Hardware

[Joshua]

http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamOS/

Thousands of games, millions of users. Everything you love about Steam.
Available soon as a free operating system designed for the TV and the living room.

Steam is coming to a new operating system.
As we’ve been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we’ve come to the conclusion that the
environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself.
SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen.
It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines.

Living room & Steam
Finally, you don’t have to give up your favorite games, your online friends, and all the Steam features you love just to play on the big screen. SteamOS, running on any living room machine, will provide access to the best games and user-generated content available.

Fast forward
In SteamOS, we have achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing, and we’re now targeting audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level. Game developers are already taking advantage of these gains as they target SteamOS for their new releases.

Cooperating system
Steam is not a one-way content broadcast channel, it’s a collaborative many-to-many entertainment platform, in which each participant is a multiplier of the experience for everyone else. With SteamOS, “openness” means that the hardware industry can iterate in the living room at a much faster pace than they’ve been able to. Content creators can connect directly to their customers. Users can alter or replace any part of the software or hardware they want. Gamers are empowered to join in the creation of the games they love. SteamOS will continue to evolve, but will remain an environment designed to foster these kinds of innovation.

In-home Streaming
You can play all your Windows and Mac games on your SteamOS machine, too. Just turn on your existing computer and run Steam as you always have - then your SteamOS machine can stream those games over your home network straight to your TV!

Music, TV, Movies
We’re working with many of the media services you know and love. Soon we will begin bringing them online, allowing you to access your favorite music and video with Steam and SteamOS.

Family Sharing
In the past, sharing Steam games with your family members was hard. Now you can share the games you love with the people you love. Family Sharing allows you to take turns playing one another’s games while earning your own Steam achievements and saving your individual game progress to the Steam cloud.

Family Options
The living-room is family territory. That’s great, but you don’t want to see your parents’ games in your library. Soon, families will have more control over what titles get seen by whom, and more features to allow everyone in the house to get the most out of their Steam libraries.

All the games you love
Hundreds of great games are already running natively on SteamOS. Watch for announcements in the coming weeks about all the AAA titles coming natively to SteamOS in 2014. Access the full Steam catalog of nearly 3000 games and desktop software titles via in-home streaming.

Over 50 million friends
Steam users are what makes gaming on Steam fun. Meet new people, join game groups, form clans, chat in-game and dive into Game Hubs, the center of activity for all your favorite games.

Workshop
The creative energy of Steam users takes shape in the Workshop - your one-stop shop for the best add-ons available. Here you can create, discover, and download a nearly endless supply of top-quality user-created content.

A cross-platform cloud
Seamless content delivery, storage you don’t have to think about and automatic updates to everything. Switch machines and pick up your game where you left off, and don’t worry about saving your preferences. It’s all in the Steam Cloud.

Constantly evolving
Steam itself has been a constantly evolving service since its debut in 2003. SteamOS will continue to deliver not only valuable game updates directly from content makers, but also regular additions and new features to the OS itself.

Worldwide
Steam is in 185 countries and has been translated into 25 languages. As a truly global platform, Steam, and now SteamOS, brings entertainment to an audience without borders.

BIG caveat regarding the "hundreds of great games" already running natively on SteamOS: the overwhelming majority of these games are hippie games, as well as mind-bogglingly retarded simshit like "Euro Truck Simulator" lolol. http://store.steampowered.com/browse/linux/

But as Gabe Newell recently announced that "Linux is the future of gaming" I think their hope is that proper game developers will eventually start coding real games natively for the platform after the Steam Box gains common acceptance, with the streaming option filling the gap in the meantime. So we'll see what happens.

[Joshua]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/20 ... room-wars/ (see also the Erik Kain topic)

It’s also possible that Valve is taking the long, long view with SteamOS.

If, as many predict, consoles are in their last generation, it may be the right time to plant this kind of seed. Certainly Valve is right to think of Steam as more than just a gaming distribution service, but rather an ecosystem unto itself. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a future version of nVidia’s Shield handheld device adopt SteamOS instead of Android, for instance; and it’s possible that Steam as a platform will spread into other technologies as well.

But the long, long view is risky and shrouded in the fog of unpredictability.

"Possible" that Valve is taking the "long, long" view with SteamOS? What other view could they possibly have by proposing an entirely different operating system?!

