Comment on What are your technology mispredictions?
tal@lemmy.today 2 weeks agoI 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 2 weeks 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.