Quoting: KeyrockAt the very least, they should throw a disclaimer up along the lines of "Not all games pictured are currently native to SteamOS and may require streaming from a Windows PC to play on the NEN Steam Machine".

They did. I finally spotted it after being told about it and watching the video a second time, looking out for said disclaimer. Kind of difficult to glimpse as opposed to a fancy video with large images flying around.

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Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: Pecisk

Quoting: FutureSuture

Quoting: Pecisk

Quoting: FutureSutureWhat's wrong in this image?

Trying to be way too picky?

Don't be ridiculous! People will see this and think the depicted games are on Linux. unless they pay close attention. How many of us can say that the general consumer does that, however?

Nonsense. It is fast frame passing by in an *ad*. Seriously, people, stop being such downers.

It's advertising, companies have been sued and forced to take down adverts over stuff like this. It annoys me personally, and I can imagine plenty of people thinking they will be able to play them. That's the point of an advert: to hook people in.

This is why I noted it in the article.

Precisely. This is being realistic, not just pessimistic.

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Quoting: Pecisk

Quoting: FutureSutureWhat's wrong in this image?

Trying to be way too picky?

Don't be ridiculous! People will see this and think the depicted games are on Linux. unless they pay close attention. How many of us can say that the general consumer does that, however?

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What's wrong in this image?

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This is hilarious. Over a month extra wait for Linux and Mac OS users despite these platforms being a part of the crowdfunding campaign from over 2 years ago, while the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions were not even mentioned back then, but are now coming out before the Linux and Mac OS clients. Amazing work, Larian.

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I will buy Divinity: Original Sin at full price once it is finally out for Linux. Late support is far better than no support, and Larian is still giving us Linux users a quality game. I do hope Larian is more prepared with regard to Linux support in the future, however.

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Quoting: miroI still see an issue there - the controllers/batteries can not be charged when a wire is attached.

That is kinda annoying, one would have to have rechargeable ones + a charger. Honestly, I know this from friends who have a XBox and call me for gaming, saying something like hey bro, bring a 12 pack of batteries from the store, we're gonna need them.

This actually means that people are not always having chargers or appropriate batteries, hence battery sales go up, but these little things are really not healthy for our environment. So it is a question of mother nature, our money, ..and last but not least it is unconvincing for gamers to have a battery box instead of just plugging that thing in once a session is finished to recharge overnight.

Seriously, I want it built-in into that controller, don't tell me to buy a charger and 2 times the rechargeables, since one pair of these has to be in the gamepad, the other one in the charger to swap them every now and then. That is BS.

This has been discussed to death on the Steam Controller's forum on Steam. It has been established that rechargeable batteries that you can switch out with ease are a superior solution to a proprietary battery pack built into the controller. I'll link you to the two biggest of these threads so you can see why it most certainly is not bullshit.

It uses batteries? [External Link]

AA Batteries? [External Link]

As you can see, some gamers aren't thrilled by the idea of using AA batteries. I, however, am ecstatic that Valve chose to go with the superior choice of allowing gamers to use rechargeable AA batteries as opposed to a proprietary battery pack built into the controller that will someday not be able to hold a charge. rendering the controller a useless brick. Now that's bad for the environment!

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I appreciate that Obsidian brought Pillars of Eternity to Linux. I bought the game twice at full price to show my appreciation. All I can say is that hopefully SteamOS will provide higher Linux sales to appease the folks at Obsidian.

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Quoting: SamsaiAlso, the Gallium3D drivers like Nouveu, R600 and RadeonSI also have additional features that don't exist even in the advanced Nvidia driver of today. With the Gallium drivers you have access to GalliumHUD which is essentially an overlay you can fire up with 3D applications that allows you to monitor CPU usage, memory, framerate and all kinds of other things. The second thing is a quite big one and you might have heard about it. I'm talking about Gallium-Nine.

For those of you who haven't heard about Gallium-Nine, it's a Direct3D state-tracker built on top of Gallium3D. What it allows you to do is bypass the Direct3D→OpenGL conversion and thus taking away some of the overhead of running 3D applications and games in Wine. This can have huge performance impacts. I don't game a whole lot in Wine and the games I play are older games that are most likely never going to get ported to Linux. One of these games is Fallout 3 which I have played quite a bit on the Nvidia driver. It runs pretty well as-is, around 50-60 FPS with occasional drops to 40s. I've tried Gallium-Nine before with Nouveau but I never got much out of it and it even had negative impact in some games and made others unstable. A couple of times the driver even hung when I tried some games with Gallium-Nine. That was not the case with RadeonSI though.


As you can see, RadeonSI with Gallium-Nine completely blew the competition out of the water. Even the mighty Nvidia blob was shadowed by the RadeonSI performance. Just in case you are questioning the validity of the results, I ran the same game version on the same Wine version with the game running at 1080p Ultra without Vsync. The test was conducted by loading up a save of the character looking into the desolate wastes of Washington DC.

I find this particularly interesting as I do own a small amount of games on Steam that are only for Windows and that I have yet to touch. That, plus there are some games that I do not yet own and that will likely never get ported but that I do want to play. Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City, for example. If Feral doesn't get around to porting them in the next few years, I'll buy them dirt cheap off Steam instead of at full price from Feral's store. Other games I am interested in are The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Dark Souls, Dark Souls II, and possibly a few more. All this will have to wait until I get an AMD graphics card, however, and I won't be getting one just to game using Wine.

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Thank you so much for doing these benchmarks, Samsai. They are very much appreciated and I hope to see more in the future.

What I gathered from these benchmarks is that Nvidia still reigns supreme when it comes to playing games native to Linux, that AMD's open source driver is beating its proprietary counterpart here and there whilst being far more stable as a whole, and that AMD reigns supreme for playing games on Linux via Wine.

AMD has two advantages over Nvidia, namely its open source driver and playing games on Linux using Wine, but Nvidia still has the top advantage because playing games on Linux that are native is the most important factor to consider.

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