Slowly the hold outs are realising open source drivers are here to stay. I don’t think propriety divers are ever going to go away but now you can have a fully open stack for all the main GPU stacks out there. I suspect more designs are insisting on open drivers and Nvidia doesn’t want to be ruled out at the start.
I think its more a case of trying to hold on to the market shares they own. Its been slow and in very very small pieces, but the fact amd has made their ai gpu stuff open source, have semi decent integrated gpus and have open gpu drivers did some things.
On top of that a company coalition against nvidia for a cuda replacement was started. Nvidia have to be careful in the next few years
They might also want to be in the running for a future Steam Deck or Linux based gaming console. And fully open source drivers is a requirement, especially if Valve is involved.
There’s also the whole thing about how AMD gets improvements from community involvement, and Nvidia then has to integrate that into their closed development cycle. They’re always a step behind and losing out on all that free development labor.
You don’t and likely never will get a fully open stack for those GPUs. Even the latest Radeon cards have a lot of closed-source binary blobs for firmware.
Where the line is drawn between the driver and the firmware blobs makes a massive difference though. Look at the recent case of AMD trying (and failing) to license HDMI 2.1+ for their open source drivers.
Yes caffe is a runner in bottles. Try it to see if it works for the game. Bethesda BattleNet Launcher works with it.
Make sure to update the distro if possible.
Sometimes restarting the device if you never do, might help in certain scenarios. Some updates need a restart even though most don’t on Linux.
EDIT:
You can try running the Battlenet launcher on lutris and running diablo 4 through instead of standalone. Blizzard launcher sometimes with updates breaks the launching on lutris. It’s why I suggest to try caffe on bottles. Download the .exe for the battlenet launcher and install it on bottles with caffe runner and run it there. Hopefully some of this might fix it. Or someone that has used Suse with more experience might suggest what to do. I don’t have that game but these suggestions are based on my problems with Battlenet launcher for the last year.
Why wouldn’t NVIDIA want its drivers made for free, gotta wonder… (might have to do with artificial segmentation, which is getting more redundant as game GPUs go through the roof)
Hey OP, could you give a brief rundown on what settings you’re using for ALVR? I was gifted a Quest 2 and would love to get it running on Linux. I got the ALVR app sideloaded on the Quest, but the performance seems to be atrocious. I also haven’t been able to get the audio routed to the headset properly, not sure if that’s something you got working either - if so I’d love to know the secret sauce for that one too!
I left most things default. When I first set it up I played with all the settings and made everything worse lol.
I can tell you that I set the resolution to the highest setting, the refresh rate to 120hz and the bitrate to the quality settings. Everything else, I left default. I found that this resulted in the best clarity while not really making the artifacting/lag any worse. I’m still playing with it though.
If you have the option in SteamVR’s game specific settings to enable “Legacy motion smoothing”, apparently that improves things noticably. For some reason motion smoothing is completely unavailable to me though so I can’t personally attest.
I’ve heard audio was an issue, but in my case (Arch plus KDE6), it was as simple as picking my audio output in the system tray dropdown. I could stream it to my headset or send it out of my headphones I have plugged in.
Edit: I’m gonna link this becaust I found it while looking into why motion smoothing was unavailable. Apparently disabling async reprojection via a config file can give a noticable performance boost. I’ve yet to try it but I’ll add another edit when I’m back at my rig long enough to test it out.
Adding a little update. Recently reinstalled my system as things were getting cluttered. For some reason, I was unable to install ALVR (or the git version) from the AUR. When building the AUR package manually, I’d get to 99% and the terminal would just close, yay resulted in the same error.
However, the portable .tar release of the latest version works perfectly. Performance is even better, I’ve had fewer bugs/connectivity issues, and once I followed the official Settings Tutorial and this article on how to disable SteamVR Async Reprojection things have been working 99% as well as they were on Windows. I have noticed occasional quality degradation, but it was never detrimental to the experience overall. And, it’s worth noting that ALVR can function over USB with a link cable, so that should eliminate any issues caused by wireless streaming.
