[HN Gopher] The State of VR on Linux
___________________________________________________________________
The State of VR on Linux
Author : ekianjo
Score : 61 points
Date : 2021-01-15 10:36 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (boilingsteam.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (boilingsteam.com)
| foxrider wrote:
| I was also pleasantly surprised by how well VR works on Linux and
| how much work had been put in to make even the Proton experience
| seamless. I now have over 1500 hours in VR exclusively on Linux.
| xtracto wrote:
| What's a good VR setup for Linux?
| ekianjo wrote:
| Valve Index + AMD GPU.
| sliken wrote:
| What are your favorite VR games/apps on linux?
| foxrider wrote:
| Boneworks certainly takes the cake as my absolute VR title.
| It beats even Alyx in terms of gameplay alone. Playtime-wise
| I spent most hours in Elite Dangerous - flying in an HMD adds
| so much to the game that its hard to put in words how
| immersed I feel.
| leeoniya wrote:
| i'm waiting to try Alyx, cause i think the outlay for the
| hardware alone will be quite large.
|
| any insight into how compatible Valve's Index will be with
| non-valve games? i don't really wanna drop $2k-$3k to play
| a single title and have the VR hardware work poorly with
| other games or become obsolete in 2 months; the pace of
| state-of-the-art in VR was so rapid, that i didn't want to
| spend money on anything until some bug-free plateau was
| reached.
| [deleted]
| zlsa wrote:
| Valve Index will work with any SteamVR game natively, and
| with a community-maintained wrapper, will work with many
| Oculus exclusive titles as well.
| mikenew wrote:
| The Index controllers can do everything other controllers
| can do + extra stuff. If you play a game that doesn't
| have finger tracking, that just means you don't get
| finger tracking. But the controllers themselves work just
| fine.
|
| There are some games that might not have a good set of
| bindings for the index controllers by default (something
| might be bound to "squeeze the grip" when it should be
| bound to the trigger, for example), but you just open the
| settings menu (inside VR), click "custom bindings", and
| then pick the most upvoted community made set of bindings
| and it just works. Takes a few seconds.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Index will work with anything. And vice versa, any
| headset can play Alyx well. If you're not up for spending
| all the money, you can mix and match SteamVR
| controllers/headsets (e.g. old school Vive with the
| fancier Knuckles Controllers).
| gen3 wrote:
| I bought and index and have been driving it with a 2700x
| and 1060 6gb. Alyx was hands down one of, if not the best
| gaming experience I've ever had. I think the index
| controllers really take the experience to another level.
| Being able to pick up things by grabbing them is awesome.
| The headphones on the index are amazing too, and really
| help with immersion.
|
| Support with other games is pretty good. I bought a bunch
| of games during the summer sale, and haven't found
| anything unplayable for me. Not all games have full
| finger tracking, and not all games have the ability to
| pick things up like you can in Alyx. Some older games
| have been updated for Alyx style controls, but many
| control exactly how they did with the Vive.
|
| I tried VR in Linux first, then tried on windows. Windows
| has better feature support and performance hands down. If
| you have a better GPU, you might be fine, but the
| advantages to booting into windows was worth it to me.
| porphyra wrote:
| Not OP, but Beat Saber and Project Cars 2 work flawlessly in
| VR via Proton. Pretty surprising tbh. And of course Half Life
| Alyx is natively supported.
| ve55 wrote:
| With how user-hostile Windows has become lately I've been happy
| to see gaming on Linux go from how esoteric it used to be to the
| more commonplace scenario that it now is. While it's obviously a
| small fraction compared to Windows (as noted in the article,
| 0.5-2% seems accurate), those that tried playing modern games on
| Linux a decade ago would be pleasantly surprised to see how much
| more feasible it is today; it's come a long way.
|
| Valve and Steam have played an important role in this, but we've
| also seen significant improvements in wine, applications like
| Lutris, and all-around steady improvements in hardware support
| and drivers, as well as a much larger and more accessible
| community and body of knowledge.