Anyway, how successful SteamOS turns out to be will depend very much, I think, on how open the platform is. The openness of the Linux kernel and the core toolchain is protected by copyright (a manipulation of copyright law that the hippies call "copyleft" but has so far mainly benefited corporations, who rely on it almost exclusively for servers and data centers). The thing with any open-source platform that has big corporate backing is that such projects are extremely difficult to kill, due to said licensing restrictions. If the original developer abandons it, anyone else is legally guaranteed to be able to take the source code, improve on it, and release the result as a new product. And if it's worth developing, someone always does. In contrast, major proprietary software products tank as soon as the company who made it tanks.

Regarding the Linux architecture they're basing it on: it now runs virtually everything -- except for your desktop computer. It's a monstrous kernel with tons of goofy hacks to make things work the way they do, but it has an astronomical rate of development. We'd be at Windows 8.7 by now if Microsoft released new versions of Windows at the same rate. Because of this it has a tendency to take over everything. Google tried forking the kernel when they made Android, but had to go back to the Linux kernel when they realized they couldn't keep up with the pace of development.

Mac OS X, iOS, and the PS4's operating system are all based on FreeBSD, however, whose licensing allows for the operating system to be converted by anyone into a fully proprietary product -- forbidden by copyleft licensing that Linux uses. (Other than that it's very similar.) It's interesting to see how this will all play out, and in general I prefer FreeBSD's model since it's more "free" (and their project is also a lot more organized). But I have a feeling an open "free-for-all" style platform based on Linux like SteamOS will eventually end up becoming too big an enemy for corporations to fight all by themselves with their little OSes developed by MERELY a couple hundred people....

[icycalm]

You make Linux sound like some awesome thing. Meanwhile, I have still to hear of a Linux-exclusive game (or even application) that's worth trying, and last I heard Linux-native games ran slower than their Windows versions lol. Apart from server application or whatnot, Linux seems to me the most pointless operating system ever. I have an article almost written about that. Don't know if I am going to finish it, but it would have been called "On Why Linux and Valve Suck, and The Myth of Open Source Superiority".

[icycalm]

And by the way, SteamOS isn't Linux. It may be based on Linux, but that's beside the point. And the Eurofighter may be based on the Wright brothers' plane but it's not made by the Wright brothers. If Valve or Sony or Apple or whoever are benefiting from the free work of dudes who have nothing better to do in their lives than develop random code for free, that's all well and good for them, but THE ACTUAL SOFTWARE THAT I USE is not open source. It is developed and owned by corporations, AND THAT'S WHY IT WORKS AND IS USEFUL, while everyone and their little brother will tell you that Linux is a nightmare to so much as INSTALL, never mind run anything.

Maybe I should get around to finishing that article soon.

[Joshua]

I will fight you on this! Well, sort of.

I completely agree with your stance on corporations. It's just that the Linux kernel IS developed and owned primarily by corporations. Most kernel developers are paid by companies like IBM, Red Hat, Intel, and even Microsoft in 2012. The kernel's gatekeeper, Linus Torvalds, isn't affiliated with any of them, but he makes about $10 million a year regardless.

And many, if not most, high-quality open-source software projects have some corporation (or government agency), or several, looming behind them somewhere. Red Hat behind GNOME, Nokia behind KDE, the NSA behind SELinux, Google behind Chromium, DARPA once funded OpenBSD, Apple behind LLVM and hundreds of others, the list goes on and on. Open-source is a TOOL corporations and governments use to ensure the longevity, security, and interoperability of their products, yet one that allows them to leverage thousands of saps who are willing to work for free. It's an awesome arrangement, and I don't see why you are so negative about it.

Most of these projects are things you wouldn't even have a choice or knowledge about. If you use Mac, you are using untold numbers of open-source products no matter what, but it's all behind the scenes. On Windows, Windows Media Player is garbage (in terms of codec support especially) so you pretty much HAVE to use an open-source media player like VLC. Maybe it was created by hippies, I don't know, but it works, it isn't ugly if you use a good theme, and it plays every type of media file there is. Subhumans produce and bag our groceries and we still eat the food, don't we?

It is a MIRACLE that Opera, your favorite web browser, works as well as it does without being open-source. Browsers are insanely complex programs, and usually when corporations try to develop them alone, the result is less than stellar (e.g., Internet Explorer, which only very recently can even be said to be usable due to all the features borrowed from other browsers). Opera is all the more impressive considering how tiny that company is -- seriously how the fuck do they do it? But the community just isn't there to produce all the plugins/extensions I need every day, so I can't use it myself.

