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

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Not our video, but an interesting watch and it's good to see a company speak so highly about Steam Machines and SteamOS, even if the Alienware rep is a little wrong at times.

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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. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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wvstolzing Nov 11, 2015
What he has to say about SteamOS is pretty encouraging.
wojtek88 Nov 11, 2015
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.
pete910 Nov 11, 2015
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Quoting: wojtek88I have to say that guy has to believe in what he is saying, because he sounds really convincing.

It's called a salesman :P
LinuxGamesTV Nov 11, 2015
Quoting: sonicI 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.
pete910 Nov 11, 2015
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Quoting: BdMdesigN
Quoting: sonicI 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
Guest Nov 12, 2015
Quoting: Guest
QuoteThe 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 )
STiAT Nov 12, 2015
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 November 2015 at 6:19 pm UTC
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