Alienware Interview Video About Their Steam Machine, SteamOS & The Future

That was really great, and quite uplifting. Good to hear the long term dedication from the Alienware rep. He was also hinting at some AAA games being released soon or early in the near year. But yeah, NO fallout4....

Sure, a freshly installed Windows (usually means pirated too) running an older game may have a small performance advantage over the same game that's then be retroactively "ported" to run Linux, the trouble is your average Windows computer you buy from the shop is HARDLY freshly installed. Besides the "rows" - literally - of tray applications (half of which are installed by the manufacturer) and other TSR services - including your anti-virus software etc, never mind the overall hit your Windows computer takes after you install the office suite (or heaven forbid - Visual studio) and most others drags your gaming performance to hell. All my mates reinstall Windows 3 times per year and their games play like junk on HW pricier than I have...

I think the biggest advantage SteamOS offers the average customers is the lightweight Linux kernel without having to know anything about our beloved open-source OS. Spec-for-spec the Steam Machines seem to be quite comparable price-wise to their PC equivalents, I would even call them cheap when you consider how expensive some branded PCs are. I am excited about a Steam Machines, and I have a PS4 too for those far more pricey games from the Sony Playstation Store, I buy 5 games on Steam/Linux for every 1 I buy on the PS4 simply on price!

In the end more competition means customers win, gamers win!

I dont thik that GPU they use will have full Vulkan support, NVidia have some problems with asynchronous shaders.

Nice to see, although the first ~18 minutes was basically about the hardware and the controller and wasn't very insightful. It did give a nice peek into Alienware's philosophy regarding Steam Machines though.
The latter part, where he talked a bit about what's coming software-wise was nice. Sounds like things will keep moving forward!

I dont thik that GPU they use will have full Vulkan support, NVidia have some problems with asynchronous shaders.

For most use cases this won't matter.

[quote=Guest]

Well, there is some notable examples of bad performing ports (yes, I have Dying Light) but I don't think that most of them are really slower than on Windows. Using the performance of those bad ports to define the whole platform would be really unfair.

I totally agree with you. Most Ports are running very well on Linux especially with Nvidia-Cards and the drivers are getting better and better on the Nvidia and AMD side.

If you are interested in some comparisons between Linux and Windows Gaming-Machines i can recommend you this Youtube Channel here:

https://www.youtube.com/user/PenguinRecordings

This Guy has some really good comparisons in his portfolio. :-)

The one thing that made me really chuckle, was talk about performance. According to the Alienware rep there's no performance "degradation" on SteamOS. We all know most ports perform worse than they do on Windows, so it's marketing speak at its finest. Again, Vulkan is going to certainly help, as will Alienware/Valve and others talking directly to Nvidia/AMD/Intel to improve their drivers for OpenGL too.

To be fair, he does seem to mean performance degradation at the driver level, which seems correct.

The price sucks. Seriously they are asking the same for the base model as the alpha with full windows license? They want it to fail I guess. Shame. I have an alpha i5 and it's nice. ( I only paid 529 )

Sure, a freshly installed Windows (usually means pirated too) running an older game may have a small performance advantage over the same game that's then be retroactively "ported" to run Linux, the trouble is your average Windows computer you buy from the shop is HARDLY freshly installed. Besides the "rows" - literally - of tray applications (half of which are installed by the manufacturer) and other TSR services - including your anti-virus software etc, never mind the overall hit your Windows computer takes after you install the office suite (or heaven forbid - Visual studio) and most others drags your gaming performance to hell. All my mates reinstall Windows 3 times per year and their games play like junk on HW pricier than I have...

That's a great point. Linux can as lean and mean as you want in order to maximize performance. I saw a noticeable performance boost recently when I ditched KDE for Xfce.

Nice to see, although the first ~18 minutes was basically about the hardware and the controller and wasn't very insightful. It did give a nice peek into Alienware's philosophy regarding Steam Machines though.
The latter part, where he talked a bit about what's coming software-wise was nice. Sounds like things will keep moving forward!

"Slow and steady wins the race" seems to be Valve's philosophy. It's easy to forget that Steam had a slow start amidst plenty of competition, and it took several years for it to become the dominant platform it is today.

What he has to say about SteamOS is pretty encouraging.

I like to listen how Chris is talking about Steam Controller and Steam Machine. Some time before there was a video with him regarding Steam Controller, now the one regarding Alienware Steam Machine. I have to say that guy has to believe in what he is saying, because he sounds really convincing.

I have to say that guy has to believe in what he is saying, because he sounds really convincing.

It's called a salesman :P

I dont thik that GPU they use will have full Vulkan support, NVidia have some problems with asynchronous shaders.

Only on DirectX 12.
Vulkan works in a other way as dx 12 does.

I dont thik that GPU they use will have full Vulkan support, NVidia have some problems with asynchronous shaders.

Only on DirectX 12.
Vulkan works in a other way as dx 12 does.

No, not really. One of the main/key point's of both DX and Vulkan. It's the Asynchronous bit thats hurting NV. AMD's solution is on the hardware from what I 've read

It's what is used to help the consoles to get the perf with such week hardware. Though with them having only 8 iirc they dont push anything like what a PC GPU can compute

This explains the asynchronous bit better than I can

[http://amd-dev.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/Asynchronous-Shaders-White-Paper-FINAL.pdf](http://amd-dev.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/Asynchronous-Shaders-White-Paper-FINAL.pdf)

The one thing that made me really chuckle, was talk about performance. According to the Alienware rep there's no performance "degradation" on SteamOS. We all know most ports perform worse than they do on Windows, so it's marketing speak at its finest. Again, Vulkan is going to certainly help, as will Alienware/Valve and others talking directly to Nvidia/AMD/Intel to improve their drivers for OpenGL too.

Gaming performance in Linux is on par or even sometimes better than on Windows...with most games. So it is mostly true for specific games, but not true for all games. If you're just talking about the OS itself and what it is capable of, what he said is completely true. OpenGL drivers between Linux and Windows are virtually the same, possibly even better on Linux due to Linux primarily using OpenGL. Then there's Valve's L4D2 report stating Linux is faster. There are also various Wine examples as well.

I have found insurgency to be running faster on my Linux PC than my friends windows PC on very similar hardware ( actually their CPU is faster than mine )

Proprietary Linux-Driver of NVidia is fine performance whise. That's really the ports having the issues ;-).

Even though, I have hopes of Vulkan will change it a big deal, since even the difference between Mantle / Metal / Vulkan / DX12 is not very much, it's basically not as hard to port a DX12 to Vulkan as it is to port D3D to OpenGL. Though, GNM (PS4) according to an engine-dev I talked seems to be a bit of a different story.

A good example of a well performing game (after the patch, before it had it's issues) is Shadow of Mordor. I was pretty impressed that a title like this would have that good performance on my 3 year old rig. The Metro-Series is a good example either, performance is pretty good.

We've had our fails, we've had our great ones. Let's see what's up for the future.

Anyway, for the guy telling he had a significant performance increase ditching KDE for Xfce. That's interesting, I've not had any significant performance increase ever switching a desktop environment. Just more RAM available ;-). Though, I'm using a .. very basic KDE setup here with a lot of stuff not being installed (the good part about the "minimum depends" depends in Arch philosophy).


Last edited by STiAT on 12 Nov 2015 at 6:19 pm UTC