Gabe Newell Showing Valve On Linux To Partners

[kwahoo]

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

[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Considering I can play Trine 2 and Amnesia fine with my (now out of date) graphics stack on Fedora 16 with R600g and a Radeon HD 4670, I somehow doubt that Valve's catalogue will put that much more of a strain on it, especially it's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.

[liam]

RedHat's core business is support, targeted at companies. While it would be nice for them to release a version of RHEL for gaming, it just wouldn't happen - it's too far removed from what they do. The best you'd get is a Fedora spin for gaming that would be mostly community maintained anyway.

entropy's post is dead on the money too. Valve would probably want to target a more recent kernel and graphics stack then what RHEL would offer. Larabel makes it sound like they're interested in targeting some of the open source driver stack aswell (e.g. the article hinting that Valve would want to get rid of the S3TC patent issue).

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. 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.

[liam]

This sounds very good if you consider binary graphics drivers only.
But wouldn't that mean this "slowly moving target" cannot benefit from the (relatively) fast moving open graphics stack?
If Michael is right, VALVE does not want to rely solely on binary drivers. It's not even possible for intel GPUs.

Yeah, I was only looking at the blobs as that seems to be a big concern and you can be pretty certain amd/nvidia drivers will work well since this is probably one of the very distros they actively test against.
As for the slow moving stack, ask Airlie about that, but they do keep the stack pretty modern by careful back-porting.
The intel drivers, of course, would work fine.

[Kamikaze]

RedHat's core business is support, targeted at companies. While it would be nice for them to release a version of RHEL for gaming, it just wouldn't happen - it's too far removed from what they do. The best you'd get is a Fedora spin for gaming that would be mostly community maintained anyway.

entropy's post is dead on the money too. Valve would probably want to target a more recent kernel and graphics stack then what RHEL would offer. Larabel makes it sound like they're interested in targeting some of the open source driver stack aswell (e.g. the article hinting that Valve would want to get rid of the S3TC patent issue).

[entropy]

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.

This sounds very good if you consider binary graphics drivers only.
But wouldn't that mean this "slowly moving target" cannot benefit from the (relatively) fast moving open graphics stack?
If Michael is right, VALVE does not want to rely solely on binary drivers. It's not even possible for intel GPUs.

[liam]

I am not a huge fan of it either but the problem is "deeper" in a way. The package distribution model of linux hurts it more than anything else IMO. Graphics drivers is the other one.

Although i ll really understand it if Valve chooses to go with whats the most popular distro at the moment.

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.

[liam]

From what we know so far, it'll be Ubuntu instead - which, I agree, is a bit unfortunate.

Well, I did say IF they were smart

[89c51]

Just personal taste, I've to admit.

I am not a huge fan of it either but the problem is "deeper" in a way. The package distribution model of linux hurts it more than anything else IMO. Graphics drivers is the other one.

Although i ll really understand it if Valve chooses to go with whats the most popular distro at the moment.

[entropy]

the reason?

Just personal taste, I've to admit.