Just thought I’d report my experience and hopefully give some folks a push to try it out. This is a huge step for the overall Linux experience IMO, as it’s very quickly opening up an entire aspect of gaming/computing in general really that, until a few months ago, was effectively not viable outside of Windows.
Thank you for the update! I just gave it another go and don’t seem to have any audio, and it still seems quite jittery - I’ll have to play around with it some more and see what I can get working on it :)
The Shield was made for game streaming which would precisely enable you to connect the controllers to it and run the games on your PC. Nvidia has since stopped supporting that software but luckily there are alternatives. The Moonlight client and Sunshine host are direct implementations of what Nvidia used to provide or there’s Steam Link if you’re using Steam.
I know the DS4 controllers had similar connectivity issues on Windows which could be solved by changing power management settings. I’m not sure if this issue still applies to using DualSense on Linux.
I did try setting Moon+Sunlight up, but thought the configuration of it was a a bit difficult tbh. I should give it another try maybe, as using the nvidia shield would be highly convenient 👍
Hopefully more cooperating with than competing against. If NVK is good, Linux users will buy more NVIDIA cards. I don’t see NVIDIA being too opposed to that. Also, if you look at the Mesa merge requests for NVK, there have been a few with @nvidia.com emails. At least a few NVIDIA people are following and contributing even if only very little (one MR I saw was regarding an unknown bit that turned out to be an NVIDIA-internal test environment flag). Also, NVIDIA hired the former nouveau kernel-side maintainer and he just published a large nouveau patch set. I really hope we’re seeing NVIDIA move towards acceptance of the open driver stack even if they continue to develop and push their proprietary one. Given their focus on AI and compute maybe they see letting Mesa handle graphics as less of a concern now. Maybe they want to get everything running on an upstreamable kernelspace driver. Who knows, but it’s definitely looking better than it ever has for them.
If NVK is good enough maybe Nvidia will consider dropping the proprietary driver because no one will want to use it and it will cost too much for them to maintain a separate driver.
Scanning through the list, it’s more like $20 worth of games I’ll actually play for $8. But still pretty good! I saw about 5 games in interested in trying, and I’m sure I’ll find more later.
Which version of Bazzite are you on? Bluetooth has been having connectivity problems in the latest versions (a regression from the Bluez driver upstream, I believe).
I rebased my Steam Deck to 39-20240328, and everything seems to be working as expected. 39-20240414 might also be okay, but I haven’t tested it myself.
ETA: I haven’t been able to connect my primary BT headphones to my Deck, but my Steam Controller and a different pair of BT headphones are fine. Might be a similar case with you; I don’t know why one works but the other doesn’t.
Indeed loads of buetooth issues on their latest versions, I’ve rebased the system by a month before the issues started and will try to see if this has solved the issue. On the latest bazzite versions and couldnt even connect my PS5 controller, had to remove the device and completely re-pair the controllers each time I wanted to connect to the PC, which was highly incontinent… But! that issues is at least fixed on the older bazzite versions. Will see if the connectivity issues I’ve been having is present on the older bazzite versions tonight.
I had this problem with fedora base system is due to the bluetooth software with controllers like PS5 they use, if I remember I never got it to work right, I am sure there is a fix somewhere but I have not found.
Is your Bluetooth adapter in a USB 3.0 port? That can interfere with the signal. Move it to a non 3.0 port, preferably on a front panel port to limit interference from the motherboard. An extension cable can even be helpful (this solved much of my BT connection issues personally).
Ah. It might be the orientation of the machine. I assume the antenna is on the back. See if getting a clearer view of the antenna to the reciprocating device helps.
Thought of that too, angled the PC and antennas directly towards the couch and still the same problem… I’ll try to play a little more around with it and see if I can make it better, but something isn’t quite what it should be and I dont know what.
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