There are no must-have Linux-exclusive applications for ordinary desktop users like us (so not counting developers) because all of those products are open-source and therefore easy to make cross-platform. And the only reason Linux games have historically run slower is because the graphics drivers were of lower quality. The drivers are produced by AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel, who in the past had little incentive to improve them since the gaming market uses Windows. They're catching up now, and in some cases outperforming Windows, e.g.:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... nwin&num=1
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/

The Linux kernel is more efficient than that of Windows, and a Linux desktop is usually a lighter-weight environment than the Windows desktop, so it's no surprise that, given a high-quality driver, Linux can experience a slight edge. That's one of the things that excites me about SteamOS, because so far, no Linux environment has ever actually been properly optimized for gaming through tweaks to the kernel settings or anything, and graphics companies have not until now had any incentive to produce Windows-quality graphics drivers. It's unexplored territory.

In short: software development is MONSTROUSLY complicated. So complicated that you don't have to worry too much about the negative effects of "opening the floodgates" to the masses via open-source licensing, since 99.9% of subhumans are too stupid to understand it. Many corporations collaborating to make an unbeatable product > one corporation trying to push their own proprietary product > everyone else. But this is true only in the long run, and only if we're talking about software tools, where interoperability is so important. If it's art, well, every open-source game ever has been utter trash... so bad and so ugly that EVEN THE INDIEFAGS (who are at least used to pretty backgrounds) don't play them hahahahahahaha. Open-source will never, ever, ever, work for videogames, except maybe the core engine.

[icycalm]

You are like everyone else, all this talk, and yet the end result is the same: Linux is utterly useless for both games and any applications which a normal person would want to use. In other words, it is a USELESS operating system. If it is a good tool -- a good kind of middleware -- for use by developers, that is another story. But as an operating system it SUCKS, and that's why NO ONE IS USING IT. Developers, I repeat, DO NOT COUNT. Developers also use the Unreal Engine, but I would not in a million years install it on my system, BECAUSE IT IS COMPLETELY USELESS.

How hard can that be to understand?

All the rest are rosy theories of the future by people, like you, who are utterly incapable of predicting what will happen. You have not the faintest clue of the history of computing, and hence no idea how difficult it would be for some company to beat Microsoft as the de facto ruler of the PC OS space. But it is only ONCE MS HAS BEEN BEATEN by another company's OS that that OS CAN BE SAID TO BE GOOD. Before the beating has taken place, THE OS IS SHIT AND USELESS. And that's where the hippie anti-capitalist open-source communism myth comes in, to brainwash you into thinking that AN UTTERLY USELESS OS IS, IN FACT, USEFUL. Which it isn't. Because nothing good runs on it, and what little does run on it runs slower than Windows.

Which I am sure you are incapable of grasping because of how strong the brainwashing is. Or you'll give me some shitty links which do nothing to change the fact that there's no way in hell any modern game will utilize my 2 GTX 690s running Crysis 3 on 3 1080p screens better than Windows. And so on and so forth.

Open-source is a TOOL corporations and governments use to ensure the longevity, security, and interoperability of their products

How is it open source if corporations are using it? Are you dense or what? Apple software is Apple software and no one can touch it. I am sure Apple employees also use public parks to rest and chat between themselves, but that doesn't make THE END PRODUCTS OF THEIR LABOR OPEN SOURCE FOR FUCK'S SAKE.

And VLC sucks. Just like Joomla and phpBB and every open source product I've ever used. You are confusing a product that ADEQUATELY DOES WHAT YOU WANT IT TO DO to the OPTIMAL SOLUTION.

I guess I'll have to write that article. Your post was rubbish, fyi, if you haven't grasped that already, which I am sure you haven't.

[icycalm]

I just checked your links lol. You are giving me on-board graphics chipsets and a 5-year-old game specifically optimized by the company that made it. How is any of that useful to anyone lol? Who plays games with on-board graphics lol? Is Valve going to optimize by hand every game that comes out? This shit proves nothing, dog, other than how brainwashed you are and how desperate Valve is.

