Comment on SteamOS expands beyond Steam Deck
Fizz@lemmy.nz 2 days agoAt the time of the steam machine wine was not in a good state (from what i’ve heard, I wasnt a linux user at the time) and gaming relied on Valve getting devs to port things to SteamOS 2.
Nibodhika@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Wine was in a great state, it just wasn’t integrated on Steam so it was clunky to get it working. Long story short Steam Machines only had a handful of games available (those with native binaries) unless you jumped through hoops to install steam on wine and launch steam from steam or something of the sort.
At the time we thought that the steam machines would make devs port their games, but that didn’t happen, so Valve invested heavily on Wine to make the games come to Linux regardless of the game devs. If Valve hadn’t invested most games that run today would still run, wine has always been an amazing piece of technology, their investment was mostly on a library called dxvk which translates directX calls to Vulkan instead of OpenGL, for technical reasons this was needed for any game that only supports DX12, but also gave some performance boost to other titles. I’m not trying to downplay Valve’s hand, dxvk was a much needed piece of the puzzle that Valve singlehandedly financed, not to mention all of the other stuff they’ve done that benefitted Linux gamers over the years, but if they had integrated wine on Steam without dxvk 99% of cases would be mostly the same (but that 1% are heavy hitters).
frozen@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 1 day ago
99% accurate, but to clarify, dxvk only translates DirectX versions 8-11 to Vulkan. vkd3d translates DX12 games.