Just updated to the latest Nvidia driver to support Vulkan 1.3 but it seems there’s a discrepancy between ProtonDB reports and reality.
Proton Experimental reports Ampere GPUs able to take advantage of Vulkan video decode to bypass the need for Media Foundation Gstreamer stuff, but on my 1080 Ti, Proton Experimental on the latest drivers doesn’t do a thing to play videos.
Did they restrict Vulkan Video Decode/Encode extensions to Ampere? Or is something else to blame? like having multiple GPUs in one system?
How the heck is Vulkan video decode/encode tackled by NVIDIA vs RADV?
Okay, it’s not multi-GPU at fault. I’ve pci-stubbed both GPUs one by one and neither wants to use the Vulkan video extensions.
I think some people on ProtonDB are throwing snake oil, or there’s some specific thing about Proton Experimental on Ubuntu that’s throwing it off vs Manjaro or Arch.
Edit: Proton 7.0 changelog lists “Added support for local decoding of H264 videos”, but it’s not working on my Ubuntu install.
I’ve long known using GE Proton works, but Vanilla Proton 7.0 is supposed to also work, but it’s not for some reason on my version of Ubuntu.
Surely Steam should call upon it’s own FFmpeg and not try to use the system’s version, right? Why the inconsistency between GE Proton and Proton 7.0 if they should both decode video?
I’m afraid I’ve reached the end of my rope because I’m not a developer. The most I could gauge from the proton Python file differences was one had references to the “video” folder in Steam’s root directory and GE Proton does not, meaning FFmpeg is in the lib and lib64 folders of GE Proton.
It does indeed stump me why .so files provided by Steam would fail on my Ubuntu install, but be good on other people’s installs. Inconsistency across distros is supposed to be what Steam Runtime is supposed to solve, yet they omitted FFmpeg.
Yup I feel the same with my current TITAN V in my plex/homelab system, was super high end at launch but still lacks features and stuff that holds it back.
That’s what I initially thought because the 1080 Ti might not support Vulkan 1.3, but apparently this is a FFmpeg issue or a older Wine version issue or some combination of all those issues, because there’s a disconnect between successful uses of Proton 7.0 with H264 decode, and how some people still have it fail and have to resort to GE Proton.
This might be a similar situation to Fedora and Nvidia, where big kernel updates are pushed and most people reporting back to Fedora’s bug tracker use AMD and Intel graphics.
1080 Ti is already holding me back because of missing optimizations for VKD3D, which means I’m waiting to get a 2080 Ti for my main Cascade Lake-X rig and moving the 1080 Ti to my Ivy Bridge-E rig.
I get that now, but I was waiting for a 3070 Ti 16GB and then it kinda never happened.
This means I have to get a 2080 Ti Hybrid for my Cascade Lake-X system because all 3080 hybrid designs are 240mm AIOs, which won’t fit in my Air 540.
This is just an assumption Vulkan video extensions in Vulkan 1.3 will fail on anything older than Turing because I tried on a Turing card and it still failed for Proton’s H264 decode feature, meaning it might not have anything to do with hardware decode, unless there’s no memory leak from video playback when Media Foundation is called, and that means it could be sending data to the GPU.
You could see if you can get some of the older Quadros, i know the RTX 4000 and 5000 quadros are decently priced atm, and even the newer A4000 is “cheap” Compared to some other 3xxx cards. and both should fit