[icycalm]

http://store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamMachines/

What games will be available during the beta?
The nearly 3,000 games on Steam. Hundreds already running natively on the SteamOS, with more to come. The rest will work seamlessly via in-home streaming.

lol yeah. Just like all these games will run on Mac OS via Parallels lol. Or just say fuck it and install Windows via Bootcamp. 3000 games lol. And Metro will run at 12 frames per second. What a load of rubbish. Can you smell the desperation?

[Joshua]

This was posted yesterday, and the second of the two announcements turned out to be correct, so maybe it's legit.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/steamo ... 24388.html

[icycalm]

lol, gotta love Intel's response.

>Why not Intel?
Because they don't care. I don't want to make derogatory remarks, but you will never find a more money-grubbing group of people on the planet. They refuse to work on someone else's idea and outright told us we have to PAY them, when all we're doing is basically marketing their fucking hardware.

He "doesn't want to make derogatory remarks", but Intel is the "most money-grubbing" etc. God forbid the best processor manufacturer in the world try to make some money for their efforts. And at least they are providing SOMETHING USEFUL. What is Valve providing? Does anyone expect me realize what Steam is? IT IS A GAME STORE. LIKE EB IN THE STATES AND GAME IN EUROPE. THAT'S ALL IT IS. A MIDDLEMAN WHO SKIMS OFF FAT MARGINS WHILE PROVIDING NEXT TO NOTHING. So I think that Valve deserves the title of "most money-grubbing company etc." far more than the goddamn company THAT MAKES THE PROCESSORS THAT POWER OUR FUCKING COMPUTERS.

All the rest he says is equally irrelevant. Until I see benchmarks that show bleeding-edge games running on bleeding-edge hardware FASTER on SteamOS than in Windows, or at the very least a bleeding-edge game that is available EXCLUSIVELY on SteamOS, the platform will be, and remain, a useless pos.

[icycalm]

As for the Steam Box... AMD processors lol. They haven't been relevant in close to a decade now. It's dead in the water. But maybe it can run "indie" tripe natively on SteamOS lol. Now the "indies" have their own computer company! (Just as they have their own console with the Ouya.) Maybe Valve, Ouya and that dude who made 100-dollar laptops to send to Africa could join forces and make the hippie version of Sony Corporation or something.

[icycalm]

And I am so excited to be able to easily record playthroughs of all these games that the OS won't be able to run! I can barely contain my excitement!

[icycalm]

The last announcement will be tomorrow apparently. And it's then that you'll see how serious they are about this, and whether they have any clue what it will take to put in a decent challenge to MS. They have to come out with a SteamOS-exclusive game, preferably Half-Life 3. No Windows version, and no console versions. Only on SteamOS, and only on Steam (i.e. no retail version either). Make it run on a new engine that takes advantage of all those overhyped features of Linux that no one has ever seen in practice, and make it at least a decent game (though this won't matter much to Valve's countless fans). They used HL2 to ram Steam down everyone's throats, and Steam was a MUCH easier scam to pull off than usurping Windows, so they will need an ace at least as strong as that to have any chance this time round.

If there are no exclusive titles announced they'll need a LOT of goodwill from developers to avoid the whole project imploding.

[Joshua]

How stupid I was to think that "leak" could have been legit. They made very clear in earlier announcements that they still had something to say on the subject of input. Maybe the 4chan leak was just Gabe Newell trolling everyone, lol. Personally I'm not really bothered by the lack of a Half-Life 3 announcement. I don't think any game can ever live up to the hype that's been created for it, which is probably what's been prolonging its development for so long. Plus I honestly believe the Half-Life series is a bit overrated....

Anyway, I don't think there are going to be any significant SteamOS exclusives, at least not for a while. SteamOS will use OpenGL which Windows also supports, so even if you develop a game native to SteamOS, porting it to Windows would be relatively trivial, and the economic benefits great. Developers will eventually want to make use of a more slimmed-down operating system, though.

Now that my excitement has died down, I agree with you that the Linux kernel at the core of SteamOS is irrelevant, to gamers anyway. Any operating system can be slimmed down considerably to optimize for playing games, so in this sense, SteamOS is just another free software-derived console OS like PlayStation's Orbis. The only thing that's different, now, is that Orbis's parent OS was copyfree-licensed and SteamOS's parent is copyleft licensed, meaning anyone who downloads SteamOS has legal protection from prosecution if they want to make a SteamOS-derivative, as long as they keep it open-source.

