Steam Machines Prototypes: Intel CPU, NVIDIA GPU

[Gps4l]

Thats actually a tad stupid from Valve. Maybe.

Could have supported opensource drivers instead, since they were talking about SteamOS being opensource. That would deliver Wayland to you and faster, cheaper development. Cross company cooperation would have been sweet to customer wallet and long term stability.

Have you seen the benchmarks on this site ?

I am a fan of opensource, but the drivers aren't good enough for games.

I wonder not just about you, but more people on this site.

Games have brought pc's to their knees for years now, at least the new AAA games.

Then you want them to use a driver that can't even get close to the closed source driver ?

[Luis]

Sigh, it would be nice if you would at least attempt to read through the GPL and understand the basics of how the kernel operates before you decide to regurgitate the same old nonsense about them. There is nothing in the GPL that prevents GPL'd programs from being distributed along side closed source programs. The GPL says that closed source programs can't link to GPL'd shared libraries, it says nothing at all about loading a closed source binary module at run-time into a GPL'd program. Binary blobs are basically self-contained plug-ins and neither they nor the kernel do any linking, dynamic or static, against each other and are therefore not within the scope of the GPL.

Sources:

http://linuxhelp.150m.com/politics/kmodsGPL.htm

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules.html

http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php

[Edit: Also, the GPL does not say you have to distribute the source when you ship binaries, only that you must make the source available in a manner that anyone can reasonably get a copy if they so wish, otherwise all the distros would be in hot water as nearly none of them include source on their images. I know this is probably a misunderstanding due to your poor use of English, but just in case it wasn't I wanted to clarify that point.]

I always appreciate free lessons from experts in law, programming and English language, thanks!

If only you would apply those lessons to yourself... I mean, really, you only had to read those links that you so kindly provided. You were so close to it, and yet... But keep trying. Self improvement is an honorable quest too (apart from trying to improve others, as you already do). In this particular case, for example, a well informed user has already provided an answer that could be quite useful for anyone willing to learn, and hopefully he's done so by using a language that might meet your standards. What's more: as in your case, he's not charging for it either, so go get it!

I myself am looking forward for your next lesson, which I'm sure will be as interesting as the previous one, If not more. I only wonder on which subject it's going to be this time...

[liam]

Xorg isn't a window manager so I'm not following your question.

But otherwise yeah, they could probably skip a whole window manager / shell setup. Is that how XBMC does it?

I never claimed X was a WM. My point was that using the distros is useful b/c you get a whole bunch of apps for free. However, SteamOS looks like it is intending to run only that giant 10' screen interface and thus doesn't need to make use of all the apps in the repos and thus doesn't need windows or X. You certainly don't need X to write a window manager but I'm not aware of any WM in linux that doesn't make use of xlib in some fashion (ignoring upcoming mir/wayland wms).
XBMC has at least two install modes to my knowledge: stand-alone and app. For stand-alone I just looked at openelec and that has X dependencies.
I'd expect steam to just write their interface using sdl since, as I understand it, one of their employees is the original dev of it, and they don't need the backwards compatibility of apps that you would need X for.

[johnc]

I never claimed X was a WM. My point was that using the distros is useful b/c you get a whole bunch of apps for free. However, SteamOS looks like it is intending to run only that giant 10' screen interface and thus doesn't need to make use of all the apps in the repos and thus doesn't need windows or X. You certainly don't need X to write a window manager but I'm not aware of any WM in linux that doesn't make use of xlib in some fashion (ignoring upcoming mir/wayland wms).
XBMC has at least two install modes to my knowledge: stand-alone and app. For stand-alone I just looked at openelec and that has X dependencies.
I'd expect steam to just write their interface using sdl since, as I understand it, one of their employees is the original dev of it, and they don't need the backwards compatibility of apps that you would need X for.

Isn't X a display server?

What am I missing here?

[liam]

Isn't X a display server?

What am I missing here?

As I understand it, from a really high level, X is an ipc concerned with windowing systems. You can largely bypass X by using dri enabled clients. Wayland/Mir make things much simpler by being designed to accomodate just such clients, but wayland still has been designed to handle certain concepts that the buffers could request (dragged/dropped, input, resizing, etc). However, if you don't need windowing at all you could just use the built-in kernel evdev to grab inputs and handle the rest with a "fullscreen" ogl environment (adopted something that is mir/wayland compatible would relieve them from having to write a decent amount of code to handle interactions but they've experience developing games so I imagine that wouldn't be too hard for them).
That's how I understand it, but I could be wrong.

[Krysto]

Would've preferred they used AMD APU's with HSA and Mantle API. You could squeeze a lot more power out of that, for a much lower price.

[brosis]

Have you seen the benchmarks on this site ?

I am a fan of opensource, but the drivers aren't good enough for games.

