and making DX? That may be true.

    No, they made their own contributions to the spec to improve Windows game performance, but didn’t publish their own spec; however they did implement the upstream spec with their contributions and ship them integrated into Windows. This was practically over with by 1995 when Direct X was introduced, so a very long time ago

    Mantle predates DX12, both vulkan and dx12 took inspiration from it, not the other way around.

    Yes and No… DirectX 3D was always low-level; its why DirectX (among being a one-stop shop) worked so well for XBox, etc. So, AMD got the idea for Mantle from MS Direct X and when AMD met with Khronos to spin off Vulkan, MS took notice that their implementation was not as low-level as Direct X 11 and they actually made Direct X 12 less low-level dependent.

    Ex. Nvidia’s dx9 driver is equally “low level” as their DX12 driver

    No its not, see above… Direct X 9 is actually much lower level than 12; however, Direct X 12 has many more requirements for certain tech that games today see as necessary that Direct X 9 didn’t

    dx12 and vulkan give finer control over the hardware vs dx9 and ogl.

    yes and no… depends on the particular portion of the spec you are talking about. For example, Direct X 9 had much more lower leve control of the CPU, but as time moved on and less CPU reliance became a thing, DirectX 12 has less control of the CPU but more control of the GPU.

  • heartsofwar@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml•OpenDX: An Open Source DirectX implementation for Linux, providing native support for DirectX-based applications and games!
    21·
    7 months ago

    ^ this is the key

    There were two major problems with OpenGL:

    • It was originally designed and intended as a professional software (high-level) 3D CAD API; not gaming
    • Extensive changes to the API were constantly being submitted by different vendors (AMD (ATI), Nvidia, Microsoft, etc) to enhance its performance on their respective hardware in their respective situations.

    This meant that almost every API change that was submitted by any one vendor was immediately scrutinized as whether it was for gaming or 3D CAD, and usually disliked for adding bloat that the other vendors didn’t need or worse causing hardware conflicts which often lead to degradation in performance for the other vendors.

    This is exactly why Nvidia bundles their own version of OpenGL with their drivers; they can make the changes immediately and release to see the impact of the API changes without approval and if it does well-enough then submit. At the end of the day though, some submissions are accepted and others are not which means Nvidia then has to maintain the changes on their own… so there is benefit to getting the API changes accepted.

    Microsoft actually blazed the path that Nvidia took; Windows use to (might still… not sure) ship with its own version of OpenGL binaries, but they disliked having to maintain the changes and fight for acceptance enough that they decided to eventually develop DirectX (among other desires to access input and audio, etc).

    DirectX 3D and Vulkan (based on AMD’s Mantle which was inspired by DirectX 12 3D) do not have these issues because both are low-level APIs which means that most of the code that would be specific to the GPU or AMD (ATI), Nvidia, etc is not hard-coded like OpenGL on the driver side… it is done by the application.