Comment on What are your technology mispredictions?
Broadfern@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I thought Apple/most smartphones would never move to USB-C, or away from proprietary chargers. Pleasantly surprised - thank you EU.
I thought wireless controllers were going to be a fad, or at least garbage in their reliability/connection strength.
I thought VR was finally going to take off as the next major gaming experience when the Vive came out. Unfortunately it remains niche.
I thought Linux was going to be unusable for gaming/mainstream use cases for much longer, but Valve has made huge strides on that with Proton, and OSS devs making things like Heroic for other stores has been awesome.
I also thought we’d never get another steam controller. Also pleasantly surprised.
tal@lemmy.today 1 week ago
I think another major factor for Linux gaming beyond Valve was a large shift by game developers to using widely-used game engines. A lot of the platform portability work happened at that level, so was spread across many games. Writing games that could run on both personal computers and personal-computer-like consoles with less porting work became a goal. And today, some games also have releases on mobile platforms.
When I started using Linux in the late 1990s, the situation was wildly different on that front.
nightlily@leminal.space 1 week ago
It was more that graphics hardware got a lot more flexible. Less fixed functionality meant that DXVK (DirectX 8-11 to Vulkan translation layer) was a lot more viable as you were able to emulate old behaviour on the GPU through Vulkan.
Graphics APIs are a lot more „thinner“ these days as well. Creating a Vulkan renderer from scratch is like „first one must enumerate the universe“. But it means that DX12<->Vulkan translation is relatively straightforward, and all the crazy stuff is done in shaders which can be recompiled for different APIs.