I wonder not just about you, but more people on this site.

Games have brought pc's to their knees for years now, at least the new AAA games.

Then you want them to use a driver that can't even get close to the closed source driver ?

Have you read my post completely before posting? No, you haven't - then why ask questions about my post before reading?

The open drivers are sufficiently fast. The problem is newer titles using OpenGL4+, which is not yet supported by MESA. Still not many do this.
But IF Valve had expressed their wish to use open drivers, they are sufficient entity to affect AMD development policy. Then, the required features would land.

Also, I question all your logical thinking. Can you please provide association between: Good games by gamers judgment; good games because some critic networks tell this (AAA++*^10+10,000 or whatever); games that put pc to knees vs games that put mind to knees. For Valve - all this is completely unrelated. Their effort is to provide independent, affordable platform that can deliver wide or at least sufficient performance field. The AAA-lity of games does not interest them.

Like I said, open drivers still can't provide possibly required features - but Valve are the ones who could affect that. Tad of stupidity they didn't, cause in longer term nvidia is worse choice and mesa could have really used their patronage.

Would've preferred they used AMD APU's with HSA and Mantle API. You could squeeze a lot more power out of that, for a much lower price.

Mantle is windows only, so its stupidity of AMD. And double stupidity, because they, when ever, would try to put in into fglrx instead of open radeon, which is head-against-wall bumping.

[juanrga]

That doesn't change the matter of those being the best drivers to go with.
If they were being ideological, they'd slap in some AMD cards with FOSS drivers, and I'm sure they would right now if it were the practical solution. But it's not.
Fortunately, it's not like using their non-free drivers is going to stop users from doing or using whatever hardware or software they want to, and won't stop Valve from making this a success. They are just shooting for the best-case scenario.

The problem is in what it means "best". As I mentioned before the closed drivers can generate problems, including security holes, due to Nvidia refusing to answer kernel developers questions. Again read what Linus said. I don't think that is "best".

It is not about ideology. In fact, there are much more games available for Windows than for linux. Why is then Valve pushing linux this hard? Because some FOSS ideology? No.

Best-case scenario? Even considering only raw performance, as I mentioned before, R9 + MANTLE will humiliate Nvidia Titan with its 'best' drivers.

I don't understand Valve selection of hardware. I makes no sense for me. Ultra priced CPUs that perform poor than cheap ones. Again, all triple-A game developers choose the FX-8350 over the i5-3570k. Haswell desktop chips considered a "joke" by Anandtech or Tomshardware.

3 GB VRAM, when 4BG is the minimum recommended for modern gaming rigs. 450W PSU when Nvidia recommends minimum of 600W for the cards mentioned by Valve. It is all weird.

[Gps4l]

Have you read my post completely before posting? No, you haven't - then why ask questions about my post before reading?

The open drivers are sufficiently fast. The problem is newer titles using OpenGL4+, which is not yet supported by MESA. Still not many do this.
But IF Valve had expressed their wish to use open drivers, they are sufficient entity to affect AMD development policy. Then, the required features would land.

Also, I question all your logical thinking. Can you please provide association between: Good games by gamers judgment; good games because some critic networks tell this (AAA++*^10+10,000 or whatever); games that put pc to knees vs games that put mind to knees. For Valve - all this is completely unrelated. Their effort is to provide independent, affordable platform that can deliver wide or at least sufficient performance field. The AAA-lity of games does not interest them.

Like I said, open drivers still can't provide possibly required features - but Valve are the ones who could affect that. Tad of stupidity they didn't, cause in longer term nvidia is worse choice and mesa could have really used their patronage.

Crysis 3

http://www.game-debate.com/games/index.php?g_id=3953&game=Crysis%203

Still think the opensource driver are good enough ?

I bought the game Serious Sam 3 on Linux.

Its only since a month or 3, this games runs good on Linux, and that is with the catalyst driver, which outperforms the opensource driver allot.
Before I had to lower the resolution on linux, to have a playable frame rate.

HD5750 1 gig of ram
AMD phenom II X4 @ 3.2 ghz
4 gig of ram

[juanrga]

Have you seen the benchmarks on this site ?

I am a fan of opensource, but the drivers aren't good enough for games.

I wonder not just about you, but more people on this site.

Games have brought pc's to their knees for years now, at least the new AAA games.

Then you want them to use a driver that can't even get close to the closed source driver ?

AMD and Nvidia are working in improved linux drivers. The drivers that will be used in the final silicon are not the ones tested here.

Moreover, claiming that open drivers are not so good as closed ones, in generic fashion, is too unfortunate. Look at this benchmark

http://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=1307304-SO-RADEONWIN91&sha=f1c8c47&p=2

Yes it is _not_ the rule those days, but breaks away the old myth that closed is always better.