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Steam Machines Prototypes: Intel CPU, NVIDIA GPU

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  • brosis
    replied
    Originally posted by Gps4l View Post
    Have you seen the benchmarks on this site ?

    I am a fan of opensource, but the drivers aren't good enough for games.

    I wonder not just about you, but more people on this site.

    Games have brought pc's to their knees for years now, at least the new AAA games.

    Then you want them to use a driver that can't even get close to the closed source driver ?
    Have you read my post completely before posting? No, you haven't - then why ask questions about my post before reading?

    The open drivers are sufficiently fast. The problem is newer titles using OpenGL4+, which is not yet supported by MESA. Still not many do this.
    But IF Valve had expressed their wish to use open drivers, they are sufficient entity to affect AMD development policy. Then, the required features would land.

    Also, I question all your logical thinking. Can you please provide association between: Good games by gamers judgment; good games because some critic networks tell this (AAA++*^10+10,000 or whatever); games that put pc to knees vs games that put mind to knees. For Valve - all this is completely unrelated. Their effort is to provide independent, affordable platform that can deliver wide or at least sufficient performance field. The AAA-lity of games does not interest them.

    Like I said, open drivers still can't provide possibly required features - but Valve are the ones who could affect that. Tad of stupidity they didn't, cause in longer term nvidia is worse choice and mesa could have really used their patronage.

    Originally posted by Krysto View Post
    Would've preferred they used AMD APU's with HSA and Mantle API. You could squeeze a lot more power out of that, for a much lower price.
    Mantle is windows only, so its stupidity of AMD. And double stupidity, because they, when ever, would try to put in into fglrx instead of open radeon, which is head-against-wall bumping.
    Last edited by brosis; 06 October 2013, 08:00 AM.

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  • Krysto
    replied
    Would've preferred they used AMD APU's with HSA and Mantle API. You could squeeze a lot more power out of that, for a much lower price.

    Leave a comment:


  • liam
    replied
    Originally posted by johnc View Post
    Isn't X a display server?

    What am I missing here?
    As I understand it, from a really high level, X is an ipc concerned with windowing systems. You can largely bypass X by using dri enabled clients. Wayland/Mir make things much simpler by being designed to accomodate just such clients, but wayland still has been designed to handle certain concepts that the buffers could request (dragged/dropped, input, resizing, etc). However, if you don't need windowing at all you could just use the built-in kernel evdev to grab inputs and handle the rest with a "fullscreen" ogl environment (adopted something that is mir/wayland compatible would relieve them from having to write a decent amount of code to handle interactions but they've experience developing games so I imagine that wouldn't be too hard for them).
    That's how I understand it, but I could be wrong.

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  • johnc
    replied
    Originally posted by liam View Post
    I never claimed X was a WM. My point was that using the distros is useful b/c you get a whole bunch of apps for free. However, SteamOS looks like it is intending to run only that giant 10' screen interface and thus doesn't need to make use of all the apps in the repos and thus doesn't need windows or X. You certainly don't need X to write a window manager but I'm not aware of any WM in linux that doesn't make use of xlib in some fashion (ignoring upcoming mir/wayland wms).
    XBMC has at least two install modes to my knowledge: stand-alone and app. For stand-alone I just looked at openelec and that has X dependencies.
    I'd expect steam to just write their interface using sdl since, as I understand it, one of their employees is the original dev of it, and they don't need the backwards compatibility of apps that you would need X for.
    Isn't X a display server?

    What am I missing here?

    Leave a comment:


  • liam
    replied
    Originally posted by johnc View Post
    Xorg isn't a window manager so I'm not following your question.

    But otherwise yeah, they could probably skip a whole window manager / shell setup. Is that how XBMC does it?
    I never claimed X was a WM. My point was that using the distros is useful b/c you get a whole bunch of apps for free. However, SteamOS looks like it is intending to run only that giant 10' screen interface and thus doesn't need to make use of all the apps in the repos and thus doesn't need windows or X. You certainly don't need X to write a window manager but I'm not aware of any WM in linux that doesn't make use of xlib in some fashion (ignoring upcoming mir/wayland wms).
    XBMC has at least two install modes to my knowledge: stand-alone and app. For stand-alone I just looked at openelec and that has X dependencies.
    I'd expect steam to just write their interface using sdl since, as I understand it, one of their employees is the original dev of it, and they don't need the backwards compatibility of apps that you would need X for.

    Leave a comment:


  • Luis
    replied
    Originally posted by IanS View Post
    Sigh, it would be nice if you would at least attempt to read through the GPL and understand the basics of how the kernel operates before you decide to regurgitate the same old nonsense about them. There is nothing in the GPL that prevents GPL'd programs from being distributed along side closed source programs. The GPL says that closed source programs can't link to GPL'd shared libraries, it says nothing at all about loading a closed source binary module at run-time into a GPL'd program. Binary blobs are basically self-contained plug-ins and neither they nor the kernel do any linking, dynamic or static, against each other and are therefore not within the scope of the GPL.

