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Graphics Intel Hardware Linux

Valve Developed an Open-Source Intel Vulkan GPU Driver For Linux 52

Posted by timothy from the good-news-for-a-change dept.
An anonymous reader writes For those wondering when the first graphics driver for the new Khronos Vulkan API will materialize and for what hardware, it looks like the first driver could very well be for Intel graphics and it might not be too far away. It turns out Valve developed an Intel Linux Vulkan driver to help ISVs bootstrap their new Vulkan code, with Valve planning to open-source this driver code. This is yet another reason to love Valve, especially as Intel graphics on Linux don't even support OpenGL 4 yet.
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Valve Developed an Open-Source Intel Vulkan GPU Driver For Linux More

Valve Developed an Open-Source Intel Vulkan GPU Driver For Linux

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  • And we have a winner (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CajunArson ( 465943 ) on Thursday March 05, 2015 @02:43PM (#49190545) Journal

    Valve has officially won the Internet for like... at least a week.

  • Names as Spock tribute ? (Score:3)

    by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Thursday March 05, 2015 @02:43PM (#49190549) Homepage

    Is it named as a tribute to the late Leonard Nimoy ?

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      No. It was decided way back, but the project name was publicly announced after he die. They know something we don't. I find that highly suspicious.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'd like to think so, but the fact that it comes from the "Khronos Group" which is a slant on the Klingon homeworld, it seems they were at least already in the Trek vein for their naming scheme.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      No.

      a) Spelled differently
      b) Leonard Nimoy died a few days ago, this has been in the pipeline for months.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Misagon ( 1135 )

      There has been some speculation that the name would have something to do with AMD. AMD has their own low(er)-level graphics API called Mantle, referring to the Earth's mantle. Vulkan is the work for volcano in some languages, and a volcano spews out magma from Earth's innards.

      When Vulkan became public, AMD announced right then that they are stopping development on Mantle to focus on Vulkan.
      It has been speculated that spurring the creation of Vulkan and the low-level API in DirectX 12 would have been AMDs in

  • Easier to support than OpenGL 4.x (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Blaskowicz ( 634489 ) on Thursday March 05, 2015 @03:16PM (#49190817)

    This comes out as a very good point for using Vulkan (which I thought would be called something like OpenGL 5.0, but well)

    It's a nice suprise, though the downside may be the need for recent hardware. Article leaves out the minimum hardware feature level : is it restricted to Haswell and up? (that's the plan for DirectX 12). What is the status for Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and even Bay Trail Atom graphics : that is pretty important given the installed base.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      My guess is that they didn't call it OpenGL 5.x because they wanted to totally break backwards compatibility and didn't want anyone to get confused.

    • It's a nice suprise, though the downside may be the need for recent hardware. Article leaves out the minimum hardware feature level

      The official Vulkan page [khronos.org] says that it will work on any platform that supports at least OpenGL ES 3.1. Of course another question is whether a Vulkan stack will actually be created for older hardware too.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mczak ( 575986 )
      If it runs on Haswell, it should on Ivy Bridge and Bay Trail Atoms as well. Bay Trail Atoms and Ivy Bridge are of the same graphics generation (gen7), and Haswell is just minimally different (gen 7.5) sharing nearly all driver code. Sandy Bridge is definitely different, though since khronos is saying everything supporting GLES 3.1 and up should be able to support it (meaning even things such as geometry shaders have to be optional), I guess it should be good enough. I am not convinced though anyone is going
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Neat, where's HL3? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RyuuzakiTetsuya ( 195424 ) <taiki.cox@net> on Thursday March 05, 2015 @04:30PM (#49191297)

    I wouldn't be making this comment if the OP didn't mention loving Valve. I think it's absolutely lovely that Valve has done this, but I kinda hate Valve.

    Valve seems to have problems internally that's lead me to believe that it's not worth hanging hopes that they'll usher in a true golden age era of PC gaming.

    First, there seems to be some bizarre drama going on inside of Valve, as evidenced here [tomshardware.com]. The flat structure isn't as idyllic as once thought.

    Then there's problems inside of their online market place. Shit just doesn't work. [youtube.com] Valve doing a bad job policing Greenlight. [reddit.com] I'm not even going to bring up Hatred.

