Steam Linux Usage Came Up Short In January

[bridgman]

Do you see AMD fixing their drivers or assisting with the open source drivers so that my card might one day operate like it does in windows without having to build my own driver from assorted bits and pieces pulled from assorted kernels and packages and hope it boots up after doing so? I hope so. Maybe SteamOS if it pans out will force this.

You're kidding, right ? Please tell me you're kidding.

We've had dedicated AMD developers contributing to the open source drivers since the end of 2007.

[Kaiyoot]

You're kidding, right ? Please tell me you're kidding.

We've had dedicated AMD developers contributing to the open source drivers since the end of 2007.

Maybe so but that still doesn't help me with my 4850 video card that I bought in early 2009 and enjoyed for a couple of years before AMD went and stuck it into a legacy driver that then was left behind as the kernels advanced. Since then I've had to use the open source drivers with mixed results. Some stuff works, some doesn't. If Linux was more popular, the amount of people AMD would have working on this stuff would be greater and that would be good news for everyone who uses Linux.

[mmstick]

Maybe so but that still doesn't help me with my 4850 video card that I bought in early 2009 and enjoyed for a couple of years before AMD went and stuck it into a legacy driver that then was left behind as the kernels advanced. Since then I've had to use the open source drivers with mixed results. Some stuff works, some doesn't. If Linux was more popular, the amount of people AMD would have working on this stuff would be greater and that would be good news for everyone who uses Linux.

You're funny. Catalyst sucks for all graphics cards so who cares about using it? The open source drivers are faster and better anyways.

[grok]

You're funny. Catalyst sucks for all graphics cards so who cares about using it? The open source drivers are faster and better anyways.

Are you serious?, I thought closed drivers had triple the framerate in some cases. Catalysts are often said to have crap performance in 3D accelerated desktops (Gnome 3, Cinnamon etc.) though. So I guess that if you want to run games more demanding than Warcraft III on Wine and Counterstrike, a 2D desktop and Catalyst are the better option if you have an AMD/ATI card.

For now, I've given up on Steam because I run an old geforce 7 (low TDP, good enough performance but it lacks OpenGL features even with proprietary driver). I plan to upgrade to a geforce 9500GT (have a free one with blown out caps, but we can't find it currently). It's every bit as old as a 4850 and has the same features, but can run with the very latest proprietary drivers and Xorg.

[mmstick]

Are you serious?, I thought closed drivers had triple the framerate in some cases. Catalysts are often said to have crap performance in 3D accelerated desktops (Gnome 3, Cinnamon etc.) though. So I guess that if you want to run games more demanding than Warcraft III on Wine and Counterstrike, a 2D desktop and Catalyst are the better option if you have an AMD/ATI card.

For now, I've given up on Steam because I run an old geforce 7 (low TDP, good enough performance but it lacks OpenGL features even with proprietary driver). I plan to upgrade to a geforce 9500GT (have a free one with blown out caps, but we can't find it currently). It's every bit as old as a 4850 and has the same features, but can run with the very latest proprietary drivers and Xorg.

That might have been true six months ago, but not anymore... The open source radeon drivers have full OpenGL 3.3 support for Radeon HD 3000-7000 series so the Radeon HD 4000 has all of it's features supported, and runs much faster than Catalyst. Heck, TF2 runs smoothly even with a Radeon HD 4650M with maxed graphics at 1080p in a full server. The only place where Catalyst is 'slightly' faster is with RadeonSI graphics cards. So what if Catalyst gets 30FPS in Unigine Valley on Extreme HD? It has a lot of critical bugs which causes games to be unplayable, and consumes an entire CPU core due to a random bug. Meanwhile, it gets 20FPS in Unigine Valley with the open source drivers without any bugs at all. If you were to compare the open source radeon drivers with Catalyst 13.12, those were only capable of 15 FPS and even more unplayable stutter. The open source drivers have been getting major advancements every month while Catalyst seems to have made little to no progress at all over the last year. For example, altough we just got OpenGL 3.3, we should be getting a lot of VRAM optimization patches coming soon from curaga.

