Quoting: Guest

Quoting: TealNVidia go and do open source your GPU drivers NOW

Yeah right, you have more chance of Microsoft upgrading Windows to a Linux kernel. :P

On a side note though, it's about time Microsoft open sourced their DX9 since it won't be used for much longer. Or why can't they just port the damn thing to Linux, it's not like the penguin is going to make a big dent in their market share any time soon.
I would welcome their WinRT to Linux, for gaming only of course!

Honestly, if Microsoft published their own runtime for Linux, giving effectively Wine-style functionality but more... work-y, I'd probably pay $30 or $40 for that.

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Quoting: opera

What are your hopes for SteamOS this year?

I would like to have some streaming apps for Youtube, Twitch, Amazon Prime and Netflix. But I actually don't expect any big updates besides VR support.

I, too, want to see YouTube/Twitch/Netflix/Hulu/Crunchyroll/ALL_THE_THINGS available to watch from inside SteamOS. That'd be good. That's currently one of the things that makes me sad about my Steam Machine. If it could do those things, it would probably replace my Apple TV (that I got for free).

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Quoting: STiATKudos for AMD having/paying developers pushing their mesa drivers for gamers. That's really a very nice and huge investment they do towards us linux gamers.

I hope there will be the state where I will be able to consider a AMD CPU a safe and good buy. I've got an AMD CPU now anyway on my new gaming system :p.

Maybe I get a mid-class AMD card for testing though...

I tested my RX 480 in Linux recently, and even on Mesa 13.0, it was pretty decent. Definitely had some problems still, but it's definitely getting there, and fast.

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Quoting: lave"Wanderlust" .. always feels awkward to see german words used in other languages that you dont ever hear in germany. Is Wanderlust somehow part of english vocabulary now, like kindergarden?

Given the Germanic roots of the English language, any time English "steals" a word that exists in German, but uses roots that still exist in English, think of it more like remembering something we forgot than theft.

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Sounds interesting. I really like transport management games (got my start on Railroad Tycoon), and it's nice to see someone still giving that genre some love.

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You should consider getting a "passthrough VM" option in place/in addition of/to dual-boot.

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Quoting: badber

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: badber

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: badber

Quoting: GuestWon't buy a new x86-CPU until they remove their microcode.

Why exactly? CPUs have had microcode basically forever and you've been able to upload new revisions for a long, long time.

Sorry, I meant until they remove their non-free microcode.

What CPUs with free microcode are you using then?

for my free system I have an older AMD CPU from 2008 and I have a NanoPi M1 too.

Both of those processors probably have microcode. Also, seems to me like AMD has supported updating the microcode at least from 1999: https://www.dcddcc.com/docs/2014_paper_microcode.pdf [External Link]

As a sidenote, wasn't the floating-point calculation problem that Pentiums had (y'know, those 90's-era CPUs) caused, and fixed, by microcode?

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: badber

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: badber

Quoting: GuestWon't buy a new x86-CPU until they remove their microcode.

Why exactly? CPUs have had microcode basically forever and you've been able to upload new revisions for a long, long time.

Sorry, I meant until they remove their non-free microcode.

What CPUs with free microcode are you using then?

for my free system I have an older AMD CPU from 2008 and I have a NanoPi M1 too.

You do realize the AMD chip probably has built-in microcode, but just has no method of updating it, right?

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*shrug*

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Quoting: Alm888

Quoting: niarbehtOne of the few upsides to integrated GPUs is they usually come with hardware encoders/decoders.

That's not true. Dedicated GPUs are also equipped with hardware encoders/decoders (VDPAU for decoding and HVENC for encoding in the nVidia's case).

Quoting: niarbehtThey're also a nice, handy backup for when everything decides to break on you.

A really unneeded backup for our money. And in place of more CPU cores which could be put to use, like, in 3D rendering or CFD. Integrated GPU's are garbage for high-perfomance solutions and sholud be only used in "typewriter-PC" machines for text processors as sole video cards.

Unneeded backup for our money? And exactly how much of the price jump for Intel CPUs in the past decade came about because of their iGPU? I'll give you a hint, almost all of their price jump has been from a lack of proper competition in the marketplace. The presence of an iGPU doesn't tack much on to the price, but the benefit is a permanent backup in case of any number of issues that can arise with discrete GPUs.

Also, as much as NVENC and AMF aren't supposed to cause any sort of extra load on the GPU while encoding, I've had performance issues in the past based on using them. Offloading encoding to the iGPU instead allowed me to keep all of my performance in those instances, at the cost of the stream looking slightly worse. But hey, that's life.

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