CalcProgrammer1

joined 3 years ago
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[–] CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (8 children)

What are you running it on? I haven't touched Apex in a while but last time I tried on Linux it was playable (this was probably on my Intel Arc A770). I've played BeamNG on my Steam Deck (AMD GPU) and it runs decently too.

[–] CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Did you wait at all? Slow performance when you first open a game is sort of normal because of shader compilation. It's a side effect of the translation layer used to run Direct3D games on Vulkan. Once shaders are all compiled the slowdown should go away.

[–] CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The key thing to note about NVIDIA "open sourcing their driver" is that they only open sourced the kernel portion. I see no intention of opening the userspace portion. GPU drivers have multiple parts. The kernel driver is the low level interface that passes data to and from the hardware while the userspace is what actually handles converting OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, CUDA, etc. calls into GPU commands and that part is where most of the performance impact happens. NVIDIA is not open sourcing the userspace.

That's why NVK/Nouveau are so important, because it is a fully open stack. It is also part of the Mesa project which encompasses all the open GPU drivers on Linux which makes it more integrated with the Linux graphics stack.

[–] CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

On AMD there is a pro driver that I think is proprietary but nobody uses it for desktop usage or gaming. You might use it if you were doing GPU compute servers on professional cards, but the open source radv driver has the best gaming performance for AMD.

On NVIDIA there is the proprietary driver that consists of out-of-tree module (both open and closed source variants depending on what GPU generation) and the proprietary userspace OpenGL/Vulkan/CUDA driver. Completely separately you have the open source Nouveau kernel and OpenGL driver and NVK Vulkan driver. The proprietary one has better performance in most cases but is broken for Overwatch 2 while NVK runs OW2 smoothly at low settings for me, and that's my most played game.

And yeah, I am the creator of OpenRGB. Thanks!

[–] CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Not really a fan of putting secure boot on. The only purpose that serves is locking the customers out of their purchased hardware. Raspberry Pi is clearly not targeting the maker market with those changes, they want that corporate money and are willing to stick the finger to hackers and makers in the process. Can't make custom firmware if you can't boot it.

[–] CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml 69 points 3 months ago (28 children)

AMD. Not even a question, really. AMD has by far the best drivers. Intel is in a reasonable second place in that they at least have open source drivers and those drivers work well, but due to their newness in the discrete GPU space I still occasionally see issues on my A770. It is solidly usable for the most part though. NVIDIA? Dead freakin last. Their proprietary driver is a mess to install and only recently is able to render anything without screen tearing and unplayable flicker. The situation is improving though thanks to NVK, an awesome third-party, reverse engineered, open source driver that is seeing rapid improvement. I can play Overwatch at 165fps on my RTX3070 laptop finally, but only at lowest settings and 50% resolution scaling (it can do the same at ultra on Windows at 100%). I am very confident we'll see NVK improve performance though.

[–] CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 months ago

RISC-V support is nice. I like the idea of being able to work as both an ARM and a RISC-V microcontroller while sharing the same array of peripherals.

[–] CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml 16 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml 14 points 3 months ago

Maybe this explains why my webcam indicator is on when no applications are using it. It's been confusing me for a while now. I've double checked anything that I expect to access it is not, and it doesn't seem to be locked because opening it works, but it sometimes boots up woth the light on. I am using Arch with pipewire so I'll check and see if this is what's going on.

[–] CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml 21 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Ugh, I got a fair return from buying to AMD right before Ryzen came out. I sold some of it and bought multiple different chip companies so now I have some AMD, some Intel, some NVDA. Oh well, it's not a huge amount but still sucks. I hope they can come back if only because AMD needs competition to keep them from becoming the evil that old Intel was. I was hoping Intel would also be a viable third GPU competitor, I like my Arc A770 for the price and I'm hoping they don't kill off the GPU division.

[–] CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago

I second this, second disk is best as you can keep your old Windows drive in case you ever need to go back for any reason. Modern UEFI makes dual booting way easier than it used to be as the UEFI itself provides a boot menu so you don't need to fiddle with dual booting using a bootloader like GRUB.

[–] CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml 17 points 3 months ago

Linux works well on supported ARM platforms, but the problem is that a lot of ARM platforms aren't supported. I recently got a Xiaomi Pad 5 Pro (had to import it as it's a China-only model) and put postmarketOS on it. The experience is surprisingly good. Paired with a Bluetooth keyboard/touchpad, it is basically as functional as a normal light-duty Linux laptop except for the lack of x86 support, which mostly just means no gaming. I have been attempting to run Steam via box64 and FEX, but pmOS isn't a supported distro for that so I have been trying in a Docker container and in Distrobox. I managed to get it started but it crashes due to steamwebhelper, and I think it's a dependency or configuration issue. Otherwise, for browsing, coding, videos, terminal use, office, etc. it's great and the battery life is amazing compared to my laptop. This is on a Snapdragon 870. Open source games run and they can hit 120fps on the 120Hz screen. I hope to see ARM support continue to improve, but I am worried about bootloader locks on these new ARM Windows machines.

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