With Valve releasing all of their hardware and software into the open (IP-wise), anyone can legally modify it to make a competing system. (This is certainly true of the OS, but I'm not sure what license they'll put on their controller.) That means that if Valve wants to keep people on their system, they MUST ensure Steam remains the most attractive game service on the planet. The upside is that if someone forks SteamOS and improves upon it, Valve can just as easily pull those changes back upstream.

[icycalm]

You're so full of shit, dude. Zero ability to understand what's going on and formulate some kind of thought about it.

Anyway, how successful SteamOS turns out to be will depend very much, I think, on how open the platform is.

You are just repeating buzzwords that you've heard in the mistaken assumption that they count for thoughts. What does "open" even mean? What does "successful" even mean to you? You are obviously not a gamer so as far as you are concerned SteamOS may as well be said to be "successful" already. It has "succeeded" to do what every other version of Linux has done -- whatever that may be. As to whether Deus Ex 4 or Far Cry 4 will run exclusively on it, or at least in any way better than on Windows -- you have not the faintest clue of what a gargantuan feat that would be, never mind what it would take for something like this to happen (tip: "openness" is the very LEAST thing that would be required -- but they WILL be on Xbox One and PS4 which are THE VERY DEFINITION OF "CLOSEDNESS", MORON), because after all you are not a gamer and you don't give a shit. Which makes me wonder why you even bother posting here. Don't you have some boring, pointless web browsing to do about subjects you don't even care about? Some tinkering about with making programs run that you don't even intend to use?

With Valve releasing all of their hardware and software into the open (IP-wise), anyone can legally modify it to make a competing system.

And compete for what? For the attention of losers with shitty hardware who don't even play games and expect to get all their software for free anyway?

Developers will eventually want to make use of a more slimmed-down operating system, though.

Do you have some kind of ETA for that? Besides which, MS-DOS was pretty slimmed down, if I remember correctly, but developers still chose Windows over it.

Why don't you do us all -- including yourself -- a favor and stop posting your opinions here? It's the same garbage every other site posts anyway, so it's not like we are not aware of it or we'll be missing out on anything. Down with capitalism and corporations and long live "free stuff" for a "better nebulous future" or whatever -- we get it, we're not missing out on anything, thanks.

[shubn]

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2013/11/04/v ... or-steamos

Valve has confirmed that it will not be making games that are exclusive to SteamOS or Steam Machines.

Speaking to IGN, Valve’s Greg Comer said, “you won’t see an exclusive killer app for SteamOS from us. We’re not going to be doing that kind of thing.”

This will also apply to third-party titles, Valve’s Anna Sweet told us. “Whenever we talk to third-party partners, we encourage them to put their games in as many places as possible, including not on our platforms," she said. "Because we think that customers are everywhere, and they want to put their games wherever customers are. That would go against our whole philosophy, to launch something that’s exclusive to SteamOS or Steam machines.”

“Or to drive customers there artificially,” Coomer continued. “Because if it can run in both places, we don’t like to create those artificial barriers to accessing content. We believe that, in maybe five years from now, folks will find it a quite antiquated notion that you should assume that when you change devices or platforms, that you lose all of your other games and friends. We’re hoping to unify, to get Steam to be as platform- and context-agnostic as possible. You shouldn’t have to shed that every generation, or even slightly shed it.”

Coomer added that “it would be pretty silly” if a third-party developer wanted “to limit their game to a certain platform.” He did note that small, independent studios who only have the resources to focus on one platform may inevitably make games that only run on SteamOS, “but that’s a very different thing.”

[icycalm]

You can see how useless the interviewers are when nobody turns around and asks them, "And what about Half-Life 2?" They probably had not even started playing games then.

[icycalm]

http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/04/valv ... -hands-on/

Anyone who uses Steam's Big Picture Mode is already intimately acquainted with SteamOS, as they're very similar. SteamOS looks and acts like Big Picture Mode, except it's the basis for the entire hardware system. It's controller-friendly and easy to navigate. The same Steam splash page washes across the screen when it launches, and the same tile-based layout of games and the Steam store are visible at launch. As promised, the OS is built on Linux (not based on Ubuntu, we're told, but entirely custom), though you'd never know it as the only interactive layer is all Steam.

