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by Crabber 1480 days ago
The vendors are the GPU manufacturers. And both AMD and Nvidia offer full support for OpenGL and Vulkan.

There is no reason why I should have to use a different APIs to access the exact same graphics hardware depending on whether I'm running Windows, Linux or MacOS.

OpenGL and Vulkan work just fine.

2 comments

> And both AMD and Nvidia offer full support for OpenGL and Vulkan

With big fat asterisks for the AMD OpenGL drivers on Windows :-P.

Just recently i read about someone trying Zinc (the OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation) on AMD hardware under Windows is actually faster than AMD's own drivers (which is on line with what i've observed with my own code between AMD on Windows with AMD's drivers and AMD on Linux with Mesa with the latter being way faster than the former).

You should try out DXVK on Windows; it's usually as fast, if not faster.
I used it to bypass some issues with D3D9 games that AMD's newer drivers had (apparently it isn't OpenGL that takes the short stick anymore, it is just that OpenGL's stick happens to be the shortest :-P). I didn't notice any performance difference.

Regardless, i've switched back to Linux ever since i could run most of my games without needing Steam and Proton (wine-staging with DXVK and VKD3D-Proton - which works on regular Wine too - seems to work perfectly fine).

Gaming on Linux has been a complete joy. Some games do run worse (e.g. No Man's Sky takes a long time to procgen textures), but others run significantly better (10-15% uplift in AOE IV). If a game doesn't work on Linux then I simply don't play it.

My only gripe is VRR under Gnome. I might try Sway out again.

For various levels of just fine, and cranky tooling.

It only took 20 years to have RenderDoc catch up to PIX, and still nothing comparable to DirectXTK or MetalKit in sight.

And in regards to game consoles even worse.