Gabe Newell Showing Valve On Linux To Partners

[kwahoo]

Considering I can play Trine 2 and Amnesia fine with my (now out of date) graphics stack on Fedora 16 with R600g and a Radeon HD 4670, I somehow doubt that Valve's catalogue will put that much more of a strain on it, especially it's back catalogue. It is not like Source is all that graphically advanced an engine anymore, when compared to what is available now.

Uh, It seems that moderator doesn't like links in posts... but I benchmarked 6670 in Half-life 2 @ 1920x1080 (highest settings without AA and AF) and got about 60 fps using R600g.

[kwahoo]

Yes, it is. Small comparison Catalyst vs Open source (my own timedemo):

[kwahoo]

Yes, it is. Ask Google (there is a moderation failutere on Phoronix:-) for wkupiesila r600g vs catalyst and use Google Translate for more info. I used my custom demo instead PTS.

[89c51]

Again, if you go with a truly stable distro like a RHEL clone, these problems are substantially lessened. Now, what could be interesting is if Red Hat offered a Gamer Edition devoid of the certifications that RHEL has (and a major source of the cost of RHEL) and configured for an ideal gamer experience (perhaps with their real time messaging kernel). I would pay a reasonable fee for that, and companies have a very slow moving target to their wares.
One more thing: by creating a distro that is primarily for gaming (but is obviously still general purpose), it might incentivize people to move from Windows. Also, the installed base of Linux is not so great, or monolithic, that it makes sense targeting a single distro right now, especially since stability problems would still exist.

What i was trying to point out is not the lack of stability but the lack of convenience.

[kraftman]

Perhaps the tone of my post was a bit on the snarky side -- I guess my frustration cup hath runneth over recently. But I think it is valid to say that Linux is not ready for gaming enthusiasts (Valve's primary market), unless those gamers happen to be familiar with all the idiosyncrasies of Linux (which is a tiny user base to begin with -- Venn diagram and all).

You mentioned the LTS... Shortly after I installed it, a new kernel was pushed out. Install... Reboot... Blinking cursor. Okay, I know what's wrong there (since I'm quite familiar with the problem), and yes, this isn't directly of Valve's concern. But if Valve is looking to move their customers from Windows to Linux (perhaps to avoid the Windows app store), then we can all be sure that newcomers are not going to tolerate blinking-cursors-on-reboot.

While I can handle these kinds of quirks quite easily, I have to admit that even I get frustrated at times... When I'm just looking to do X but a roadblock is thrown up and I have to waste my time fixing something before I can get the job done.

I'm just saying that what we have currently is nowhere near good enough for anything other than hacker and hobbyist adoption... and playing ostrich does not make any of the problems go away.

Keep in mind there are millions of Ubuntu users who doesn't have such problems. There's always some fault tolerance when comes to hardware and it seems Ubuntu is in the best position to become the most error prone distribution. It will be great to have Ubuntu certified hardware to make users sure they won't get into such problems. Btw. your problem seems to be more likely Unity or graphic driver issue.

[kraftman]

If valve is smart, they'll use rhel as the supported target. That's really the only option. No one other linux distribution, aside from, perhaps, Debian, has their QA resources. To be clear, rhel means rhel clones including centis, scientific linux and oracle's linux.

No, because Ubuntu is the most popular desktop distribution. It's also much easier to install codecs and proprietary drivers in Ubuntu. Valve's decision to support Ubuntu automatically means it will get much more testing.

[89c51]

Yes, it is. Ask Google (there is a moderation failutere on Phoronix:-) for wkupiesila r600g vs catalyst and use Google Translate for more info. I used my custom demo instead PTS.

http://wkupiesila.blogspot.gr/2012/07/catalyst-kontra-r600-w-half-life-2wine.html

You can post links after a few posts (don't know the exact number). I believe this is what you wanted to link.

[Dukenukemx]

Yes, it is. Small comparison Catalyst vs Open source (my own timedemo):

That seems very CPU limited.

[MonkeyPaw]

That seems very CPU limited.

Source games are generally CPU heavy, especially the earlier games where the polycount is lower. Portal 2 is a better game to try if you really want to give the GPU a challenge.

[Kamikaze]

I never claimed this would happen, only that RH would be in the best position for this sort of thing. Aside from that, it really isn't that far from what they do. Obviously their main source of income is support for RHEL along with upselling of their virt stack and JBoss, but they've really already done the hard work needed for this sort of thing with RHEL.

I agree about the support & jboss, and I do think they have the best QA'd and stable distro, however I still think it's quite distant and unlikely from their core goals as a business. Though I'd love to be proven wrong and see that the "Red Hat Desktop" edition they have was actually a long term plan and push they were waiting to get around to

The big reason it wouldn't happen is the vast increase in user support they would have to accomodate, and that, along with the small fee I supposed, would prevent this from happening.
Lastly, as I said, you can ask Dave Airlie but I'm fairly certain they back-port the graphic stack as much as possible, and, really, that isn't the issue here since these would be running the blobs for max performance otherwise you'd have a hard time convincing window's gamers to switch.

I'm not really across the graphics stack of RHEL at all, but would love to ask David Airlie the question, because it would imply there's a benefit for Red Hat to do so.. I guess David Airlie being an employee of Red Hat implies there's a benefit, but I don't really see it in terms of what they do??

Only slightly relevant -- but I noticed the last support request I filed with RH recently was found to be due to a bug in the kernel that was actually fixed in 3.0, but hadn't been back-ported. Because of things like this I just figured the majority of libs and the kernel worked like that in RHEL... Basically that they'd only back-port security fixes, major bugs, perhaps major performance enhancements, or if you report them - smaller bugs that affect their customers. e.g. I wouldn't see them backporting fixes to the graphics stack unless their business clients are really using the open source stack.