That means it also has the limitations of Steam: SteamOS is not the replacement for Windows 8 you've been waiting for. Beyond basics like browsing the web, there's little in the way of standard OS functions. While Valve reps showed off slides of the box's vanity shots using a Windows PC, I asked how I'd view such shots from within SteamOS -- the answer is that there's no real way to do so, as there's no file browsing system or image viewing application. While these limitations may not affect the vast majority of Steam Machine buyers (who are essentially buying a game console), it certainly impacts folks who are looking at Steam Machines as a replacement for their standard PC. Make no mistake: Steam Machines are PCs posing as game consoles, which comes with both positives and negatives.

haha

[icycalm]

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... arks&num=1

A comprehensive performance comparison is underway at Phoronix that pits SteamOS against other desktop Linux distributions

Everyone involved with Linux seems to be retarded. WHY WOULD ANYONE CARE HOW STEAM OS COMPARES WITH LINUX? NO ONE PLAYS GAMES ON LINUX FOR FUCK'S SAKES! WE WANT TO SEE HOW IT COMPARES WITH WINDOWS!!!!

It probably sucks compared to Windows, just as Linux in general does, and that's why no one's talking about it.

[El Chaos]

Hands-on with SteamOS, what happened when Digital Foundry deployed the Valve beta on its high-end games PC: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... h-steam-os

Gaming on SteamOS - our picks

• Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs
• Brütal Legend
• Costume Quest
• Counter Strike: Source
• Dota 2
• Faster Than Light
• Fez
• Half Life 2: Episode 2
• Hotline Miami
• Left 4 Dead 2
• Mark of the Ninja
• Metro: Last Light
• Portal
• Proteus
• Psychonauts
• Super Meat Boy
• Team Fortress 2
• Trine 2: Complete Story

SteamOS' current software support is also certainly not very widespread, but it's early days. At just under 300 titles available in the Linux section, most of the names here are indie favourites like Mark of the Ninja, Fez or Darwinia. For bigger 3D titles, the best examples we can find come from Valve and Double Fine, with pretty much every major game from each studio's back catalogue making the jump to Linux - one curious exception being Portal 2. Unfortunately, even with an Intel i7-3770K PC clocked to 4.3GHz, backed by 16GB of RAM and a GTX 780 TI, we find that settings are not maxed out in games like Left 4 Dead 2 by default - meaning some tinkering is needed for the optimal experience. Very PC-like when ideally you'd want SteamOS to scale the game experience to the capabilities of your hardware.

This is a particular bugbear of 4A Games' Metro: Last Light. The game is unique in SteamOS' current roster in that it's one of the few 3D titles to push a higher-end modern system. However, its graphics settings menu is reduced to a simple left-to-right quality bar, meaning there's no telling what exact band of graphics quality, anti-aliasing or physics we have at play before starting. This defaults at 16 out of 20 bars for our PC every time we load the game too. It's a bit of a nuisance, as it forces us to ratchet it up the extra few notches for each session.

It's also clear that the transition from DirectX 11 to OpenGL hasn't been smooth for Metro: Last Light. Even with the graphics quality bar at full, the in-game visuals through SteamOS come nowhere close to the maximum quality of the Windows version. At this setting all forms of motion blur are removed, texture quality is visibly lower, ambient occlusion is dialled back and tessellation appears to be off the table. The frustration here is that there's currently no way play the game to its fullest capacity using the vague graphics settings given to us, despite our hardware clearly being up to the task. The latest OpenGL should offer feature parity with DX11, so the omission of features is disappointing. On the flipside, it may well be the case that a high-profile target like SteamOS could be the catalyst to match and perhaps even exceed DirectX 11.

Fortunately the likes of Dota 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 run on our setups without hassle, and all options are open to us for later tweaking. Even so, it falls on Metro: Last Light alone to show us how Nvidia's OpenGL drivers are optimised for performance, as the most technically strenuous game on offer. The opening 30 minutes play out as smoothly as the Windows build with its delivery of 60fps, but after hitting the Reich stage we face some glaring stability issues. Unlike Valve's output, the game crashes five times within two hours of play - sending us swiftly back to the Steam menu without so much as an error code. It's a shame, as performance outside of these breaks is perfect, once again suggesting an attempt to move to Linux may not be straightforward.

