Originally posted by juanrga
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Valve would be working with Nvidia to make sure any big issues are fixed, as they have been doing up to this point. There's always going to be a security issue at some point in the pipeline, but the raw performance is too good to let go of. Do you think normal users would care about possible but not probable security issues (probably none worse than would be faced in Windows or any other console) when the performance is several times more potent on the non-free solution? Probably not.
Of course it would be GREAT if Nvidia and AMD started putting more work into a foss driver, but Valve needs to balance being a good FOSS citizen with having the most functional platform it can. Other companies that work with Linux do the same, some better than others. In this case, not going with Windows actually proved to have not only ideological wins, but also real world performance gains and user experience improvements in some ways. Linux was clearly the better choice for them, even though they need to pick up games along the way. Realistically, I don't doubt they can pull that off.
The downside of mantle as I understand it, is it only works with AMD cards (cutting down on user choice) and isn't nearly as cross-platform.
I don't know why they picked the CPU/vram/psu exactly, or why all the damn ram. 16 gigs seems like overkill I think. But I dont think many games have been made to make use of over 4 cores, so Intel CPU's might not be that terrible of a choice. Maybe Intel is cutting them a good deal? I dunno.
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