Valve Reports Steam Linux Usage Fell Further In March

[dimko]

I haven't used Skype since 2005, when it was the only VOIP software not blocked by my campus.
My social life does not suffer of anything because of it (it'd be FB for me actually...)


Yes I can, and yes it would be true.

Then you don't have friends, just buddies

[Cyber Killer]

play something and type top to the terminal. Do you see why pa is shit. Last xfce update was over year ago so xfce is more stable than ubuntu beginner desktop. Ubuntu is slow.

Just tried this... pulseaudio takes 1% of cpu (old Athlon 64X2 4200+ 2x2,6GHz) and ~10MB of ram when running a game that is playing audio (running from steam in KDE, tried 2 different games to be sure). So the only thing that's shit here are your arguments.

Seriously... PA is badly integrated in Debian and derivatives, that's why it causes problems. Ever since I switched to OpenSUSE I never ever had a problem with PA. Do a test install on a small partition and see for yourself.

Plus the benefits it gives:
- software mixer - really needed for many integrated soundcards and for all USB soundcards (e.g. in usb headphones)
- per application sound control
- network streaming
- volume control from in-application (like lowering game sound volume when someone talks on mumble)

[juno]

thanks

[Kano]

Nvidia cards with GT200 chip have got built in HDMI Audio codecs, Nvidia series 9 cards used a SPDIF connection for this. I am not fully sure when AMD introduced it, but I think around HD 3000 series. ATI/AMD limited it usually to the HDMI ports, Nvidia allowed all DVI/HDMI ports.

[anda_skoa]

As this is already off-topic, can anyone tell in a few words what alsa and pulseaudio are doing?

ALSA is basically the sound driver architecture, it has different drivers for different audio hardware and exposes the hardware's capabilities to the user space software.

PA is such a user space software, its output goes to one or more ALSA devices.
PA's input are the output of one or more programs, which PA can optionally change (e.g. affect the volume), potentially mix (combine more than one input into one output) and route (send specific output to specific ALSA device).

"sound proxy" doesn't tell me much. Is ALSA comparable to DRM in graphics and PA to X?

I would say so, yes.

Is there hardware support (e.g. for sound card DSPs) in ALSA?

That's is main purpose.

And btw: do graphics cards really have dedicated audio hardware or are they just passing through sound from on-board (mainboard) audio?

I don't think graphics card have audio hardware, that is either on-board or in the form of audio cards.

While we talk about passing through - is bitstream passthrough (DTS, AC3, ...) to a A/V-Receiver possible with PA?

No idea.

Cheers,
_

[juno]

As this is already off-topic, can anyone tell in a few words what alsa and pulseaudio are doing? "sound proxy" doesn't tell me much. Is ALSA comparable to DRM in graphics and PA to X?
Is there hardware support (e.g. for sound card DSPs) in ALSA?
And btw: do graphics cards really have dedicated audio hardware or are they just passing through sound from on-board (mainboard) audio? While we talk about passing through - is bitstream passthrough (DTS, AC3, ...) to a A/V-Receiver possible with PA?

[anda_skoa]

All them do the same thing, routes audio from the app towards hardware.

They don't do the same thing, they participate in the whole pipeline, each at a different stage.

Cheers,
_

[Kano]

You must be the only one that can figure out a difference of 1 % in multicore usage - without top this is impossible! PA does not introduce delays in the range somebody mentioned, if that happens then it must be completely wrong configured. Most likely with dmix (which is basically also a software emulation in many cases) - alsa double routing or whatever which is not needed. If you use alsa output for mplayer (or mpv) or other media players instead of pulse then it is your fault - this requires an extra wrapper. Some games ship old versions of openal without pulse support, replace those with a symlink and all is fine. It's not the CPU usage that matters, the functionality matters, you can use pavucontrol and switch input/outputs on the fly, (un-)mute app specific like if you run a game in the background it can be muted easyly. My CPUs are usually idling most of the time, if that costs just 1% why not? Do you think a game needs 100% on all cores? That would be 100% * # cores and thats just very unlikely - usually only 1 thread is maxed out - and thats not because of PA. Learn to use PA instead of making stupid remarks about it! That also means: use pulse output with wine-staging!

[b15hop]

Typical for Linux users. Spam/cry every site for software but never buy anything.

Yeah like for example Apple. You pay a crap load for outdated hardware, pay for sub par performance, and then end up with more advertising on your paid and bloated software.... On top of that, if you don't pay for that new bit of apple hardware, you might end up left with a brick because that new iOS update is needed because your paid app no longer works. Oh well. Better pay for a new iPhone.... Heh.

[b15hop]

Oh! nice answer, you don't realize how much this tells me about you:
1 - You were/are a windows user (this is not bad, but ex-windows users are more critcs; familiarity bias);
2 - You never coded anything;
3 - Probably you like linux because is free of charge;
4 - You have problem to understand freedom;
5 - You have less respect the people on the backstage(devs) and their opinion;
6 - You don't know how to act as part of freedom in community (I had some trouble to teach myself too);

I have no problem in dealing with it, but I must to tell you something, if you don't fill a bug form they will never know what happened (I know, a lots of newcomers don't know how to do and as veteran users we need to teach them before is too late), to our community survive, information is crucial.

Why destruct when we can construct?
Why demolish when we can fix?
You will possibly disagree with me, but attacking each other will make us colapse, we are community driven and as we see in any world history book, too much disagreement makes everything fall apart.
As part of this incredible community we need to never forget that our freedom is at stake and teamwork is needed to reach the victory, even if you don't like one teammate pulseaudio, which for me is a good player.

This guy has a point you know. I have played Dota 2 on a windows machine and on Linux and experienced input lag. Linux should in theory should have less lag than windows. I remember running Unreal Tournament x64bit back in the day, it ran far better on Linux than it ever did on windows. So why is it now with steam and their persistent use of 32bit? I wonder if it's a game related thing rather than a Linux thing. Or is it just steam... Who knows. I don't see how understanding programming C or C++ is going to improve your gaming experience on Linux anyway. Users just want to use the computer to do stuff. Not everyone is a developer. This mentality is the biggest issue for the Linux community. Just because I develop software, doesn't make the next person a developer. What if they just want something simple like Ubuntu with word processing and a bit of gaming? Where does it say explicitly that they need to be game developers?