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About LinkBacksRead more.Prototypes look like they are influenced by the Sony PlayStation 4 case design.
Read more.Prototypes look like they are influenced by the Sony PlayStation 4 case design.
SteamOS.
Radeon.
Oh boy this thing is going to be ****.
ATI's awful Linux drivers mean plenty of games are already starting to look NVIDIA-only, such as Metro Last Light.
iBuyPower is making the steam boxes. Yeah no thanks. I'll build my own.
Youll be suprised. AMD are probably working on good drivers as we speak. Just the risk that Steam OS will be a success means they have no choice. They dont want to give NV all the market shareOriginally Posted by directhex
Yawn.
Not sure where you get that from? Neither the Hexus article nor the linked Engadget piece mention Radeon...?
But yes, one of the key reasons AMD need to get their Linux driver support sorted out is Steam Machines. It's also a pretty good driver (no pun intended) for them to ensure that Mantle is ported to Linux ASAP
No, iBuyPower is making a Steam Machine. There is no the Steam Machine - a variety of Steam Machine designs will be available from a range of vendors. And yes, as the OS will always be a free download (if you believe Valve, anyway) then you'll also have the option of building your own. See, everyone's happy
http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/25/5...-radeon-r9-270
scaryjim (26-11-2013)
Great, another fancy dust collector in my living room.
CAT-THE-FIFTH (27-11-2013)
AMD (and their ATi predecessor) have been 'working on good drivers' for more than a decade. Trust me, when Linux users lament of how awful their fglrx drivers are, they're being exceptionally polite about it.
all steam titles?!
most of them are windows only and dont run on linux, i smell windows kernel inside for windows titles only . steam might purchased windows kernel and injected it as emulator inside their O.S.
CAT-THE-FIFTH (27-11-2013)
Or not, since the OS is going to be available as a Steam download and I can't see any way that Valve could a) afford the time and development that would be needed to enable the ridiculous kernel and driver switching required to run both windows and linux games side-by-side (if that's even possible), and more importantly b) pay MS money for something then give it away free.
Presumably it means all Steam OS compatible games, which is basically a few Valve FPS games and some low-spec indies. Shouldn't be too hard to get those running at 60fps, even with the questionable performance of AMD drivers....
First off, that's a pretty looking machine - certainly nicer than the ugly XBone. Still going to build my own Steambox though.
Keep hearing about the "shocking" state of the Linux Radeon drivers - surely AMD don't want to gift NVidia with SteamOS/SteamBoxes, in which case surely they'd better get their "**** together". Also wouldn't go as far as the "experts" on Linux Action Show who are of the opinion that AMD graphics hardware is also sub-par.
I really must look into it better, but I thought this "Mantle" project was supposed to deliver better drivers all round?
Career status: still enjoying my new career in DevOps, but it's keeping me busy...
No, Mantle's a new, lower-level graphics API that replaces (in this case) OpenGL, and theoretically provides better performance by removing the CPU hit taken from running a higher level API, and giving more fine-grained control to the game developers. It actually needs a *separate* driver to OGL/DX, and so makes more work for the driver teams*. OTOH, I find it hard to believe that AMD won't up their linux driver game given that SteamOS seems to be getting a reasonable amount of hardware vendor interest....
*incidentally, another benefit of Mantle is that it's meant to make the driver much less important in overall performance, handing that task back to the developers. A lot of modern games need title-specific driver optimisations, which is what most driver updates seem to be about now. From the stuff I've read (CAT's linked some very interesting articles in the Piledriver Chit-chat thread over in hardware) mantle either won't need those optimisations at all, or will need far less of them.
crossy (27-11-2013)
Like I said, they've been at it for over a decade, the workstation angle should have been all the motivation they needed to get it working, but they can't, they're institutionally stuck on fglrx when the entire thing is broken to the core and needs to be discarded. Until that happens, they're never going to have usable Linux drivers.
As someone who's bought multiple radeons and prayed that this time it would be better, AMD/ATi have never failed to disappoint. My old 9600XT used to work brilliantly stable with the open source drivers (particularly the low level kernel framebuffer driver), but that was never developed fully and the mesa (opengl) driver was even slower than the fglrx binary blob since the developers weren't privy to the proper hardware documentation. After that card newer cards were basically completely unusable with the opensource drivers until the last few years, and they still lag far behind new card releases.
It was getting to the point where holding onto Radeon as a Linux user was akin to being a battered wife. You keep telling yourself he loves you, really, things will be different this time, or it was all your fault, or he can change, he said he will, or whatever... But really, it's just a toxic relationship which has no future whatsoever. fglrx is really really just that bad.
Mantle is suppose to reduce application<->hardware overhead to increase performance and I guess it'd reduce older API limitations to graphical computation offering more flexibility, but it wont magically make drivers better. If the driver sucks balls and causes performance and stability problems then no amount of tweaking with APIs is going to help anything since OpenGL wasn't to blame in the first place, just their drivers. Mantle will also need yet another renderer to be developed for each engine alongside OpenGL, and DirectX. If I was a developer, I wouldn't exactly be all excited by that prospect to have to develop for new-enough AMD GPUs, as well as Microsoft and the rest of the universe.
Indeed, if I were developing an engine, and Microsoft were overcome by an attack of decency and they added opengl support to the xbox, there really wouldn't be any need to develop more than a single opengl renderer, the engine would need less framework sprawl to keep that aspect strictly modular and swappable. In any event, for all those legacy applications, as well as new applications developed by people who don't enjoy doubling their workload just to get in on the buzz API of the month for its own sake, AMD will need to whip up a non-fail OpenGL driver, Mantle or no, if they expect to ever gain traction on Linux.
I recently read this Phoronix article testing Linux performance on various AMD cards - and wasn't that impressed. So basically if SteamBoxes/OS end up as an NVidia-only ghetto then AMD only have themselves to blame.
Career status: still enjoying my new career in DevOps, but it's keeping me busy...
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