> This is a very difficult combination to achieve, and yet that’s exactly what we’ve done for Valve with Mesa3D Turnip, a FOSS Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs.
Look at that. Something Qualcomm should have been doing.
Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS.
It's actually very easy for skilled people to deliver good products when they aren't just tasked with sucking off shareholders. Public trade of companies makes them worse every time.
I don't play games almost ever, but I'm going to buy all the products Valve releases soon, just to support their OSS efforts. They seem to be the only vendor that's opening stuff up, rather than locking it down.
Really cool stuff! Especially nice to see the groundwork being laid for what could become very efficient handhelds, considering how much performance Apple's M-series and Qualcomm's Elite series with relatively few watts. Much better than AMD, Intel or Nvidia.
One nit: it's too bad Valve / Igalia choose to completely ignore the lessons from Bazzite.
Bazzite already runs a scheduler like LAVD, called BORE[0]. It would have saved them a lot of work to extend and improve that rather than invent the wheel again. I'm not sure if Valve and Igalia are unaware of Bazzite and BORE or if this is a case of NIH.
My impression is that Nvidia still leads in power-efficiency when compared node-for-node. The Switch 2 is a miracle beyond anything Apple or AMD ever did with 8nm silicon.
Everyone else is shipping less power-efficient raster hardware unless you're super pedantic about idle draw.
speculating that it might be one of those arm + gpu SoC that gpu makers are currently developing, probably the amd one.
outside of gaming, i hope this work for qualcomm chips help those who bought laptops with their chips somehow. (i understand it is not the same stack but in theory)
The Steam Frame shows a lot of promise in terms of letting people play games on a massive virtual screen. But with the hardware, even more is possible. I hope they are working on a compatibility layer that allows 2D games to be rendered in 3D, like the 3D TV of the 2010s. In my opinion that would be a killer app.
Not sure if this is what you had in mind: Projected 2D views into a 3D "movie screen" environment is a feature of the Frame, per my understanding of their marketing, and of early reviewers' experiences.
If you meant, "do they take 2D render frames from videogames and convert them into pseudo-3d or actual 3d where the user can tilt their head to see a different view INTO the 2D game's universe, e.g. see behind bushes just by tilting head", then "no".
The Winlator-releated ecosystem already works pretty well, there just isn't a good frontend or integration for it yet. That's what is really exciting here.
Gamehub is a proprietary app by a Chinese controller manufacturer with some suspicious behavior and several LGPL violations that unfortunately works much better then the alternatives. Funnily enough their CDN endpoint is called "bigeyes", which when researching a bit was apparently their (failed) effort to bring x86 VR to ARM almost 10 years ago. Some people have "debloated" the app, but it seems very amateur hour to me and the process isn't very transparent (the GitHub repo is just a readme)
There's also GameNative, which seems promising, but is very buggy.
And Winlator itself, which is a mess of tons of tunables and different forks that I really don't have the patience for when PC handhelds exist today and have a much better ecosystem.
Considering all this work is open-source, could some third party make a Qualcomm Snapdragon based handheld console, if Valve decides not to make a Steam Deck Mini?
I really loved the idea of the Steam Deck, but I'd prefer to play something that's more like the size of a PSP or a Switch Lite at most.
Some powerful retro handhelds support Linux loading, such as: Retroid Pocket 5, Mini, and Flip 2 on the five-year-old SD865, and more recently, Ayn Odin 2 (original, Mini, and Portal) on the three-year-old SD8 Gen 2 (which is one version lower than the SoC in Steam Frame (SD8 Gen 3)).
So if we get a native arm version of Steam and Proton ARM64EC, we will essentially already have mini Steam Deck(s), and since you want something similar to a PSP, you can check out the Ayn Odin 2 Mini, it's similar to the PS Vita, but I'm not sure if it's still available for sale, or you can order the Retroid Pocket 6 (available in a few months), which has the same chip, but a better screen and is also small in size.
> “If you love video games, like I do, working on FEX with Valve is a dream come true,” said Paulo Matos, an engineer with Igalia’s Compilers Team
Life is great sometimes. Particularly when your nerd hobbies like contributing to open source connects you with important industries so you get justly rewarded
the Qualcomm Adreno 750 GPU is a Snapdragon Gen 3 device. This is basically an android device.
