Rich Geldreich On The State Of Linux Gaming

[arboy84]

Drivers coming along

Like others have said; it looks as though OpenGL 4.2 support (Mesa 11.0) will happen early in 2015, at least for the Intel driver. The other Mesa drivers, on capable hardware, will likely have support by the middle of 2015. Hopefully Mesa OpenGL 4.5 support can be achieved by the end of 2015 or early 2016. OpenGL 4.2 support will still be superior to the support offered by Mac OS X which uses OpenGL 4.1.

AMD is releasing AMDGPU to replace the most important parts of the Catalyst driver for Linux and presumably that work can be ported over to BSD and other *nix OS. People will then have the choice to run a Mesa stack on top or the remaining proprietary parts of the Catalyst stack. This work will be very helpful in the long-run for AMD support on open operating systems, but it seems like work is slightly slowed down a little on their current release cards while they work on their new driver and its attendant infrastructure. Open drivers on Linux (and presumably other *nix OS) is AMD's future. In the long run, more and more of the Catalyst driver will probably be made open at least on *nix.

nVidia has great support for Linux/BSD/etc, even if their driver is proprietary. It's hard to argue with the practical reality that it works, especially on Enterprise distributions. Hopefully nVidia will lend more support to Nouveau and open source in the future. However, it's hard to argue with a working product; even if the way it works is less than ideal.

It seems to me that the main focus for open drivers right now is making sure that all of the features the cards can support actually work. Performance optimization will happen over time and will likely become the focus for future work, especially as Valve moves forward with its SteamOS efforts.

I think it's fine that Valve is taking its time with SteamOS. It is better to get things right, than rush a product out that seems to be largely a matter of hedging their bets. The situation of gaming on Linux is better than it has ever been and it looks as though the situation will only improve in the coming years.

I think their initial effort is to get Steam running on anything it can and then in a few years once all the bugs and kinks are worked; they will release a subsidized game console. The ability to buy once and then run the same game on your console, Windows PC, Mac, or Linux PC will present a strong alternative to the existing paradigm.

[dungeon]

Honestly I think this is all a load of shit. Mainly because as I've stated before, the driver progression is screaming along.
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/ - Look at the feature matrix. Seriously. There are 4 main components of the Nouveau Driver remaining to be completed:
OpenCL (dead in the water right now), Power Management, SLI, and Tesselation support. Tesselation isn't even needed until you look at OpenGL 4.3+ We have about 4 OpenGL tasks left until OpenGL 4.2 drops. Realistically we will see 4.3 by the middle of 2015. Now look at the power management subpage from the feature matrix: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/PowerManagement/ We see that for the current gen cards, 5/10 are MOSTLY, 2/10 are DONE, 1/10 WIP and 2/10 TODO. Every other card of consequence has more dones/mostly and maybe 1-2 WIP and 0 TODOs So realistically the Power Management status should be set to MOSTLY not WIP. Nouveau is under-reporting progress on Power management. I predict this: Linux 3.19-Linux 3.21. Nouveau will finish Power Management on Nvidia cards upto 700GTX models, possibly 900 GTX series. OpenGL 4.3 will land on Linux by mid 2015, and Nouveau will be a viable drop-in replacement for the Nvidia binaries for most gaming. AMD is still bumbling along with their crap-ass cards that aren't designed for GL and don't work well with it, but even they will see some gains coming from the code sharing with AMD/Intel/Nouveau. Intel is doing surprisingly well. OpenGL 3.3 will be working on Sandy Bridge by middle of 2015, and OpenGL 4.3 will be working on Intel hardware capable of supporting it by then. I don't think this guy is being realistic in his assessment of Linux and OpenGL and I think he's shilling for ATI/AMD. ATI/AMD are not necessary for Linux to have a strong gaming segment. What's needed is a lot more pro-active activism and coddling upto NVIDIA. We need to get NVIDIA to start cross promotion. We should be seeing a lot more works best on Intel/Nvidia/Nouveau/OpenRADEON signage/news/information. If AMD aren't going to step up and actually deliver a working product, then we should be promoting the alternatives. Why should gamers have to settle for inferior hardware on their platform of choice? If AMD is not delivering the performance but NVIDIA and Intel are delivering performance/features. They should be celebrated and rightly so. I'm sick of seeing these debates framed as if AMD is on a level field with NVIDIA. They aren't, they've had over 15 years to prove they were serious about Unix. They aren't. Nvidia works on FreeBSD/Solaris/Linux/MacOSX. AMD just tries to throw their own crappy APIs at people because they can't cut it in OpenGL. It's time the community got vocal about it and started to show people why AMD is a crap brand.

What an insane mafioso-fascistic bullshit of words - no comment really

[volca]

On Steambox:

I reckon steambox hasn't come out because AMD's driver performance has been so rubbish. That Valve initially thought they could flood the market with cheap AMD gaming PCs in living room form factor. Now they're finding out oh crap, the drivers just can't do the job and they're either scrambling to get the drivers fixed, or they're trying to get their hands on low-cost nvidia parts. Nvidia is probably very reluctant to move back into the living room after they got burned so badly on the original Xbox, and are quite content to stick to their two segments of portable gaming and big desktop cards.

