Intel & NVIDIA Dominate The Initial Linux-Based Steam Machines

[sarmad]

It is more like if Radeon GPU equiped machines are there, then AMD will improve drivers - things does not work other way

What?! Since when do companies sell before building the product?! If a company wants to sell a product it has to develop it first, and the driver is part of the full GPU product. This is like making a car without the dashboard and say: if enough people buy this car we will build a dashboard for it.

[dungeon]

Yes it's clearly good thing. AMD proprietary drivers added more for bad reputation of Linux as desktop OS than any other thing.
No way this crap should ever appear in consumer-grade hardware.

I don't share your pain about fglrx really

It's will be good thing once company like AMD provide better open source solution or Intel start produce proper GPUs.

AMD opensource drivers are fine and have best performance then other opensource drivers+hardware...

For the Intel GPUs they do their best to improve things, their Iris Pro 6200 is never better - it is for few days currently the best performing integrated solution:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9320/i...5775c-i5-5765c

For now console-like solution need something that just works and not require any attention.

Yeah they can do that and decrease stability of Intel and Nvidia stacks.

Yeah, more reasoning like that to not support anything from AMD is completely absurd

Big teams of kernel and userspace drivers. Intel have about 50 Mesa and 25 kernel contributors.
Reasonable resource into OpenCL support (Intel have dedicated team of 15 contributors).

AMD has 10 people who works on amdgpu driver. Which is if we compare size of companies pretty reasonable and even more than that. Intel has 12 times more employees then AMD which means that Intel needs to have 120 developers per 10 developers from AMD side to be equal.

Appropriate support for hardware available in kernel and userspace before hardware become available.

Carrizo is supported with amdgpu driver, if you can find hardware somewhere please let me know.

[Kano]

My simple guess is the Steam Machines will not improve Linux market share, nobody buys highend hardware to play mainly old games with Linux ports. Sooner vor later those PCs will just run Windows. They just down't. buy the Windows licence. Basically they could use AMD hardware as well, would just be shorter the time with SteamOS. Linux is ok for some games but from neary 400 games in my library there are only 110 for Linux available, some with bad ports.

[duby229]

It looks like Intel has been dumping a whole bunch of money into its diffusion and packaging technologies. It looks to the naked eye far more advanced than any other MCM i've ever seen. Not to mention MCMs for consumer devices is like insanity.

[Mathrosa]

I really do not understand why AMD does not have great open source drivers. Is the problem there is not enough people with the know how? How many man hour is needed to get great drivers? AMD APU:s seems to be a perfect fit for devices like this, would it take tens of millions to developer good drivers? (English is not my native language)

[dungeon]

I really do not understand why AMD does not have great open source drivers. Is the problem there is not enough people with the know how? How many man hour is needed to get great drivers? AMD APU:s seems to be a perfect fit for devices like this, would it take tens of millions to developer good drivers? (English is not my native language)

AMD opensource drivers are great essentialy if you are properly informed. Intel only supports what they made - that are iGPUs. But AMD need to support APUs (iGPU) and cards (dGPU) and various combinations people wanted in between, dual graphics, crossfire or whatever people coming from Windows expect... so it is only not good if people expect so much from much smaller team.

Again remember that Intel made only iGPU and only Intel made them! That is much easier to support for driver developer (and to leverage resources for tiny optimizations). For AMD APUs that is also true, but dGPUs are found from various card manufactories with varying combinations and quirks which are often non referent and undocumended.

I think it is clear picture now, AMD's job on drivers is much harder Well radeon driver is biggest kernel driver, if that does not draw proper picture i dunno what can

[johnc]

My simple guess is the Steam Machines will not improve Linux market share, nobody buys highend hardware to play mainly old games with Linux ports. Sooner vor later those PCs will just run Windows.

Exactly. Eventually Valve will settle on a streaming-only living room solution and the Steam Machines effort will be put in the grave.

Now our hope for Linux gaming lies with Google and Android.

[eidolon]

If a customer can build a better PC for 500$ how on earth aren't Alienware able to. Last I checked they pay less for parts than customers.

They pay more in operating costs. But their operating costs have no bearing on value to an individual (such as yourself) who is capable of putting together a computer for less.

Eventually Valve will settle on a streaming-only living room solution and the Steam Machines effort will be put in the grave.

Valve had to realize that the Steam Link would undercut at least some of the Steam Machine mindshare. And Steam Machine manufacturers surely see that as well.

[sarmad]

Exactly. Eventually Valve will settle on a streaming-only living room solution and the Steam Machines effort will be put in the grave.

Now our hope for Linux gaming lies with Google and Android.

Just how exactly are you expecting to run high-end GPUs and games on Android? Don't you need drivers for that? For GNU/Linux there are drivers for nVidia that work fine, and for AMD that are crappy. That is much better than the situation on Android where you simply have no drivers at all. AAA games? There are only few on GNU/Linux, and that's much better than the situation on Android where you only have touch-based games. Did you really think Valve didn't look into Android before deciding to go GNU/Linux? If SteamOS fails then just go buy a Windows machine because that will be the only remaining option. Heck, just go buy a Windows machine right now and forget about Linux already since you don't like the idea of SteamOS.

[johnc]

Just how exactly are you expecting to run high-end GPUs and games on Android? Don't you need drivers for that? For GNU/Linux there are drivers for nVidia that work fine, and for AMD that are crappy. That is much better than the situation on Android where you simply have no drivers at all. AAA games? There are only few on GNU/Linux, and that's much better than the situation on Android where you only have touch-based games. Did you really think Valve didn't look into Android before deciding to go GNU/Linux? If SteamOS fails then just go buy a Windows machine because that will be the only remaining option. Heck, just go buy a Windows machine right now and forget about Linux already since you don't like the idea of SteamOS.

There's nothing inherent about Android that makes gaming unlikely on it. It is, after all, just Linux. It might not be GNU/Linux, but it's Linux. There are two primary advantages that Android has over SteamOS: 1) It's backed by a company that actually has ambition; and 2) Game developers aren't allergic to it.