    And of course, where the bloody hell is Half Life 3? Or the steambox? Or a stable release ready version of steamOS?

    Valve can't be all things to all people and try to spread itself as thin as possible. It winds up doing nothing well and it's all starting to fall apart. I just hope they let us know what happened to Barney Calhoun before the company shits the bed.

    • Re:Neat, where's HL3? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by spire3661 ( 1038968 ) on Thursday March 05, 2015 @05:30PM (#49191713) Journal
      I wish people understood how cheaply Valve is doing all this. They are building a gravity well, a potential, not a single machine. Sony and MS spent orders of magnitude more money to get where Valve is in the console process. WE are seeing a console built from the ground up, using what we have lying around. MS spent more money on their controller than Valve has spent on the entire SteamOS project.

      • What I've seen for the last 10 years of watching Valve is seeing a company with seemingly no care about release dates [valvesoftware.com]. We all want to have a good laugh at Peter Molyneux for over promising and under delivering... but he delivers on time.

        Valve isn't being serious about running their business. It's like children are running the company and they occasionally put something out.

        • You are so wrong it hurts. Look at DOTA 2. Its a monster of epic proportions... Valve just solved the mouse/controller schism problem. They are going ot let you pipe your PC to your TV for $50 per screen.....They are way more serious then you imagine.

          • YAMOBA 2 is out. After they bought it from another developer.

            Neat hardware projects are coming out ... with no actual release date. Also one of those things is basically a wireless HDMI cable. Which has been long solved.

            I'm just kinda done with Valve.

          • Huh?
            It will start costing money?

      • WTF are you smoking?

        They're selling custom made PCs as a console, the didn't do jack shit other than design a controller to go with it, and the controller looks kind of lame too.

        Didn't write the OS

        They have essentially 1 title the make as far as games go, and then they sell some mods other people built for it.

        So basically, you think that piggy backing on the work of Microsoft, Sony, AMD, Intel, nVidia, and all the other game developers and the groundwork laid by all these people ... that Valve is doing it a

        • No, hardware vendors are selling machines, not Valve. Or you can make your own. This is what im talking about, the Steam Box is an IDEA, not a singular machine or design. Its a way of using what you have to make your own, or buy a fully formed dedicated box. Its an alternative and wont fit into any one pre-existing container currently on the market. Its a console built from the ground up organically, not empirically from the top down. I have a good/better/best Steam Machine setup since the concept was first
      • But that's the thing though. They aren't doing it. All Valve has to show for their lofty efforts is a showcase of vaporware and a bunch of pie-in-the-sky internet articles.

    • And of course, where the bloody hell is Half Life 3? Or the steambox? Or a stable release ready version of steamOS?

      No news on HL3 (and that's actually kinda a fact a lot of people miss: no news. They've never announced they've been working on it at all, all the expectation is fan hype, not DNF-style vaporware... which, as a Half-Life fan, is annoying, true). As far as the Steambox goes, well, they've got a release data [steampowered.com]. SteamOS they've been working on with fairly regular patches, apparently, and I'd assume the November date holds for that too. As far as the internal drama goes: that was almost two years ago, by a fired

      • They DID announce HL2 Ep 3 for Christmas of 2007.

        Which well at this point, they might as well just release HL3.

        Peter Molyneux's problem is that he over promises and under delivers. Valve's problem is that they over promise and sometimes never deliver.

        As far as the Steam Machine thing goes, I didn't notice the Steam Machines are actually showing a release. Which, good on them.

        As far as Valve's internal drama, It's not just Jeri Ellsworth. [glassdoor.com]

        If they get their shit together and start releasing things, I'll cut th

    • > Or the steambox? Or a stable release ready version of steamOS?

      Here you go, just as you asked for!

      http://arstechnica.com/gaming/... [arstechnica.com]

      Did you do that on purpose? ;)

      • Did you do that on purpose? ;)

        Yes, because you're making the point for him.

        You linked to a story about things that can't actually be bought. Its got pictures of prototypes, but you can't go BUY a SteamBox or a Steam controller can you?

        You can not actually buy anything in that article, nothing. The article is little more than a press release for Valve.

      • No product, no credit.

        With Valve, I'll believe it when it launches, and even then I'm skeptical it'll run.

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