I wonder why Valve is maintaining a separate linux and driver fork for this. Snapdragon Gen 3 android game SDK works very well...including Windows emulation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hsQ_-8HV6g
not saying what Valve is doing is not spectacular. But i cant help but wonder if it isnt a more productive use of their resources to mainline this in Android ?
Maybe even accelerate the Desktop Android merge (which Qualcomm is pushing ! https://www.theverge.com/news/784381/qualcomm-ceo-seen-googl...)
Android that is Valve compatible will further Valve's goals of open platforms than maintaining their own fork.
"much of our work extends back through years of Snapdragon hardware, and we regression test it to make sure it stays Vulkan conformant"
would have been nice to hear of a specific device that now has Vulcan support
id be curious what the ballpark cost and time frame of the work was
im honestly surprised the technical expertise to do it (without qualcomms help) is even out there bc this is a space that has notoriously slow development relative to user interest
31 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 62.1 ms ] threadLook at that. Something Qualcomm should have been doing.
Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS.
Everytime their name pops up it's inevitably "oh some thankless extremely technical low level work leading to impressive/long-awaited features"
One nit: it's too bad Valve / Igalia choose to completely ignore the lessons from Bazzite.
Bazzite already runs a scheduler like LAVD, called BORE[0]. It would have saved them a lot of work to extend and improve that rather than invent the wheel again. I'm not sure if Valve and Igalia are unaware of Bazzite and BORE or if this is a case of NIH.
[0]https://github.com/firelzrd/bore-scheduler
Also bazzite uses LAVD by default for steam deck hardware https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/bazzite-buzz-18/379...
My impression is that Nvidia still leads in power-efficiency when compared node-for-node. The Switch 2 is a miracle beyond anything Apple or AMD ever did with 8nm silicon.
Everyone else is shipping less power-efficient raster hardware unless you're super pedantic about idle draw.
This is gonna be fantastic.
outside of gaming, i hope this work for qualcomm chips help those who bought laptops with their chips somehow. (i understand it is not the same stack but in theory)
If you meant, "do they take 2D render frames from videogames and convert them into pseudo-3d or actual 3d where the user can tilt their head to see a different view INTO the 2D game's universe, e.g. see behind bushes just by tilting head", then "no".
Gamehub is a proprietary app by a Chinese controller manufacturer with some suspicious behavior and several LGPL violations that unfortunately works much better then the alternatives. Funnily enough their CDN endpoint is called "bigeyes", which when researching a bit was apparently their (failed) effort to bring x86 VR to ARM almost 10 years ago. Some people have "debloated" the app, but it seems very amateur hour to me and the process isn't very transparent (the GitHub repo is just a readme)
There's also GameNative, which seems promising, but is very buggy.
And Winlator itself, which is a mess of tons of tunables and different forks that I really don't have the patience for when PC handhelds exist today and have a much better ecosystem.
I really loved the idea of the Steam Deck, but I'd prefer to play something that's more like the size of a PSP or a Switch Lite at most.
So if we get a native arm version of Steam and Proton ARM64EC, we will essentially already have mini Steam Deck(s), and since you want something similar to a PSP, you can check out the Ayn Odin 2 Mini, it's similar to the PS Vita, but I'm not sure if it's still available for sale, or you can order the Retroid Pocket 6 (available in a few months), which has the same chip, but a better screen and is also small in size.
Life is great sometimes. Particularly when your nerd hobbies like contributing to open source connects you with important industries so you get justly rewarded
I wonder why Valve is maintaining a separate linux and driver fork for this. Snapdragon Gen 3 android game SDK works very well...including Windows emulation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hsQ_-8HV6g
not saying what Valve is doing is not spectacular. But i cant help but wonder if it isnt a more productive use of their resources to mainline this in Android ? Maybe even accelerate the Desktop Android merge (which Qualcomm is pushing ! https://www.theverge.com/news/784381/qualcomm-ceo-seen-googl...)
Android that is Valve compatible will further Valve's goals of open platforms than maintaining their own fork.
would have been nice to hear of a specific device that now has Vulcan support
id be curious what the ballpark cost and time frame of the work was
im honestly surprised the technical expertise to do it (without qualcomms help) is even out there bc this is a space that has notoriously slow development relative to user interest
I want to move away from Windows completely also for my gaming hobby but cant yet fully.
I also want to ravage Nintendo monopoly and unwillingness to let me play old games they no longer want to support AND dont want to let me play.
I rly rly hope Valve will make it and we can ditch those companies with shady practices.