The difference is money. Vulkan is an incredibly terse spec compared to dx12. You’d think that would make it much more consistent to work with, but really, it’s all it can do to keep up with msft and IHVs who pour money into coaxing AAA devs to use dx12. Then, even when the app gets something wrong and causes issues for end users, the IHV just makes a special case in the driver to correct it, because having a big important dx12 title run correctly on their hw is important to sell units.
Meanwhile, the same IHVs barely bother to support anything beyond the basic vulkan requirements, because it doesn’t gain them anything to do more. If a vulkan game experiences issues, IHVs don’t care because it won’t sell well anyway.
That’s true, and I can hardly blame the Linux developers for this problem. It’s just an unfortunate result of the fact most software is written for profit, including most Linux code. GPU vendors support Linux either because if data center support cases or because they sell devices (like the Steam Deck) and make them money.
Microsoft, making their own money, can clean up after these manufacturers where necessary, or at least clean up much better than volunteers can. It’s not like Linux gamers make or break a product launch, they barely make up more than a few percent on the global gaming market.
With the performance of modern Windows executable wrappers, the lack of native Linux support isn’t even a problem. Some games run faster on DXVK than on Windows, amazingly. Linux may not have vendors hot patching badly programmed games, but Proton does a pretty good job in their place. And honestly, publishing proprietary software of any kind on Linux is a massive pain, because so many parts of the Linux ecosystem assume distro maintainers will pin and compile matching versions of system libraries for you.
Yes, and the primary reason any of gaming on Linux is viable (steam deck, proton, etc) is due to Valve dumping money into it. AMD probably didn’t care about the miniscule number of chips they sold to Valve for the deck, valve just wanted a vendor who had the performance, and had decent Linux support.
But Valve is the one eating all the vulkan costs that msft normally eats on the dx side. To be clear, it’s never out of the kindness of their hearts, it’s purely because a msft dominated gaming ecosystem on PC is steam’s biggest weakness. They don’t want steam on windows to reach the point of EGS on the apple store.
The difference is money. Vulkan is an incredibly terse spec compared to dx12. You’d think that would make it much more consistent to work with, but really, it’s all it can do to keep up with msft and IHVs who pour money into coaxing AAA devs to use dx12. Then, even when the app gets something wrong and causes issues for end users, the IHV just makes a special case in the driver to correct it, because having a big important dx12 title run correctly on their hw is important to sell units.
Meanwhile, the same IHVs barely bother to support anything beyond the basic vulkan requirements, because it doesn’t gain them anything to do more. If a vulkan game experiences issues, IHVs don’t care because it won’t sell well anyway.
That’s true, and I can hardly blame the Linux developers for this problem. It’s just an unfortunate result of the fact most software is written for profit, including most Linux code. GPU vendors support Linux either because if data center support cases or because they sell devices (like the Steam Deck) and make them money.
Microsoft, making their own money, can clean up after these manufacturers where necessary, or at least clean up much better than volunteers can. It’s not like Linux gamers make or break a product launch, they barely make up more than a few percent on the global gaming market.
With the performance of modern Windows executable wrappers, the lack of native Linux support isn’t even a problem. Some games run faster on DXVK than on Windows, amazingly. Linux may not have vendors hot patching badly programmed games, but Proton does a pretty good job in their place. And honestly, publishing proprietary software of any kind on Linux is a massive pain, because so many parts of the Linux ecosystem assume distro maintainers will pin and compile matching versions of system libraries for you.
Yes, and the primary reason any of gaming on Linux is viable (steam deck, proton, etc) is due to Valve dumping money into it. AMD probably didn’t care about the miniscule number of chips they sold to Valve for the deck, valve just wanted a vendor who had the performance, and had decent Linux support.
But Valve is the one eating all the vulkan costs that msft normally eats on the dx side. To be clear, it’s never out of the kindness of their hearts, it’s purely because a msft dominated gaming ecosystem on PC is steam’s biggest weakness. They don’t want steam on windows to reach the point of EGS on the apple store.
dxvk async ftw