Valve Reports Steam Linux Usage Fell Further In March

[sterky]

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.

So im running pulseaudio for general use, gaming and most of the time using my pc,
for bitperfect audio i have audacious set to use my dac directly with alsa.
Still i have configured pulse to use higher quality resampling, since it does make a difference in audio quality,
my pulse settings are here:

enable-remixing = no
enable-lfe-remixing = no
lfe-crossover-freq = 0
resample-method= speex-float-10
default-sample-format = float32ne
default-sample-rate = 44100
alternate-sample-rate = 48000
default-sample-channels = 2
default-channel-map = front-left,front-right

Now im using 8 core AMD FX-8320 cpu, currently running at stock 3.5GHz speed.
Playing just youtube in browser i can see pulseaudio going up to 2% of cpu in top, firing up Shadow Warrior and also leaving youtube playing, i can see pulseaudio going up to 9% of cpu in top, considering that i have 800% of cpu to use, where is the problem? What would it give me, if pulse would use a few % less cpu?

[rewik]

My machine is fine when pulseaudio is compeletly removed.
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/lin...-needs-repair/
Do not repair pa, kill the project. They have had almost 10 years time to fix the shit.
Jack Wallen writes 2015 that after configuration pa is not working bueno. Gstreamer, alsa and jackd works without configuration. Gstreamer is used in embedded devices so it is much better software than pa.

You're comparing totally different software.
Gstreamer - multimedia framework, designed to decode media files and send them to playback. It has nothing to do with any other software you mention other than using them as output sinks.
Pulseaudio - sound multiplexer, designed to multiplex X applications playing on Y sound cards, with individual volume control and the ability to switch between sound cards on the fly (internal card, bluetooth headset, USB headset, etc.) it takes input from applications, remixes it to a format understood by hardware and sends it to the driver
JACK - audio connection kit, it takes input from hardware, passes sound from one application to another or back to the hardware (via a driver). Designed for low latency and professional audio processing.
ALSA - a driver API, allows direct access to hardware, may block other applications to access the soundcard at the same time if additional software mixing is not enabled (though I think that by now dmix is enabled by default on analogue outputs unless otherwise specified).

Also the article you link to is from 2013.03.03, so it's 3 years old now

[Kano]

@debianxfce

Many games that Michael benchmarked hit a CPU limit with a 3 (Turbo 3.5) GHz Intel CPU. Of course with a slower GFX card or a higher resolution it is less likely to hit that limit but the reason why this happens is that at least one thread is at 100 % load. As those games usually are not that extremely CPU limited with Windows you can conclude that for Linux gaming you should use a CPU with fast per core performance and at least 3 cores (one more than needed for Windows, thats why Dual Core comparions are not optimal between W+L). I have got no idea if PD 2 would be faster with Windows as I only played it with Linux and it was fast enough. 10 % just for PA like dimko mentioned is not realistic. You can play everything with AMD CPUs but performance/core/price is most likely worse with AMD compared to Intel i5 and AMD needed Mantle (soon DX12/Vulkan) to sell their CPUs to gamers.

[duby229]

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

That's not true exactly, freedom doesn't have anything to do with cost. IMO as long as it is required for the computer to function it should be open source. But I'll gladly use and pay for commercial software. For me personally that primarily means games because I'm a gamer, but other OSS supporters have a wider range of interests where commercial software is fine.

I've used the commercial NX remote desktop software in the past, because its basis is open source and has perfectly valid commercial usage.

[totex71]

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

Speak for yourself. You wanna pay for something thats worse than the free alternative? I pay for anything as long as it supports linux and is actually "worth paying for".

[mike4]

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

[duby229]

I would, but skype... YOu ignore this = 0 social life.
And every now and then really good games on Steam pop up that dont work on ALSA. Pulse is a fucking cancer.

Thankfully my social circle is pretty intelligent. I don't have that problem.... I just can't imagine socializing through skype, some people must have no life.

[humbug]

I gave up on Steam on Linux, since Valve is very clear thet they don't care if it works on GNU/Linux, they only care about SteamOS. Instead of using your system's installed libraries, it downloads the "Steam Runtime", hundreds of megabytes of outdated libraries based on Ubuntu 12.04. That's just bizarre, and causes multitude of issues on up-to-date systems.

Michael- can you get a comment on this from your valve contacts? Because this seems to be the most common complaint from Linux steam users.

[dimko]

IMO people should boycott apps built against PA. Just don't use them and then don't worry about it. PA does have some conveniences, I do use it on my laptop because It makes it easy to get higher volume on those tiny speakers.... But that is not usage where high quality matters.... So for most people they really --shouldn't-- be using PA at all. But for those people that do, oh well, let em'.

I would, but skype... YOu ignore this = 0 social life.
And every now and then really good games on Steam pop up that dont work on ALSA. Pulse is a fucking cancer.

[wodencafe]

I wonder if people running and buying from wine are inadvertently doing a disservice to Linux by under-representing to game devs how many Linux gamers are out there.

Yes and no, I imagine a lot of Linux Steam gamers are in a position like myself, where there are some games that work better in the native Linux Steam client, and others that work better (or only work) in Wine Steam.

As long as they run the win32 build of a game, it should count as Windows,
You could see them as a potential Linux market, but if they're already happily using the windows build, there is no real incentive to develop Linux games for them..

Let's be real, Wine for gaming is a D3D -> OpenGL translation layer, and you don't get that for free.

If all the Steam games functioned correctly in Linux Steam AND Wine Steam, I would use Linux Steam because as a gamer, because I want the best performance. That's the incentive.

That, and modern cross platform game engines make it so easy to target multiple platforms now. Even just a 1% market share is a lot of $ for a big game title.

The other unfortunate aspect of having to bring in Wine, and I hate to say this, but it's adding yet another member to the group of "entities that have to work together to make the game run".

So we have Linux, Mesa, Steam, The Game, and Wine. It's another point of failure.