Going forwards CCP seems to be gating DX11 visuals using dialog options for the moment, but they have vouched continued official support for the mac client, so it should be interesting how they satisfy this conflict of interest. It's entirely possible, considering their past, that they assign resources to bring dx11 features to wine, which would be pretty nice for linux gaming IMO. I doubt they will switch a decade+ year old gaming engine to vulkan.

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I guess it would be nice to know what games do support DX10/DX11 in wine-1.8, since support for that seems to be a little shaky for this release...

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I like that companies use the wrapper route to bring down development costs, I think the naysayers do not understand the underlying mechanics of a wine/eos. In the short run it gives a good baseline performance for standard shaders and standardized library calls across a lot of hardware. Is that a baseline that most native linux ports claim to achieve ?

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Would have gone for COH2, but the free weekend showed it just didn't work well on my GTX 750 ti, so I'll go with the totally awesome Pillars of Eternity patch, which came alongside the DLC release and made the game much less grindy.

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Quoting: mmstickI tried Witcher 2 on Linux one month ago and it still runs significantly worse than running the Windows copy through Wine with Gallium Nine. Indeed, I would very much prefer that non-native ports are abolished henceforth and never allowed onto Steam. Non-native ports are not the way, nor will they ever be. Fixing a bug in a native port is easy, but resolving a bug in a non-native port? I don't think so. Either do a port correctly the first time or don't do a port at all. No port is better than a bad port.

I don't think you can argue that Wine and the Eon wrapper are in a different technological bracket, even if one is better than the other, how does that validate your argument that a native port is better?

I don't think it makes much sense dampening the marketing momentum needed to get linux gaming into the mainstream, most of these companies would not even consider linux a few years ago, and probably wouldn't now without the potential hype surrounding steam machines.

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It's possible Valve is providing developers an incentive "lending" package to port to Linux, much like the mobile platforms have done the past for their app stores.

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I disagree with the article's main gist.

Wrappers like wine give a cost-effective opportunity to grow the gaming market. Just imagine every developer would need to do native ports, and due to the costs of writing a fully-fledged native port linux, it fails to attract a significant gaming market end of this year when the steam machines are released ? Who cares about all the peripheral arguments made in this article ? These arguments will not apply once people want to make money on the platform.

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Quoting: CybaCowboy

Quoting: maodzedunI hate the fact you can't upgrade it.

Um, did you even watch the video?

Aside from the obvious fact that a "Steam Machine" is quite literally a standard computer running the Linux-based SteamOS in a flashy case (i.e. it's just as upgradable as any other computer), "Chris" from Alienware even specifically states that you can upgrade the components!

I daresay that some Steam Machines will go with a console-like approach and make component upgrades difficult (e.g. with custom cases purpose-designed to be secure and tamper-proof, etc...), but it certainly won't be impossible for any of them and I would imagine that the process would be simple for most Steam Machines...

After building my own small form factor steam machine, I disagree that the components are that easily upgradeable. You are tied to the limited wattage of your PSU, space around the GPU, and modest motherboard options. I think you will easily be able to upgrade RAM and your main disk drive, but everything else you'll probably have to make compromises.

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If it's between having a port of a triple A game running on some wrapper vs. not having the same triple A game on linux due to development overhead of a native port, I would still prefer to have the EON-wrapped game, but I would pay less for it.

I think it's something the consumer should decide.

It's probably not worth doing native ports for most Linux games at the moment, so I don't think gaminingonlinux should be drawing any ethical/moral lines on this issue.

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