[curaga]

Company A has dedicated devs for years, has their full product range supported in free software, and has released documentation for the last ~6 generations depending how you count.

Company B dedicated one dev a month ago, and a week ago released a minor, basic contribution for a single mobile chip of theirs.

User flogs company A for doing less than B. The cognitive dissonance is strong in this one.

[curaga]

For example, altough we just got OpenGL 3.3, we should be getting a lot of VRAM optimization patches coming soon from curaga.

Way to pile on the pressure

[Kano]

@Kaiyoot

I tested an old HD 4550 yesterday with kernel 3.13, mesa 10.0.3 with some extra uvd patches and the card could run Killing Floor, L4D2 and Serious Sam 3 (well pretty slow, but your card is much faster). I even would prefer radeon oss over fglrx for newer cards like HD 5670, i dont have got a radeonsi based one, if somebody wants to send a sample to me feel free to contact me. Are you really sure that a NV 9500 GT would be faster for any game over a HD 4850 with current oss drivers? You can even use vdpau with H264/VC1 with your card...

[Kaiyoot]

Bash me all you want but I can only speak about my experience with my 4850. I don't have a Nvidia card so I have no experience with their Linux drivers. I have been using the Open Source driver ever since they canned the legacy driver. I have noticed some slight improvements in video quality (i.e. youtube) and everything else has been ok (Half Life, Portals, bunch of Indie games, ....) except for my latest experience with the Strife Beta. With my 4850 and the Open Source Drivers I was unable to play the game. The menu would load and I could load the first tutorial level but as soon as the level started I would get a segmentation fault crash. S2 Support said I had to use the propriety drivers (which as discussed I was unable to without jumping through hoops which wasn't worth the risk). So my AMD experience has been ok up until this point. Does that deserve my "Shame on you" to AMD? I still think so as while AMD has helped the open Source driver (as you have so kindly reminded me multiple times), they still dropped official support for a card that isn't that old and would be capable of playing most of today's games without issues. Do you think they dropped support for it because there was an alternative driver available which freed them up to put their limited manpower on other driver development? I don't know.

I'm quite confident that if I booted up Windows with my 4850 that Strife would work. Why after 5 years is Linux still struggling with video card issues like this if AMD's support has been so great?

Everything I've read related to the SteamOS points to Valve working with Nvidia and getting results superior to the equivalent windows experience. It appears that AMD is involved some how as well but I have not read much on how well that is going between Valve and AMD.

My point of the whole thing still remains that driver support from both AMD and Nvidia should drastically improve if SteamOS is successful. And based on the HumbleBundle numbers (which I think are low for the actual Linux Users) and the Steam Surveys (again low due to not a really random selection amongst all users according to everyone around here posts), I expect a big jump once Valve is "ready" to officially release SteamOS. It would make them look better since as soon as SteamOS goes golden, suddenly their numbers "magically" skyrocket and they prove to the world that SteamOS has changed gaming with its incredible numbers increase (this is a theory - no proof (yet)). Never mind that these numbers are supplied by Valve so they can tweak them however they want to and we just follow along. Does that matter? To me? No, I just want better drivers and a better gaming experience which in this scenario, regardless of what video card company you are using, things will get much better if SteamOS succeeds.

[Kaiyoot]

The cognitive dissonance is strong in this one.

I have no contradictory beliefs in this matter. I'd just rather talk about how the Linux numbers are possibly going to change with the release of SteamOS rather than nit-pic someone's personal experience with his 5 year old video card.

Going off-topic you guys are strong in <my Yoda impersonation is quite poor>.

Granted I have learned via this discussion that I'm better off where I am now with the oss than the Catalysts drivers which is good news seeing as I haven't been able to use the Catalysts drivers for the longest time.

Thanks!