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Gaming - War is Over - View Post

fatslob-:O on 01 October 2017
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caffeinade said:

The S3TC is set to expire on the 2nd of October, joining MP3.
This is pretty big news for Linux as it should allow greater compatibility when using WINE and such.

Sure there are newer and better texture compression algorithms (that already work fully on Linux) such as ASTC.

Specifically it is open source drivers such as mesa drivers that benefits most ... 

And finally we can have new players that can support modern Direct3D and Apple could move on to support S3TC instead of PVRTC1/2 for their iPhone GPUs ... (soon we'll see Adreno on Windows)

caffeinade said:

Side note: the Switch supports ASTC on a chip level, and advantage it has over the older PS4 and XOne.

And just look at the test results shown by Nvidia.
bpp stands for Bits Per Pixel.

Not really, PS4/X1 has comparable texture compression algorithms to match ASTC in quality such as BC5/6H/7 ... (the only advantage with ASTC is that it's far more scalable to lower qualities but that's moot when it's expected of home consoles to have the highest quality texture compression) 

I'd say Switch supporting D3D12 feature level 12_1 and doube rate FP16 is more interesting than ASTC. Switch has support for overestimate conservative rasterization but the vast majority of the use cases are hardly performant considering Nvidia HFTS used in games will make the framerate tank so that kills a the enthusiam a little bit. Switch supporting raster order views is optimal for transparent and volumetric rendering. Double rate FP16 is good stuff for increasing performance on Switch ... 

caffeinade said:

S3TC and MP3 alone would not be enough to warrant a "War is Over" title.

But I think with the adoption of Vulkan, Valve's work behind the scenes, AMD's increased support... ect.

Linux is day by day becoming a more viable ecosystem.
Someday soon we can all leave Microsoft behind for greener pastures freedom.

Linux could become viable for common use case but it'll never match Windows in gaming and I bet AMD wants it that way too since Microsoft keeps throwing a bone for them known as Direct3D updates ... (D3D12 does so much more for AMD than Vulkan does so far and it's far more advanced too, I actually sort of lamented that Star Citizen wasn't going to support DX12 since it's lost opportunity to show the true advantages of being built around WDDM 2.X/shader model 6.1+)