Graphics: Nouveau, Wayland, Mesa and RADV

• Nouveau Gallium3D Finally Seeing Mesa Shader Disk Cache For Faster Game Load Times

  While the open-source Intel and Radeon OpenGL drivers within Mesa have long employed an on-disk shader cache to help with game load times by being able to load previously compiled shaders from disk, the Nouveau "NVC0" Gallium3D driver is on the heels of finally seeing similar support. Nouveau saw a TGSI shader cache a few years ago while now it's finally seeing support for caching the compiled shaders.

• LavaLauncher 1.6 Released As A Simple Dock/Launcher For Wayland

  If you have been looking for a simple dock/launcher that natively supports Wayland, LavaLauncher 1.6 is available as one such solution. LavaLauncher is a simple Wayland-only launcher that allows placing the dynamically sized bar against any screen edge. Unlike most launchers, LavaLauncher doesn't rely upon .desktop files but allows specifying a path to an arbitrary image and the associated shell command to run, allowing for it to be quite extensible than just showing .desktop files for launch applications.

• Lima Gallium3D Driver Picks Up Multi-Submit Optimization In Mesa 20.1

  Lima in Mesa 20.1-devel now can handle multi-submit support for greater efficiency in handling of multiple OpenGL frame-buffer objects (FBOs). This should allow for greater efficiency/performance in the likes of the X.Org Server or Wayland compositors and avoiding flush-reload costs when switching between FBOs. No hard numbers, however, were provided for the multi-submit benefits to expect.

• RADV Vulkan Driver Makes A Few More Improvements For GCN 1.0/1.1 Hardware

  Valve open-source driver developer Samuel Pitoiset has contributed some improvements to Mesa 20.1's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver benefiting GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics cards. These original GCN graphics cards are compatible with the RADV driver but require first switching the kernel driver from the default Radeon DRM driver over to the AMDGPU driver, normally via the radeon.si_support=0 radeon.cik_support=0 amdgpu.si_support=1 amdgpu.cik_support=1 kernel flags. After doing so, RADV has tended to work well with these aging GCN graphics cards -- especially more recently with the RADV ACO back-end now working back to GCN 1.0 for offering better performance.

Sparky 2020.02 Special Editions

Special editions of Sparky 2020.02 “Po Tolo” of the (semi-)rolling line: GameOver, Multimedia & Rescue have been released. It is based on the testing branch of Debian “Bullseye”. GameOver Edition features a very large number of preinstalled games, useful tools and scripts. It’s targeted to gamers. Multimedia Edition features a large set of tools for creating and editing graphics, audio, video and HTML pages. The live system of Rescue Edition contains a large set of tools for scanning and fixing files, partitions and operating systems installed on hard drives.

Games: Aquamarine, Humble Store, Paradox

• Do a little quiet ocean exploration in the new 'Aquamarine' demo

  Now fully funded on Kickstarter with 8 days to go, Aquamarine has a demo out so you can have a go at this quiet survival adventure about perception and discovery in an alien ocean. A small-scale, story-driven game inspired largely by the psychedelic sci-fi of the '70s and '80s, Aquamarine combines old-school roguelikes and the survival genre with the exploration and puzzle solving of classic point-and-click adventures.

• Humble Store has a big sale going on some top indie games

  Another week, another sale begins. Humble Store are running a third edition of their Indie Hits Sale with some really popular titles with big discounts.

• Paradox have updated their handy launcher - should help Linux gamers too

  Paradox have released a new version of their game launcher, the screen that appears when you load most of their modern games to give a few little handy features. Not to be confused with the standalone Paradox Launcher you can download from their store (Paradox need a better naming scheme…), this is the application you see when you load up Stellaris, Cities: Skylines, Prison Architect and so on. Today "2020.2 - The Palindromic Version" was released.

Windows 10 vs. Eight Linux Distributions On The Threadripper 3970X

When taking the geometric mean of all these benchmark results, the Windows 10 Professional performance was the same as Windows 10 Enterprise for this Threadripper 3970X testing, unlike the Enterprise advantage we've seen on the larger Threadripper 3990X. The slowest of the eight Linux distributions tested was the Ubuntu 20.04 development snapshot, but that still came out to be 9.5% faster than Windows 10. The fastest Linux distribution was Clear Linux on the Threadripper 3970X with a 19% over Windows in these cross-platform benchmarks. Following Clear Linux with a strong showing was the new rolling-release CentOS Stream.