Fuck you AMD for being too lazy to implement VK_EXT_fragment_shader_interlock even though your hardware supports it [1]

It's literally *the* best way to implement any sort of order independent transparency ( https://web.archive.org/web/... )

But noo, not enough people are using it so too bad. Now you just have to render transparent objects all fucked up and bad looking on AMD hardware because "we don't feel like it"

[1] https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/...

that's awfully specific 🤔

@kobenz It is! I wanna use the damn vulkan extension for my game engine but it's only supported on intel and nvidia. The guy in the github issue recommends manually rendering the first two alpha layers but that is both slower (you have to render all translucent objects twice) and even then only sorts the two first layers of translucent objects. Everything behind that will looked screwed up

So I remember a while back that NVidia support on Linux was awesome. Then it wasn't. When it wasn't AMD support was awesome. Are we back to AMD support sucking and Nvidia support is awesome on Linux again?

This kind of shit makes me not think Linux can be a good gaming platform.

@Demolishun Funnily enough AMD *does* support the extension on both macOS and linux but not on windows... I don't know man

I was working on a little engine with OpenGL some years ago, it's on hold right now, but I vaguely remember having trouble with transparent objects, and subsequently going out of my way in redesigning the cell and grid structures to make sorting by distance to camera *every frame* to be as fast as I could make it.

This would also build an occluder mask, so meshes were excluded from being drawn along the way, and that would leave me with one ordered batch I could render with very few calls. It was a piece of shit clusterfuck system; it worked flawlessly.

But... you're telling me I DIDN'T have to do that?!!! AGHGHGHGHGHHGHGHG!!

@12bitfloat that is cursed then. But it has support from Direct X? That would be THE platform you would support.

@12bitfloat this just screws any cross platform support in vulkan for AMD. I wonder how Godot solves this issue?

@Demolishun It really sucks because this is by far the best way to implement order independent transparency

Like the guy in the github issue recommends you can also implement this with something called "depth peeling" which I guess most other games do, but it's worse because it's slower, more complex to implement and worse in quality if you are looking through more than two transparent surfaces (which is literally just one hollow transparent object)

@kobenz Their name is 12bitfloat. Of course the stuff is gonna be awfully specific.

@12bitfloat dont get made. Learn C and how to make your own drivers... then they can't control u.

@Demolishun gaming on linux never seems valid to me.

@awesomeest when I running only Linux I found a lot of fun games. However the ones I like to play now are a pain in the ass on Linux. If I could go back to my Windows 7 that never updated I would. A golden era where I learned that if you bought OEM version it never ran updates (or some weird shit). Didn't get updates for 10 years. It was glorious. Shit just worked and I never got "hacked".

@Demolishun if you ever need to cut the balls off of a windows system just let me know... ive been doing it over 2 decades

@Demolishun glorious days. GunZ, Tibia, Need for Speed Underground, Counter Strike 1.6, DotA, Castle of Wolfenstein... Skipping school to hit the lan house. I'd spend a whole afternoon staring at that Win7 screen.

@awesomeest gaming on linux is not any different from windows, if your games are on steam. If they're not, you just install the windows version via steam and add them as non steam games.

I'm currently playing ELDEN RING with that seamless coop mod with my gf. Ubuntu & Windows.

@thebiochemic by you saying it's not any different, im thinking you don't really understand the mechanics behind these processes... and when youre saying 'on steam' youre only ref to the games that play through steam as an emulator, which gets more complex as spec reqs go up.

To be clear, im not talking about the user experience for games thatd be generally low req. Im talking about the games that need to work with the OS and the general efficiency of things like the emulator of steam. These things typically arent noticed by users until it's hit a threshold of crashing or near unplayable... or fucked up shit elsewhere. They, and things with the same variety of catch-all mechanics, tend to use more resources than otherwise necessary.

@awesomeest I just don't think my 1500 mod modlist for Skyrim would play nice with Linux. I have modlists that are in the hundreds of gigabytes that I like to play. They push the machine to cry. Yeah, playing a lightly modded Skyrim would work fine. But I don't ever play a lightly modded Skyrim. Another problem is all the good tooling works well in Windows due to specific Windows features. Like Mod Organizer 2. It creates a fake filesystem using features of NTFS. This allows the entire folder of Skyrim to be virtualized. So you can have as many modding setups as you want (pending disk space). Last I checked this doesn't work in Linux.

@awesomeest i absolutely understand the mechanics behind that stuff and i don't necessarily disagree, but as you also mentioned, i talk about the user experience. And im pretty sure that an average gamer does the same. Either thing work, or thing no work.

And for me thing work.

For context "thing work" refers to VR Games like half life alyx, boneworks, VR Chat and similar. Need for Speed heat, Elden ring as mentioned but also DS1 Remaster and DS3. All the borderlands games (including 3). Fallout 4 with tons of Mods. and more, but you get the point.

if you dont believe me btw, just check out protondb.com

Only big caveat is that proton only supports some anti-cheat variants. which makes games like for example destiny 2 unplayable

@thebiochemic how do you do the modlist for FO4? I use MO2 because of the virtualization, but it also snags a copy of the exec folder. So if FO4 gets updated it doesn't ruin my rig.

@Demolishun i do it the old school way. But luckily for it it works pretty much identical in skyrim and games like Morrowind, where you just slap the files and esps in the appropriate folders and then activate them in the launcher/adjust the config.

i never used mod managers, unless they were builtin (including games like minecraft, probably because i used to mod MC before mod managers even existed). But maybe i need to look into MO2, because that makes helluva lot of sense.

Man now i want to install FO4 again 🤣

@thebiochemic modding to me is a pain the ass these days. Memory dll fixes, patches for this and for that. I use lists from Wabbajack because I don't have time to figure all that shit out. I can plop down a huge modlist, pretested with hundreds of mods in a couple of hours. Doing that much by hand would take months.

Yeah, I downloaded a modlist for FO4 a little while back. I did it before they updated the engine. So if I want to go blasting I can.

If you play again, and hate the starting dialog with Piper at the gate. You can punch her, then put away your hands. They will stop aggroing you and open the gate. Zero dialog with Piper if you want.