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SteamOS 159 Drops Support For NVIDIA's Pre-Fermi Graphics Cards

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  • SteamOS 159 Drops Support For NVIDIA's Pre-Fermi Graphics Cards

    Phoronix: SteamOS 159 Drops Support For NVIDIA's Pre-Fermi Graphics Cards

    Valve today pushed out the SteamOS 159 update into the Alchemist repository today, which matches the recent changes to the Alchemist Beta repository. This update isn't too exciting as it's mostly stable fixes, branding updates, etc, but the NVIDIA Linux driver update does remove the support for pre-Fermi graphics cards...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Considering that these cards would probably be too weak for new games coming for the Steam Machines and we don't see much porting of older titles, this shouldn't be a huge problem. Support might also resurface through Nouveau once it implements reclocking properly.

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    • #3
      Considering the fact that it's debian wheezy, 'dropping support' probably means 'they updated to the latest nvidia driver which no longer supports pre-fermi nvidia cards, install nvidia-legacy-304xx-driver'

      What would be far more news worthy is if SteamOS updates to Jessie, where they wouldn't have to do so many little hacks here and there to get Steam running (it's already packaged and working in Debian Jessie when you had the i386 branch.)

      slaapliedje

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      • #4
        How is Nouveau on pre-Fermi cards? I'm wondering cause my laptop has a 960m in it. Is reclocking fully working and etc?

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        • #5
          Originally posted by leech View Post
          Considering the fact that it's debian wheezy, 'dropping support' probably means 'they updated to the latest nvidia driver which no longer supports pre-fermi nvidia cards, install nvidia-legacy-304xx-driver'
          Well, this update hosed my SteamOS installation without any warning. I didn't have much luck with nvidia-legacy - I can't remember exactly why - perhaps it wasn't compatible with the kernel version used by SteamOS. Either way I decided to replace it with Debian Jessie and run Steam as a standalone app, which works and actually gives a much better experience, I think. I really don't like conole UIs, they seem to take away and not add to the utility of what is always just a general-purpose computer underneath.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by stevenc View Post
            Well, this update hosed my SteamOS installation without any warning. I didn't have much luck with nvidia-legacy - I can't remember exactly why - perhaps it wasn't compatible with the kernel version used by SteamOS. Either way I decided to replace it with Debian Jessie and run Steam as a standalone app, which works and actually gives a much better experience, I think. I really don't like conole UIs, they seem to take away and not add to the utility of what is always just a general-purpose computer underneath.
            It's worth noting that Valve doesn't really intend anybody in forums like these to be bothering with SteamOS. We're all perfectly capable of installing our Linux of choice and getting Steam to run on it or, worst case, at least picking a distro where making Steam work is easy. SteamOS is really for OEMs and smaller computer shops to assemble console style systems for people who want them. If you've ever installed your own OS of any sort instead of just using what the OEM provided until the device died, then Valve is assuming you will just install the Steam app to whatever OS you want be it on a typical computer setup or a couch + controller setup.

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            • #7
              SteamOS is five-year-old stock Debian with the Steam client pre-installed.

              I don't get it.

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              • #8
                That's reasonable. SteamOS is for the ready made Steam Machines and those are all new machines. People who want to use or re-purpose older machines are not the target of SteamOS.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by johnc View Post
                  SteamOS is five-year-old stock Debian with the Steam client pre-installed.

                  I don't get it.
                  SteamOS is a reference platform: it allows devs to target a single Linux instead of 100 distributions. If it works on SteamOS, it proves that they did their side of the job. If other distributions want to support gaming properly, they would have to fall in line with what SteamOS provides. And since SteamOS is based on Debian, this shouldn't be too hard at all.

                  This hits head-on a major complaint of a lot of devs about Linux, and I believe will prove an enormously important contribution by Valve to gaming on Linux.

                  Would you want to install SteamOS yourself? Probably not, because it's a more limited OS than most free operating systems. However, many specialized computers may come with it pre-installed.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by johnc View Post
                    SteamOS is five-year-old stock Debian with the Steam client pre-installed.

                    I don't get it.
                    "Hey manufacturers, if you want to make a Steam Machine and you only care about the Steam client then here is a ready made distribution for you to install"

                    How hard is that to understand?

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