Metro: Last Light's maximum settings on SteamOS doesn't bring us the premium experience we enjoy on Windows version. Textures appear noticeably lower in resolution and motion blur is removed. Tessellation is a core feature of DirectX 11 API that should - in theory - be matched in OpenGL 4.3 and onwards. Much like the console versions though, the SteamOS release strips back the effect across environments. 4A Games' lighting model forms a big part of bringing out details in Metro's grim underworld. For the SteamOS version on its highest settings, however, we see reflection mapping is dialled back here. Ambient occlusion settings, along with shadow quality, also take a noticeable hit compared to the very high settings on the Windows release.

[icycalm]

It's also clear that the transition from DirectX 11 to OpenGL hasn't been smooth for Metro: Last Light. Even with the graphics quality bar at full, the in-game visuals through SteamOS come nowhere close to the maximum quality of the Windows version.

This is even worse than I had expected. I just thought it'd be slower, now it's slower and with inferior image quality. But hey, Linux is such a faster, more efficient and easy to use operating system than Windows, that knowledge of this fact should compensate you for the fact that your screen shows the exact opposite of it.

[Joshua]

Got some SteamOS vs. Windows 8.1 benchmarks: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... ows8_linux

Here's a summary of the results excluding the freetard games:

• Unigine Heaven: slight edge to Windows 8.1
• Unigine Sanctuary: comparable performance
• Unigine Tropics: comparable performance
• Unigine Valley: a bit stronger on Windows 8.1
• GpuTest GiMark: stronger for SteamOS
• GpuTest Plot3D: stronger for Windows 8.1

I want to respond to this: http://culture.vg/forum/topic?p=21747#p21747

First of all, disk performance on Linux is generally bad.

This is wrong according to, like, ... every IOPS benchmark ever? The ext4 filesystem is more efficient than NTFS. It's the reason why Linux tends to "feel" faster than Windows even if it isn't necessarily. Whether or not Linux is faster for other tasks as well isn't so clear.

Another problem under Linux is load times. [...] But I think what's really killing it is the need to compile shaders just in time. Loading up Crusader Kings 2 takes literally 10 minutes on my i5 3570K and GTX 660Ti.

No, on my Linux partition loading CKII takes 4 seconds less than on Windows if I'm using the AMD graphics driver. He probably failed to install the NVIDIA driver which is something you have to do on Windows too, so he's a moron. Nobody uses an OS's fallback drivers to play games.

To be fair, he's 100% correct that Linux sucks because of multi-monitor support, and will continue to do so until Intel's Wayland becomes standardized on the desktop.

How is it open source if corporations are using it? Are you dense or what? Apple software is Apple software and no one can touch it. I am sure Apple employees also use public parks to rest and chat between themselves, but that doesn't make THE END PRODUCTS OF THEIR LABOR OPEN SOURCE FOR FUCK'S SAKE.

I don't know how to respond to this. "Open source" is just a form of licensing. For instance, Google makes the open-source Android mobile OS. Companies who make phones then take Android and customize it, then that phone with its customizations gets released to the public. The licensing does not prevent them from making money off of the operating system through other means.

What the licensing does do is allow competitors to fork and redistribute it. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyanogenMod

This forces Google to work harder on Android to ensure people don't switch to CyanogenMod, the same way any competing product drives prices down and quality up in a capitalist market. The difference now is that CyanogenMod maintains binary compatibility with Android, i.e. whether you choose one or the other you can still run the same apps. This benefits CyanogenMod because there is no significant downside to using it, and this benefits Google by establishing Google's code as being the upstream standard. There are downsides too, but communism has nothing to do with it. Communists don't make billions "selling freedom", so to speak.

Here's another example: Red Hat has been selling free software since 1993. There is even a product called CentOS which simply recompiles their code and releases it at no cost. You'd think they've lost a lot of money on this, but they're still a huge multi-billion dollar corporation, and they're doing just fine. Fine enough that they are even now going to help CentOS! WTF!

But it's not so crazy if you think about it. They will end up making more money this way. Red Hat was already the upstream standard, and now, everyone who uses CentOS might be able to easily and instantaneously buy a support contract from Red Hat.

