Recapping The Linux News From GDC 2014

Here was the major news last week from the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco as is relevant to Linux gamers.

For those not following as closely to Phoronix as you should be, here's a recap of some of the biggest Linux gaming news items from the past week:

Crytek showed off CRYENGINE on Linux for the first time publicly. Crytek also announced their Engine-as-a-Service licensing. While I was in San Francisco I also found more about the CRYENGINE Linux port.

I exclusively delivered the story on AMD looking at a new Linux driver strategy for Catalyst that would involve an open and shared kernel driver with their existing DRM/Gallium3D Radeon stack. I also found out they're looking at the feasibility of Mantle on Linux and other AMD Linux information I learned. AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA all talked about reducing OpenGL driver overhead.

Ubisoft is formulating a Linux game plan.

Unreal Engine 4 was released and is coming to web browsers through cooperation with Mozilla for porting to WebGL and ASM.js.

Unity 5 was announced and there's still Linux support, albeit not for the Unity editor.

The Witcher 2 is coming to Linux. GOG.com will start selling Linux games. Meanwhile, The Khronos Group announced OpenGL ES 3.1, SYCL, EGL 1.5, OpenGL 4.4 was revised, and WebCL 1.0 updates.

Valve was showing off new Steam Controller prototypes and SteamOS. Valve also open-sourced their VOGL OpenGL debugger in time for GDC 2014.

I checked out NVIDIA's Tegra K1 ARM SoC with Kepler graphics and it was great on Android but I can't wait to benchmark it on Linux.

LunarGLASS is still being worked on for Mesa as an LLVM shader compiler stack by LunarG.

That was about it with non-Android Linux seldom being shown on the GDC expo floor.