    Sources:
    How to Make a Website with free web hosting services & cheap web hosting for ecommerce & small business hosting. Create & Make a Free Website with Affordable web hosting provider free website promotion tools & web stats. Free Website Builder, Templates, & Best Free Web Hosting. How to Create a Website


    Preamble The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works. The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your fr…


    [Edit: Also, the GPL does not say you have to distribute the source when you ship binaries, only that you must make the source available in a manner that anyone can reasonably get a copy if they so wish, otherwise all the distros would be in hot water as nearly none of them include source on their images. I know this is probably a misunderstanding due to your poor use of English, but just in case it wasn't I wanted to clarify that point.]
    I always appreciate free lessons from experts in law, programming and English language, thanks!

    If only you would apply those lessons to yourself... I mean, really, you only had to read those links that you so kindly provided. You were so close to it, and yet... But keep trying. Self improvement is an honorable quest too (apart from trying to improve others, as you already do). In this particular case, for example, a well informed user has already provided an answer that could be quite useful for anyone willing to learn, and hopefully he's done so by using a language that might meet your standards. What's more: as in your case, he's not charging for it either, so go get it!

    I myself am looking forward for your next lesson, which I'm sure will be as interesting as the previous one, If not more. I only wonder on which subject it's going to be this time...

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  • Gps4l
    replied
    Originally posted by brosis View Post
    Thats actually a tad stupid from Valve. Maybe.

    Could have supported opensource drivers instead, since they were talking about SteamOS being opensource. That would deliver Wayland to you and faster, cheaper development. Cross company cooperation would have been sweet to customer wallet and long term stability.
    Have you seen the benchmarks on this site ?

    I am a fan of opensource, but the drivers aren't good enough for games.

    I wonder not just about you, but more people on this site.

    Games have brought pc's to their knees for years now, at least the new AAA games.

    Then you want them to use a driver that can't even get close to the closed source driver ?

    Leave a comment:


  • Bathroom Humor
    replied
    Originally posted by juanrga View Post
    I also was talking about them. Linus criticism was because Nvidia refuses to answer kernel developers questions.
    That doesn't change the matter of those being the best drivers to go with.
    If they were being ideological, they'd slap in some AMD cards with FOSS drivers, and I'm sure they would right now if it were the practical solution. But it's not.
    Fortunately, it's not like using their non-free drivers is going to stop users from doing or using whatever hardware or software they want to, and won't stop Valve from making this a success. They are just shooting for the best-case scenario.

    Leave a comment:


  • Mike Frett
    replied
    Maybe I'll buy an Nvidia card, maybe. But I'm definitely NOT going to buy an overpriced Intel CPU. Sorry Valve, I'm sticking with AMD on the CPU part.

    Leave a comment:


  • pingufunkybeat
    replied
    Originally posted by brosis View Post
    Nvidia driver is clearly not derivate work. Being derivate means taking something and expanding it. Nvidia driver on the contrary is a bridge between nvidia GPU and $kernel. Could be any $kernel. The driver without GPU is nothing. This also distinguishes DRI, Gallium and nvidia, and puts some specific light on the latter. For the bridge to work, it needs some open interfaces. GPL does not want those interfaces start acting like octopus tentacles, sucking many parts of free code into blob - thats about it. Whether one use/ship nvidia or not, is not questioned. That aspect and backdoor/dependence/trap one, ofc. The problem is - modern programming profits from intensive interoperability very much, but management wants to sell it as proprietary parts instead. The day nvidia realizes its position on the proprietary is its own major income hinderer, it will be a big leap forward.
    I understand this position, I'm just telling you that it's not the only position out there.

    Here, for example, is what Linus Torvalds has to say about GPL and kernel drivers:

    Originally posted by Linux Torvalds
    There is nothing in the kernel license that allows modules to be non-GPLd.

    The only thing that allows for non-GPL modules is copyright law, and in particular the "derived work" issue. A vendor who distributes non-GPL modules is not protected by the module interface per se, and should feel very confident that they can show in a court of law that the code is not derived.

    The module interface has never been documented or meant to be a GPL barrier. The COPYING clearly states that the system call layer is such a barrier, so if you do your work in user land you're not in any way beholden to the GPL. The module interfaces are not system calls: there are system calls used to install them, but the actual interfaces are not.

    The original binary-only modules were for things that were pre-existing works of code, i.e., drivers and filesystems ported from other operating systems, which thus could clearly be argued to not be derived works, and the original limited export table also acted somewhat as a barrier to show a level of distance.

    In short, Crispin: I'm going to apply the patch, and, if you as a copyright holder of that file disagree, I will simply remove all of he LSM code from the kernel. I think it's very clear that an LSM module is a derived work, and thus copyright law and the GPL are not in any way unclear about it.

    If people think they can avoid the GPL by using function pointers, they are wrong. And they have always been wrong.


    Alan Cox is even more strict on this, IIRC.

    Frankly, I'm surprised that people STILL don't know this and go on about linking, which is not in the GPL at all. The only thing that matters is whether the driver is derivative of the kernel.

    FSF is not *evil* organisation, but strictly on side of users.
    The FSF does not hold the copyright on the Linux kernel so it's not their battle.

    Any single one of Linux copyright holders could sue a company which violated the kernel's license.

    Most Linux distros do not ship binary blobs, but provide software to make downloading and installing them easier. There's a reason for this.
    Last edited by pingufunkybeat; 05 October 2013, 03:29 PM.

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