It's just a continuation of the whole free-to-play thing going on with MMOs. Many companies realized they could make more money by removing subscription fees and letting in the whole mob for free. The microtransactions of a few pay for everyone else. Sucks for games, because every game using this model has sucked ass, but I have yet to see any substantial downside to this model for operating systems. For complex individual applications like games, Photoshop, PowerPoint, etc., yes, open source licensing means NO PROFIT and poor quality and that will be true forever. But if you can get everyone on your platform, your platform is king, period. Microsoft did this with Windows through hardware licensing and Google is doing it with Android through software licensing, for better or for worse.

And now Valve wants to do the same thing for consoles. They may have already lost the game to Android though once the successors to the NVIDIA TEGRA K1 start showing up in home consoles.

[icycalm]

What the licensing does do is allow competitors to fork and redistribute it. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyanogenMod

This forces Google to work harder on Android to ensure people don't switch to CyanogenMod, the same way any competing product drives prices down and quality up in a capitalist market.

So the advantage of open source software is that it encourages, say Google to work harder than it otherwise would? Like setting a hungry wolf after yourself while running so that you'll run faster?

It just seems retarded to me. Aren't these people concerned with quality at all? How many shitty "forked versions" are there out there? It is part of the character of the creator to hate others shitting up their work. All this shows to me is that these people take no pride in their work, a conclusion which is reinforced by my experience with every piece of open source software ever. Stuff like phpBB and Joomla FUCK UP as many features with every new version as they improve! And these are by far most the widely used applications in their respective fields! Every time I try to visualize the kind of person who worked on these things I am forced to think of someone retarded. That's the only way to justify the kinds of choices that they made.

The only reason, as far as I can tell, that open source is praised so much is because it's free. They get the job done -- mostly badly -- but they are free so people prefer them to superior paid choices. And then the proliferation of the shitty free software chokes the revenue stream of the superior paid choices, which then end up becoming marginalized and finally disappear. The end result of all this is that the free software will do your job if you have VERY LOW REQUIREMENTS and if you are prepared to tolerate A LOT OF BULLSHIT, but if you are trying to do a solid, precise job, YOU HAVE TO WRITE THE FUCKING SOFTWARE YOURSELF -- either from scratch, or by taking the free software and fixing all the retardations. Or you can hire programmers to do the custom job for you, but for ASTRONOMICAL PRICES.

So in sum we can say that open source lowers the cost for easy jobs, but RAISES THEM THROUGH THE ROOF for any serious job that demands precision.

I don't know whether this result is beneficial from an economical point of view, for an entire society. Perhaps it is. Nevertheless a cutting-edge intelligent programmer will DESPISE open source software precisely because he is a cutting-edge intelligent programmer, and all that praising it does is tell me that the person doing the praising is an imbecile who is just repeating what everyone else is repeating.

I have no doubt that Edsger Dijkstra would agree 100% with what I just said, just like Carmack was contemptuous of Valve's OS in a recent interview (published AFTER I wrote my own posts heaping them with contempt). It's just that you do not have high expectations from your software, nor are you really a gamer, so you don't see what's wrong with bottom-of-the-barrel coding and operating systems that don't run games.

[icycalm]

I don't even understand why you keep coming back here. You have like 5 words published on this forum on actual games, and thousands on shitty operating systems that don't run games. You are obviously not a gamer. You come here to try to convince me that some random OS that doesn't run games is better than an OS that runs ALL the games -- including all the console ones! --, and when you fail you leave for a few months, and then come back and try again. Why not just sign up to a Linux forum or something? Are you retarded or something? Or is it because you've already paid your subscription fee and want to get the most out of it by annoying me before it runs out?

[icycalm]

Here, I'll give you the philosophical underpinning of my argument.

Open source software is bad software for the same reason democratic governments are bad governments. It is a matter of PRINCIPLE. Pointing out a single instance of a good open source software (say Videolan) achieves as much as pointing out a single instance of a good democratic government (say Periclean Athens): nothing. Nor does the fact that someone is currently getting a job done prove that he is the best person for that job.

But the problem with you, I repeat, is not theories and principles. You even lack the basic knowledge, intelligence and common sense to recognize the basic facts FROM WHICH theories are built. Your whole life seems to revolve around software, and yet you still stand astounded before me when I tell you that, in my experience, every piece of open source software I've ever used has sucked ass.

So even if you do accept my theory, you'll just end up parroting and misapplying it because you are incapable of recognizing the empirical observations from which I built it.

In short, like I said before, just do everyone a favor and just sign up to a Linux forum or something.