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It's Easy Getting Intel Graphics To Work On SteamOS

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  • It's Easy Getting Intel Graphics To Work On SteamOS

    Phoronix: It's Easy Getting Intel Graphics To Work On SteamOS

    While Valve only advertises NVIDIA graphics driver support in the SteamOS Beta released on Friday, I already found that AMD Radeon GPUs work with Catalyst on this Debian Linux derived OS. With a simple tweak, Intel HD Graphics can also run quite fine on SteamOS...

    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
    Can the OpenSource Radeon drivers be activated as well?

    The OpenSource Radeon drivers are at a similar functional level to the Intel ones. Do they work too? Or are we forced to use Catalyst?

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    • #3
      Most likely you can use the open source drivers, just that being focused to gamers, the blob is probably the default (I mean, I don't see gamers running Steam caring too much about the open source drivers).

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      • #4
        But why would you use Intel graphics for gaming...?!

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        • #5
          Originally posted by Krysto View Post
          But why would you use Intel graphics for gaming...?!
          Maybe you have an optimus setup, and want to use it for playing videos when you are not gaming.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by mrugiero View Post
            Most likely you can use the open source drivers, just that being focused to gamers, the blob is probably the default (I mean, I don't see gamers running Steam caring too much about the open source drivers).
            On the contrary, a lot of us with r600 compatible hardware are using the Open Source drivers for gaming. With the latest graphics stack and kernel, high end r600 cards can play about 90% of the games on Steam at 1080p and/or 60fps. (At least until we get more games at MetroLL level of quality).
            This is not because of caring about the drivers being Free, but rather that they actually do perform much better than Catalyst in pretty much all games. It's more of a pragmatic thing.

            But yes, any newly built or bought Steam Machines are likely going to have GCN cards, so the Free driver is not yet suitable yet. Valve is probably waiting on AMD to release a better blob before "officially" supporting it.
            Last edited by benmoran; 16 December 2013, 01:58 AM.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by benmoran View Post
              On the contrary, a lot of us with r600 compatible hardware are using the Open Source drivers for gaming. With the latest graphics stack and kernel, high end r600 cards can play about 90% of the games on Steam at 1080p and/or 60fps. (At least until we get more games at MetroLL level of quality).
              This is not because of caring about the drivers being Free, but rather that they actually do perform much better than Catalyst in pretty much all games. It's more of a pragmatic thing.

              But yes, any newly built or bought Steam Machines are likely going to have GCN cards, so the Free driver is not yet suitable yet. Valve is probably waiting on AMD to release a better blob before "officially" supporting it.
              Yes, I'm aware that R600 performance is at least comparable, and in a lot of cases better than Catalyst. I just kind of assumed gamers tend to have "the latest" hardware. And also, most gamers don't really care about free software (or at least that's my guess; I do prefer the open source drivers, even in cases where it is not performing as well as Catalyst). This combination leads to choosing Catalyst.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by Krysto View Post
                But why would you use Intel graphics for gaming...?!
                Because you already have an intel system and you want to install SteamOS on it?
                Besides that, the new 4000+ and 5000+ HD are quite capable for gaming.

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                • #9
                  It's quite possible that someone would have a new Haswell based laptop with Iris graphics that wants to try dual booting Steam OS or booting it from a USB drive just to try it out. It's also possible that someone with a slightly older laptop with HD 4x00 series graphics available would want to test it.

                  Personally, I have a four year old plus laptop designed for gaming which I might want to use to check out Steam OS that has Radeon 4850 graphics (pretty good when it was purchased). Right now the open source drivers are almost the only choice (unless you want to run an older Catalyst driver) for a graphics card that is still reasonably capable.

                  Some things that have happened with AMD lately almost make me wonder if it's actually going to be continued acceleration of development of the open source driver that makes AMD better on Steam OS rather than newer versions of the Catalyst for Linux driver. It seems like they'd want to fix the Catalyst driver, but I've seen way more action on the open source side lately.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Krysto View Post
                    But why would you use Intel graphics for gaming...?!
                    Because Intel has awesome OSS drivers, and Ivy Bridge graphics are plenty powerful for all the games I play.

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