|
| While there's still quite a few games that seem near-impossible
| to play from linux, I think a lot of people that decided against
| trying this many years ago would find things much better off than
| where they left off, especially for someone that is willing to
| put in just a little bit of time to fix potential issues (but of
| course, we must admit that sometimes one can be unlucky and spend
| hours trying to fix some specific issues, even if that is much
| more rare than it used to be). Although I don't play much, I'm
| happy to not have to dual boot Windows just to run a few select
| applications and I hope that things look even better this decade
| with the amount of interest we've seen in FOSS, user privacy and
| security, and so on, all increasing.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As proven by Netbooks, ChromeOS, Android and maker consoles.
|
| Anything Linux based that goes mainstream has very little to do
| with regular GNU/Linux, or is based on customized
| distributions, tainted with OEM specific drivers and kernels
| that never get updated.
| mav3rick wrote:
| Chrome OS regularly uprevs the kernel. And updates drivers
| etc with it. Most of these are open source.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Valve's been amazing. Without their (ongoing, even after
| SteamOS pretty much flopped!) support, I don't know if I
| could've survived on Linux. xP
|
| What's surprising is how many games _are_ native through Steam.
| It tends to be the types of games I think most Linux nerds
| (like me) would stereotypically _tend_ to prefer, too
| (Factorio, Europa Universalis 4, Kerbal Space Program, Cities:
| Skylines, most roguelikes). That said, I think a varied gaming
| diet is important. For non-native (especially AAA) games,
| https://www.protondb.com/ is very handy. Even games that can't
| run seem to get more runnable over time. Not long ago (a year
| or two?), Fallout 4 would run hilariously badly -- tons of
| graphical assets would be missing, and it was unplayable.
| Today, it runs "okay" (a subset of the sounds don't work unless
| you use a Proton flag in Steam, and the mouse is pretty
| sluggish).
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| I've seen it theorized that SteamOS was less a flop and more
| a shot across Microsoft's bow that had the intentional
| effect. It briefly seemed like a war was brewing over the
| Windows Store or the Steam Store being the main outlet for PC
| game purchases, particularly games developed by MS studios.
| Seems that all but disappeared when the Steam Machine came
| out.
| podiki wrote:
| Great article (disclosure: from my colleague at Boiling Steam)!
| Definitely learned a lot as a newbie to VR on Linux. I'm still
| new to VR but not Linux gaming, and have been having a blast. I
| really appreciate it especially in the winter (great and fun
| workouts while playing games) and when other activities are
| limited due to the tragedy that is the US coronovirus response.
| The sense of space is what really gets me, never have I felt so
| transported somewhere else. This is in contrast to things like 3D
| movies where stuff pops out at you, while this gives depth and
| openness as you step into huge rooms, landscapes, whatever.
|
| I also wrote [0] about just getting the Valve Index and playing
| on Linux with my aging but still capable desktop (poor 970 was
| still going strong but VR is really pushing it).
|
| [0] https://boilingsteam.com/the-valve-index-on-linux-on-a-
| min-s...
| gcblkjaidfj wrote:
| Sad to see the focus being on gaming. Installing any modern game
| on windows is a nightmare. You install one root kit after
| another. All running as administrator and installing things left
| and right, with each studio having their own identity tracking
| running forever in the background.
|
| The benefit of VR will be when it is decoupled entirely from
| games. Just like we got window manager composers when we finally
| stoped looking at openGL as a game technology.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, it's the same with GPUs, mostly made for gaming, but lots
| of people use them for totally different purposes.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| OpenVR/OpenXR are already decoupled from games. You can target
| both Oculus and SteamVR with these APIs and pretty much do
| whatever you want. I think the only reason games dominate the
| medium is because of the hardware. It's very difficult to do
| productivity in VR, but comparatively easy to put a player into
| a simulated world to have fun.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-01-15 23:01 UTC)