There's Progress Running Unreal Engine 4 With SteamVR On Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: There's Progress Running Unreal Engine 4 With SteamVR On Linux

Progress is being made with running Unreal Engine 4 for VR on Linux with SteamVR...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=UE4-SteamVR-Linux-OGL

[haagch]

Support him on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ue4linux

[humbug]

As far as PC new gen APIs are concerned epic seems more interested in directX12. When they do talk about vulkan it's with regard to android.

[indepe]

As far as PC new gen APIs are concerned epic seems more interested in directX12. When they do talk about vulkan it's with regard to android.

Seems to me even on Linux that has changed only recently with Feral now talking about Vulkan ports. Others are experimenting with Vulkan but not announcing anything more definite (except for the GPU vendors), as if there was any alternative on Linux. Wake-up call not received yet.

[eydee]

Should be in a good shape by the time major UE4 games start dropping. If ever. The dominance UE3 had cannot be seen anywhere.

[mike44]

I'm also curious, apart Feral games, in the announced 3 Vulkan/SteamVR games from Valve.

[theghost]

Why don't they simply hire Yaakuro. He could improve a lot on the Linux side of UE4.

[LubosD]

Does it have reasonable performance? Last time I tried UE4 on Linux, it was super slow compared to Direct3D/Windows.

[mike44]

The only difference I've remarked is that the editor seems to take a little longer to load (with glsl430). Nothing bad, they should bring on Vulkan and the marketplace.

[beniwtv]

Seems to me even on Linux that has changed only recently with Feral now talking about Vulkan ports. Others are experimenting with Vulkan but not announcing anything more definite (except for the GPU vendors), as if there was any alternative on Linux. Wake-up call not received yet.

The problem isn't that they haven't reveived the wake-up call. It's because of Apple, and their refusal to support Vulkan.

Right now, many engines (including UE4) already have DX11/DX12 renderers on Windows. They don't *need* a Vulkan renderer on Windows, even though they could use it. On Apple, they can't use Vulkan. On Linux, they could also use Vulkan, but right now they already have an OpenGL renderer.

So right now, if they were to implement a Vulkan renderer, it really only would benefit Linux, and a very small subset of Android devices new enough to support it. So it does not make much financial sense to go full steam on Vulkan. Even then, they are slowly implementing it. They're just not in a rush.

Feral is another story, since they don't sell games on Windows, they don't need to care about DX11/12.

Also, if Apple had supported Vulkan, the story would be very different. Because then, they could throw away your OpenGL/DX renderers and go Vulkan for all major desktop OSes. And that would be very tempting, because only one renderer means less maintenance/support costs, as you share the mayority of the code, even between differen OSes/drivers.

But there's hoping Apple will come around.