Vulkan

It also lets adaptive sync or variable refresh rate work better, too.

Of course, graphics drivers, VKD3D, and others also need to implement the relevant Vulkan extension.

But I'm sure it won't be long, or it might already be there in Mesa drivers, uh, because this protocol was introduced at the end of 2024, and for example, Gnome already supports it.

Now, that's good stuff.

And interestingly, it's actually running Windows software using Wine or Proton.

They pass the rendered frames from the game to that Windows executable.

Then it applies DLSS 5 to those frames, and it passes these updated frames back to the Vulkan chain for drawing them on screen.

Now, of course, you have a Linux graphical user interface to configure all the little sliders and to get a result you like or that you find the most horrific.

This is where it gets complicated.

So Melon DS, when I tested it way back when, was before they added Vulkan, before custom drivers, all of that.

There is maybe a scenario where Vulkan comes out ahead here for Melon DS, but I don't know.

now it's called water watermelon ds that's what everybody uses so we'll have to see how that goes but i have a big doubt that watermelon ds will run well here that leaves you with two options drastic again still or seedless ds which is drastic but in the watermelon ds ui so There is complications here.

This is why I don't like this is because it complicates things.

Never a space to lag behind.

NVIDIA has dropped update six hundred and fifteen point seven one point zero nine for their Linux driver, offering powerful improvements, especially around the Vulkan API.

It means richer graphics, more reliable pipelines, and greater stability for users pushing the envelope in gaming, research, visualization, and machine learning.

For folks working on AI image generators or complex simulations, this continues to make Linux desktops not only viable but truly cutting edge.

But it also seems like many other vendors are kind of missing out on that opportunity.

An interesting curve ball here is that NVIDIA makes up about half of the PRs for the Vulkan backend.

And the Vulkan backend is a cross-platform API that supports different operating systems, GPUs and CPUs.

And this is an example of a PR made by an NVIDIA affiliate for the Vulkan backend.

indicating that it is changing files related to supporting Vulkan, but the specific addition is for performance gains specifically when using NVIDIA chips.

So naively, it may be that this particular contributor happens to be a Vulkan expert working at NVIDIA, but the more gloomy guess is that NVIDIA can capture the open backend to one that favors their hardware.

I also wanted to briefly talk about Hugging Face.

So people who use models locally, they don't just download the base models.

I wish it was that.

So Vulkan is a piece of rendering tech.

If you are aware of something called DirectX on Windows, what DirectX is, is it's a library, a set of technologies that Microsoft provides that lets your GPU interface with various applications and games and then display those things on your screen.

Vulkan is something that is more so used on the Mac OS and Linux side.

And if I had to guess...

The reason they're moving to Vulkan is because of a number of changes coming down Apple's pipeline in the next year with OpenGL and Intel binaries.

That would be my guess on that.

Well, it looks like we're going to get a blog post this week, probably tomorrow.

Because if it don't, dude, like when I got to start looking at Wikipedia and like, oh, no, you need to set up a disable async compute shaders.

But only if you're using Vulkan and get this mod.

No. Yeah.

I want to play the game.

And...

But these games, they're just going to run native.

This thing's running Vulkan.

It's doing its thing, you know.

Fudo and Whisper.cpp don't use either of them.

They run on GPU via OpenCL or Vulkan Compute.

That's portable, it works on almost anything, but it's not optimized for the NPU's systolic array.

So you could have the same model

on the same chip.

And if someone did the integration work to run it through QNN instead of Vulkan, it'd be two to three times faster.

Easily.

But nobody's done that integration for a keyboard.

And, uh, when I see people, uh, on various website saying that we need to reach 100%, I disagree because they are really corner cases that, that ra- rarely happens in real life.

I think as a sort of similar comparison point to that, um, GPU drivers and Vulkan conformance.

Hmm.

A lot of drivers that people rely on don't necessarily have 100% conformance because there are some real weird...

Vul- I don't r- remember how many tests Vulkan has.

It's some stupid number.

Or, like, um, browser web test conformance.

So with everything moving forward with the developments in Proton, It's a game where you can run AAA games on Linux, and it wasn't that long ago that it would be almost impossible to run some of this stuff.

But because of Vulkan and plus a Proton, Vulkan is an emulation layer for... for those programs too it helps with the drivers and stuff so not getting into much detail but nubar takes all that those in the package and it's uh it's a great project and i think i uh will just let that be the end of that because you know i'm a fan boy as you can tell

yeah absolutely So we've had a segment for new users to Linux and how to get into the adoption of Linux.

And we've had a segment specifically for gamers.