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Comment by mhh__ | Hacker News Reader

Valve maintain a steam runtime which aims to smooth over a lot of the bumps.

That steam runtime still runs on top of gazillions of driver/hardware combinations. Especially Linux GPU drivers are highly buggy though.

Valve contribute directly to Mesa. It's pretty high quality. Less buggy than Windows graphics drivers I'd say.

This year alone I had two different bugs with my GPU drivers. First in the Laptop with AMD graphics where the screen would be black on resuming after suspend. After updating I'm not getting the bug any more.

Then I got another bug on the desktop with a builtin Intel GPU. Those are usually regarded as the ones with the best driver support on Linux, but that didn't save me. After waking up after it has went to sleep, sometimes, that means often, parts of the screen would flicker. It happened directly after the update from Ubuntu 20.04 to 20.10, or kernel 5.4 to 5.8. Now I've manually installed 5.10 and the bug is gone, but without my manual intervention the bug would have continued for months.

Nothing is bug free. But overall experience with AMD is very good for me. And you should always use the latest kernel if you want to avoid stuff like that.

On AMD the GPU driver stack is unlikely to be materially different from Stadia, I doubt Google is using anything else than (possibly customized/patched) amdgpu+mesa.

Stadia is using amdvlk as far as I know, since they referenced AMD GPU profiler which didn't work with Mesa in the past.

https://www.amd.com/en/press-releases/2019-03-19-amd-radeon-...

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