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Valve joins the Linux Foundation

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Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#41

Post by dimillian »

terabytest wrote: post #8
casca wrote: post #6

It will be interesting to see whether Valve can encourage the move to Linux gaming. Their biggest asset at this time is the distribution model of Steam, but that's not sufficient to get the big publishers to develop for OSX, never mind Linux. Edit: Valve's game list: http://www.valvesoftware.com/games/

OS X is not a good platform for gaming. It has a significantly smaller user base of which only an even more significantly smaller are gamers. Playing on a MacBook (or at least on my MacBook) is impossible, and I wouldn't buy an iMac for gaming. On the other hand, you can put Linux on anything (for free!), from your mom's 2002 pc to the latest generation hot stuff. This means there is indeed a potential, and somebody…

You'll be amazed on how it has changed. First, latest Macbook are kinda powerful on the GPU side, even with the integrated one, the Intel HD 5000 or Iris can run modern game at low/med settings. While it's shit for gamers who cares about graphics and performances, for any casual gamers it's sufficient. My Macbook is my work machine but also my gaming machine.

The other things is about Wine, they're working on accelerating the Direct3D driver, and OMG, it's soooo fast now. I'm running Skyrim on a custom Wine engine (1.7.1 with a patch from the D3D boost branch), on hight/ultra settings on my Macbook Retina, It's running at 80% of the Windows performance. And it's only the beginning, it's far from done. I also have it running on a friend Macbook Air, it run at medium setting at a solid 30 FPS.

My point is that you can actually plays with Macbook nowadays.

Edit: The PR from codeweavers is relevant (Especially the part about the Command Stream). http://www.codeweavers.com/about/general/press/20131112/

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#42

Post by officemonkey »

philliphaydon wrote: post #35
SkyMarshal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a gamer, why would that be?

Because game companies will likely delay games, cut corners to get cross-platform and claim its too hard, but still charge the same price for less content. If that makes sense.

You've just described Mac gaming. :-D

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#43

Post by dimillian »

lazerwalker wrote: post #18
SkyMarshal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is playing on a MacBook impossible? (not a Mac user, serious question)

The driver performance just isn't there. If you have a cross-platform game and run it on the same Apple machine in OS X and on Windows, the Windows version's gonna be WAY more performant. As a lesser frustration, most Windows games I play natively support the Xbox 360 controller, whereas almost no OS X ports do.

You're right, but it's moving fast (At least once a year...). I would say that native games are 95% on par with Windows equivalent.

Wine and other "Translator" are moving fast too, in a few release you'll see a lot of big improvements in the graphics area. Crossover latest release already profit from that.

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#44

Post by sandGorgon »

dimillian wrote: post #41
terabytest wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS X is not a good platform for gaming. It has a significantly smaller user base of which only an even more significantly smaller are gamers. Playing on a MacBook (or at least on my MacBook) is impossible, and I wouldn't buy an iMac for gaming. On the other hand, you can put Linux on anything (for free!), from your mom's 2002 pc to the latest generation hot stuff. This means there is indeed a potential, and somebody…

You'll be amazed on how it has changed. First, latest Macbook are kinda powerful on the GPU side, even with the integrated one, the Intel HD 5000 or Iris can run modern game at low/med settings. While it's shit for gamers who cares about graphics and performances, for any casual gamers it's sufficient. My Macbook is my work machine but also my gaming machine. The other things is about Wine, they're working on acceler…

is this the case only with OSX-Wine or Linux-Wine as well ? I dont mind paying for professional quality wine on linux - a.k.a Crossover

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#45

Post by Kurtz79 »

lazerwalker wrote: post #18
SkyMarshal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is playing on a MacBook impossible? (not a Mac user, serious question)

The driver performance just isn't there. If you have a cross-platform game and run it on the same Apple machine in OS X and on Windows, the Windows version's gonna be WAY more performant. As a lesser frustration, most Windows games I play natively support the Xbox 360 controller, whereas almost no OS X ports do.

I was able to play quite a few games (Civ5, Walking dead, Portal 2, Diablo 3) without any issues on a Macbook (Pro 15 Retina first generation). Portal 2 and Walking Dead are quite playable also in my Macbook Air 13 (2010, last model with nvidia board).

Of course these are relatively low requirements games. Do you have examples where the performance difference is relevant, and the games actually unplayable ?

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#46

Post by mercurial »

Strom wrote: post #9
kayoone wrote: post #7

While this is great, its a bit sad that Valve is mostly doing all of this now, because they fear losing their dominance on windows to the native Store in Win 8.x In the end its a win-win for everyone if it works out, just their motives are questionable.

It won't be a win for Microsoft if this transition takes off. Also, of course profits and control are the biggest motivations here, not some inherent wish for linux to succeed.

No, it's clearly a business decision. But I wonder how long it has been in the works, considering that every few months, you used to get these "Steam on Linux" "news" which never translated into anything solid until Steam for Linux eventually came out.

In other news, it looks like the XCom remake will soon be in beta on Linux: http://steamdb.info/sub/35236/

Apart from the fact that I'd like to play it, it's interesting because Linux Steam has a dearth of AAA title (although it does have good indie games like Unity of Command).

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#48

Post by salient »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #27

Also of note, at the end: "The Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation [1], a nonprofit consortium founded by AMD, ARM, Qualcomm and Samsung, among others to develop open-standard specifications for parallel computing, and startup Cloudius Systems are also joining the Linux Foundation today." [1]: http://hsafoundation.com/

I hope something interesting will come out of HSA/OpenCL 2.0 in the next couple of years, and that heterogeneous computing will start becoming more practical for more types of programs.

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#49

Post by rhblake »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #13
cabbeer wrote: post #10

Right now the only thing keeping me from running linux full time is the Adobe Master Collection (PS AI LR ID AE...)

Will it run in a Windows VM on Linux?

I used Photoshop CS6 in a Windows 7 VirtualBox VM, often for editing large RAW pictures. Slower than native, of course, but it was totally OK for occasional photo post-processing. Perfectly fine for typical web design work. This was on a 2011 Thinkpad X220 (i7, 16 GB RAM, no SSD).

Lightroom felt too sluggish and I didn't even bother trying Premiere, but at least having Photoshop available kept rebooting to Windows to a minimum.

Re: Valve joins the Linux Foundation

#50

Post by stinkytaco »

terabytest wrote: post #8
casca wrote: post #6

It will be interesting to see whether Valve can encourage the move to Linux gaming. Their biggest asset at this time is the distribution model of Steam, but that's not sufficient to get the big publishers to develop for OSX, never mind Linux. Edit: Valve's game list: http://www.valvesoftware.com/games/

OS X is not a good platform for gaming. It has a significantly smaller user base of which only an even more significantly smaller are gamers. Playing on a MacBook (or at least on my MacBook) is impossible, and I wouldn't buy an iMac for gaming. On the other hand, you can put Linux on anything (for free!), from your mom's 2002 pc to the latest generation hot stuff. This means there is indeed a potential, and somebody…

You seem to be contradicting yourself. Gaming doesn't work on OS X because it has too small a user base, but Linux's user base is much smaller. Playing on a Macbook is impossible (presumably for performance reasons?), but you talk about putting Linux on a 2002 PC for gaming. And Linux may or may not run on the latest generation hot stuff, depending on how much time you want to spend to get your newest graphics card working.

I'm not sure what potential you are talking about. If gaming doesn't work on OS X, I can't see it working on Linux.

As an aside, Linux gaming would seem to me to suffer the same fate as the Android market times about a billion. Too many possible variations and massive platform fragmentation. It sounds like a development nightmare.

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