Valve's Dota 2 Game Can (Still) Run Natively On Mir
With there being Mir support within SDL2 (along with Wayland) that's used by Valve's Steam runtime, plus Canonical developers have been adding Mir support to other libraries necessary to the Ubuntu Linux desktop, the Mir support situation is continuing to take shape.
With the various support libraries having their Mir support enabled within Ubuntu, Dota 2 can run natively on Mir and with performance that's on par to running under a classic X.Org Server.
But this actually isn't new news... We've known that Dota 2 can run on Mir since back in July when the feat was accomplished. There was the video back then, lots of excited Ubuntu desktop gamers, etc. It seems there's a fresh wave of promoting this accomplishment.
Will Cooke, the Ubuntu Desktop Manager at Canonical, posted on Friday to his Google+ about Dota 2 running on Mir without any X11/XMir dependency. Cooke wrote, "Brandon Schaefer and the other folk in his team have been adding Mir support to some key libraries. Here we see DOTA2 running in Mir. DOTA2 uses the SDL2 library." As shown above, Will's video is the same exact Dota 2 Mir film as was uploaded to YouTube back in July by Brandon Schaefer, a software engineer at Canonical.
It's still not been decided when the Ubuntu desktop will switch to Unity 8 and Mir by default, but for now it's an alternative option that can be done by enthusiasts/developers for existing Ubuntu 14.04/14.10 installations and that Canonical does plan to have the switch done by the next LTS release, Ubuntu 16.04. Before that happens, the proprietary AMD and NVIDIA drivers will need to support Mir. There's also been no progress to report on mainlining XMir support inside the X.Org Server, which means at least for now it will just be patched within the Ubuntu xorg-server packages.
48 Comments
