What's Your Hopes From Valve's SteamOS?

[dee.]

Please DEE,since having the audacity to call Mir developers non professional time and time again, direct us to your code contributions so they can be critiqued.

Is their really any need for the constant defamation of people you don't personally know .

Take it easy, champ. I didn't even mention Mir...

[sarmad]

We have 64bit ARM chips. Anyway they should offer a 64bit only Steam client and games. FFS we are in 2014 in a few months.

As end users, what do we gain from 64-bit games over 32-bit games?

[dee.]

Anyway they should offer a 64bit only Steam client and games. FFS we are in 2014 in a few months.

As soon as enough of the target demographic moves away from 32-bit that it ceases being cost-effective to produce 32-bit versions, I expect they will. Before that, why would they?

[mrugiero]

As end users, what do we gain from 64-bit games over 32-bit games?

There are some gains and some losses. Losses include a bigger memory footprint because of bigger pointers, and lazy developers who waste memory (I'm not referring to the ones who actually require memory to do useful or better performing things, but mostly to the ones who don't check for leaks) are able to get their shit on computers because "there is probably enough memory anyway". Gains include the ability to build assuming some extensions to x86 that highly improve speed on some areas (the ones I mean are present in some 32 bits, but are not used in default 32 bits builds because they are not present in every 32 bits x86 CPU, while they are part of the de facto standard on x86_64, so you can safely target them for such builds), more and bigger registers which also help performance, and the ability to use more memory when required (this implies larger worlds and such, since textures and models and maps could take more memory available, which is limited to 2GB in the 32 bits world).

Take it easy, champ. I didn't even mention Mir...

Considering you are most likely not referring to X11 developers as unprofessionals (since they are either fathers of the modern *nix OSes or the same devs working on Wayland), I think one could state you implied Mir.

[LinuxGamer]

hmm my hopes for Steam OS

here's a little list

1 To Kill Ubuntu (sick of seeing all the Circle Jerker's)
2 To Work With Upsteam
3 To Kill Android
4 To Kill NIH Project's like Upstart Mir or most any thing Canonical developed
5 To Kill Microsoft
6 To Kill Xbox
7 To Kill Sony Playstation for removing the Linux Installer
8 To Make Linux a better Desktop over all
9 To make Game developers Support Linux
10 To Rule the World

[belal1]

My biggest wish....

my biggest wish from Valve in general is that they release a console themselves or atleast certify a minimum standard. This way they can control a minimum standard that people can be assured a game will run great without even thinking about "how" it's going to run on their system/console. But at the same time, it should be open enough that people can build their own systems above that minimum standard so the more expensive systems will be able to run games better and at higher resolutions.

The minimum standard system should be $200-300 and yes, this is wishful thinking but at that price point it would shatter the mold in a $500 xbox1/ps4 world.

[b15hop]

My hope is they don't hijack the games market like they did on Windows, where many popular games are Steam exclusive and users don't have a choice of using it or not.

My second hope is that they help make Linux viable for game development, and help improve OS neutral APIs and toolsets.



I don't see why people want yet another Linux distro or why Valve is in a position to do that. I can't believe that Valve intends to compete with Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS for productivity centric Linux distros. I also can't imagine serious programmers switching their work laptops or server farms over to a video game centric distro.

There are a lot of ifs and buts here.
First if they do make their own distro, they have to have good reason to do so.

• One such reason is gaming performance.
• Another reason is to make the os easy to use for console like environment. The machine after all is intended to be used in the living room rather than in the office.
• Maybe they have a better match of hardware for Linux, with top notch drivers (for a change). This would be Linux game developers dream.
• As you say, maybe they might have better API and development tools to come along with the device.

The thing that begs the question is in relation to John Carmack complaining about consoles being a better environment to develop on for gamers. And there are several factors why:

• Console is one hardware spec: http://au.gamespot.com/forums/topic/...match-ps4s-gpu Also Carmack stated that consoles were still more powerful (2011) than current hardware. http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/que...s-his-concerns If the steam box can change this with Linux steambox, maybe this will be a turnkey product! Something I would love to know, maybe Gabe can talk to JC himself about this issue.
• Drivers are never an issue on consoles, and so the games developer can focus on working on the game rather than platform issues:

  John Carmack: I don't worry about the GPU hardware at all. I worry about the drivers a lot because there is a huge difference between what the hardware can do and what we can actually get out of it if we have to control it at a fine grain level. That's really been driven home by this past project by working at a very low level of the hardware on consoles and comparing that to these PCs that are true orders of magnitude more powerful than the PS3 or something, but struggle in many cases to keep up the same minimum latency. They have tons of bandwidth, they can render at many more multi-samples, multiple megapixels per screen, but to be able to go through the cycle and get feedback... “fence here, update this here, and draw them there...” it struggles to get that done in 16ms, and that is frustrating.

  From http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Editori...d-more/Intervi
• Carmack believes that the upcoming consoles from Sony and M$ will be essentially the same. Even more surprising is that they sound like they will be using PC architecture: http://www.geek.com/games/john-carma...4-are-1564248/
• His keynote in 2013 compares AMD to nVidia, and believes that AMD / Intel are ahead of nVidia with their aim of unified memory pool in APU design. If he is correct, and I doubt he is wrong, that would mean that the upcoming design of the steam box might need to be AMD based instead of nVidia: http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Editori...-Quakecon-2013

So the hardware of the steam box needs to be aimed towards games development as well as being future proof. No doubt that valve is very clever regarding this and they will make sure that they listen to other game developers. We don't want just another console. We want something better than a PS4 and xbox one. We want Linux with good hardware so we can still use keyboard and mouse if need be. I want it to be upgrade friendly and mod friendly. I don't want it to be like Sony where they force the consumer to buy proprietary - Sony only products. Steam needs to remember its roots and not go down the path of money grabbing.

[LinuxGamer]

my biggest wish from Valve in general is that they release a console themselves or atleast certify a minimum standard. This way they can control a minimum standard that people can be assured a game will run great without even thinking about "how" it's going to run on their system/console. But at the same time, it should be open enough that people can build their own systems above that minimum standard so the more expensive systems will be able to run games better and at higher resolutions.

The minimum standard system should be $200-300 and yes, this is wishful thinking but at that price point it would shatter the mold in a $500 xbox1/ps4 world.

The PS4 is 399$ you cant build a Good Desk top at that low of a price you can build you own Steam Box as the Steam OS will be free to download the thing is the PS4 and Xbox are going to take a lost for the first few years on the hardware

[dee.]

Considering you are most likely not referring to X11 developers as unprofessionals (since they are either fathers of the modern *nix OSes or the same devs working on Wayland), I think one could state you implied Mir.

Considering I never called anyone unprofessional, I think one could state you are confusing implication with inference.

[johnc]

• His keynote in 2013 compares AMD to nVidia, and believes that AMD / Intel are ahead of nVidia with their aim of unified memory pool in APU design. If he is correct, and I doubt he is wrong, that would mean that the upcoming design of the steam box might need to be AMD based instead of nVidia: http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Editori...-Quakecon-2013

That isn't a particularly controversial claim since nvidia doesn't even have an APU yet. Unless you consider this Maxwell stuff (which won't be shipping for awhile) and since it's not based on x86, it's somewhat less relevant.

It does seem likely that the Steam Box could be AMD hardware which is frankly astonishing to me considering AMD has basically no Linux presence, pretty awful GPU drivers and horrible video playback options. But I guess we'll find out tomorrow.