Alienware's effort (Alienware Alpha) contains NVidia GPU, so we already see some shift this direction. Agreed on AMD's driver quality. Hopefully, their move to splitted driver (common kernel backend) will iron some of the wrinkles.

If I understood what Rich written here it may be even that Valve's stuff refocussed on something else. Probably, there are different reasons for the delays, and the Steam Controller is probably one of the major. It does not usually take so long to make a piece of hardware, but they have a hard nut to crack.

[matt_g]

Public, hard facts are what count. Devs putting up with broken drivers, crappy (if any) debuggers, etc. for 1.5% (or whatever) of the market is just not sustainable. Steamboxes are MIA (at the moment) and hope can only last so long. It's likely not even 1.5% market share for devs that go NVidia-only.

I keep hearing people complain about debuggers under Linux but I'm not sure I understand the issue. I use GDB professionally and I think its a fantastic tool I'm not a programmer I'm an engineer I write scientific modelling simulations mostly in Fortran and C but I imagine a lot of the issues I'm concerned about would be applicable to games - many matrices, fast high precision floating point operations etc.

I've grown up with GDB it was the tool we were taught to use at University - on Solaris workstations even - it was better than the Sun tools, back when all we had were HP RISC workstations GDB was the supported debugger by our vendor everyone in my industry knows GDB maybe I'm just a unix dinosaur blind to whats out there in the world but if you are going to complain at least articulate what is missing I'd be very surprised if it couldn't be extended to do what you need it to do.

[pal666]

Well, I don't think a developer can live on the 1.5% market share that Linux currently has.

of course he can. first, there is much less competition on linux, so he gets bigger share of that 1.5%. second, to port to linux from osx is many times simpler, than to port to 5% market share osx from windows, and still games are being ported to osx

[Creak]

Agreed with matt_g, but at an even higher level: please stop saying things out of nowhere or out of your mere experience and throw them at us like if it was the holy truth everyone should believe in. Bottom line: use real facts.

I've seen people here trying to find elements of facts about Valve based on the words of a guy that is not hired anymore in the company! Some other guys here are persuaded that nVidia cards and their proprietary drivers are the only one used to play games on Linux, or that they use Wine or even Dual-boot. Well, sorry to bother you, but your reality may be different than the one for the rest of us.

[Zan Lynx]

I keep hearing people complain about debuggers under Linux but I'm not sure I understand the issue ... maybe I'm just a unix dinosaur blind to whats out there in the world but if you are going to complain at least articulate what is missing I'd be very surprised if it couldn't be extended to do what you need it to do.

I also use GDB on Linux and I love it a lot. However, I've done some Windows programming so I might be able to explain what is missing.

Visual Studio is neat because you can hover over a variable and it displays the value. It also shows all the local variables, etc. And unlike GDB it has all the C++ STL display scripts included, you don't have to install a plugin package to dump a std::vector for example.

And windbg does a whole lot of neat things when you learn how to really use it. I like to read blogs like Raymond Chen's Old New Thing and NT Debugging and they often use debugger tricks. Some of the tricks windbg can pull off are really amazing. Yes, GDB can also do them with enough scripting added but like with the STL display, it isn't included by default. Some of the tricks I remember are dumping the state of all the kernel handles, showing what's waiting on mutexes, showing the thread TLS contents, recovering meaningful information from a scrobbled stack, etc.

[yakman2020]

of course he can. first, there is much less competition on linux, so he gets bigger share of that 1.5%. second, to port to linux from osx is many times simpler, than to port to 5% market share osx from windows, and still games are being ported to osx

+1.
Plus the major obstacle to a small company/developer putting out a product is not the cost of building the product, but the need for a store and the competition in the store for notice. In windows land you need to advertise, and there is no central store (really, I know they are doing one, but it really hasn't happened yet from what I can see). In iOS/Mac land you need to get through the gatekeepers, then advertise/"incent" the store so that searches will get you first rather than the other guy (if there is one). Word of mouth is not very powerful in that environment from what I can tell.

In linux land there is enough of a level field available that you can post, you can put things in the Ubuntu store, you can set up a ppa, in short you have some options that don't require $k to get get in the door.

I haven't heard anyone mention that linux is the anteroom to android, and the android market is *huge*, esp with new hardware coming out that very nearly equals the traditional desktop players.

[atmartens]

AMD drivers are getting a lot of flack. My 6850 runs TF2 great with the open source drivers. In about 3 years it's plausible that a PC, running Linux and with a high end AMD APU, will be a drop-in replacement for a console.

[pal666]

What's needed is a lot more pro-active activism and coddling upto NVIDIA.

what's needed is to cure you from masochism
nvidia does not release docs and does not pay developers to produce open driver, so it gets no money and no coding