Guest post by It seems to have so far escaped OSNews’ notice (if the top few hits for a site-search for ‘Steam’ is any indication) that Steam for Linux is now in Open Beta; you can get the Linux steam client from steampowered.com. So far, they appear to only be making an Ubuntu .deb available, and the client will require closed-source GPU drivers in order to work.
It bears repeating that the limited distribution availability fits with Valve’s primary objective in porting Steam to linux – enabling an Ubuntu-Linux-based Steambox. It remains to be seen if Valve will provide packages for other distributions, but I won’t be shocked if they don’t – or if they do as Dropbox, Skype and Google have done, and provide packages only for the latest Ubuntu and Fedora distributions. So users of slightly more obscure distributions (I’m using Mint/Debian here at school) are S.O.L., and can probably expect to be so for a while.
In the grand OSNews tradition, now that I’ve said a few words about what is ostensibly the topic, I’d like to take a moment to prance, preen and provoke.
As of right now, getting actual games to work will require installing the proprietary drivers for your platform. There are several possible reasons that this could be the case, among them that the proprietary drivers are known to offer slightly higher 3D performance. However, I strongly suspect that there is one major reason for the requirement; on most platforms, the closed-source drivers will provide a GL3+ context, while the open-source drivers still provide a GL2.1 context.
This should be an embarrassment for all parties concerned; we (by which I mean, the community of Linux users, developers and enthusiasts; I am not a developer or distributor) are still shipping on modern systems a graphics API that is now six years old, and that was superseded four years ago. I had to check Wikipedia for my chronology; GL2.1 was 2006, and 3.0 was 2008. GL4.3 is the current standard. And yet, on the shiney, new Fedora 18 install I set up a few days ago, I get GL2.1, in spite of my somewhat-recent Radeon 6650.
This in particular points up Gallium’s failure to live up to its promise. The entire point, as far as I understood it, of moving to Gallium was to avoid replicating the OpenGL interface layer across all drivers needlessly; the idea was that, once there was an OpenGL3 state tracker, all Gallium drivers would be able to use it, and we’d all get OpenGL3 cheaply. That clearly has not happened.
Aaaand forums are full of problems. That’ll inspire devs to port their games to Linux.
trolololo
Bahaha! Looks like this is closed source everything, so I’m sure the FOSS crowd isn’t going to be happy.
Which begs the question… how does the FOSS crowd suppose that game developers can be profitable releasing source code for their games? Well, if the games are as much of a pain in the ass to get running under Linux as it sounds, I guess they could charge for support
LMAO
I’m feel almost as strongly about keeping an open-source system as Stallman but I’m also pragmatic enough to make an exception for games because I recognize that games fall squarely in the area current open-source development models and communities are weakest at.
(There’s still a lot of work to be done to enable and encourage participants who artistic without also being technically-skilled, Game engines are significantly harder to architect such that you can incrementally improve them over the course of a decade, etc.)
The problem is with games is that while there are large amounts of people involved, the collaborative model doesn’t really work with something that is at it very core creative and more like art than something technical.
The games the are open source, while some of them are very good are usually knock-offs of popular 90s games (Nexuiz/Xonotic – Q3/UT) being a good examples.
Indie games are quite popular these days because they were given an audience through things like the humble bundle, steam and whatever they call Xbox Live Arcade.
Edited 2013-01-30 08:07 UTC
Sad but true. I’m constantly disappointing by the number of FPS clones the OSS community manage to create. Sometime it seems that like every new OSS game is yet another stale FPS clone.
It’s doubly sad because the there’s no inherent reason why the open source model (and perhaps combined with creative commons) shouldn’t work for creating new and innovative games.
I’d say there kind of is in practice: creating a compelling story, designing the interaction mechanics between the player and the game-world in a meaningful way, real interface design, doing all the graphical and audio assets — ie. all very much artistic assets — pay quite well in the real world. In addition, creating such assets tend to be really, really time-consuming, much more so than cranking out code, and therefore such just may not be deemed worth the peoples’ efforts and time.
It’s not the amount of coders available that is the problem, it’s the lack of everyone else. Even a project leader with a well-defined, uncompromising vision could give these F/OSS – games some much-needed direction, but as it stands, these projects are mostly collections of random, shallow ideas thrown together.
True but coding pays pretty well too, probably better in general than creative pursuits.
Besides, a lot of artists release some of their work under public domain or creative commons so there’s really no reason these people couldn’t contribute to OSS games in the same way.
Maybe it’s just a lack of communication or effort from the coding camp to actually get creative people onboard.
Edited 2013-01-31 04:38 UTC
Just a quick correction: Richard Stallman does not feel strongly about open source software. Instead, Stallman feels strongly about free software.
Also, a person who feels (almost) as strongly about free software as Stallman would not be interested in making a compromise for non-free software, because it goes against the principles of the Free Software foundation.
In that sense, it kind of sounds like you are more of a proponent of open source software, and not free software.
I realize this may seem like a nitpick, but one Stallman’s primary points is to emphasize the difference between the Free Software movement and the Open Source initiative.
I guess I would count as part of the ‘foss crowd’ as I vastly prefer (f)oss and run a Linux based distribution pretty much fulltime (with some time logged in Haiku).
That doesn’t mean I think everything has to be (f)oss, in fact the main important thing for me is that everything I need to operate my system is (f)oss, and that everything I need to store/archive/retrieve my personal data is (f)oss.
Depending on it’s nature, I also require applications through which I generate data to be (f)oss, but that’s a somewhat more fuzzy deal, as the most important part here is that there are simple ways of exporting the data to open formats with all the information intact.
Games are none of that, they are pure consumption. I will never need a game in order to use my computer or get my work done.
As such I have no problem using proprietary games (and as stated above, I have no problem using proprietary software as long as I am not subject to vendor lock-in, as I would never entrust my own data to a proprietary format).
At least 5G free hard drive space (more if you want to play games!)
You have to be fragging kidding me! At least 5G free hard drive space to *INSTALL* this worthless garbage?
If I’m going to dedicate OVER FIVE GIGABYTES of my harddrive space to something, it sure as hell isn’t *THIS*
Edited 2013-01-30 01:41 UTC
What are you talking about?
Oh I get it, the Ubuntu Wiki (erroneusly) says 5G when the Steam site just says 1G.
I suspect 5gb includes ubuntu…
Well, either way, upon launch you are required to “update” steam. That, I kid you not, is a 200+ MB download.
WTF?
Well, Steam does download a similarly-sized “update” when you first launch it on Windows, too, so I don’t see the problem. I don’t know why it’s been done like that, though.
I have a problem with it being 200Mb. Seriosusly, why is it so big even without any installed games? It’s absurd.
On the other hand, in a world where driver installers come in at almost 100MB (Hi NVIDIA) I guess I shouldn’t expect better.
I don’t really know, I haven’t taken a look at it, but I am guessing it’s mostly all compiled as static binaries and therefore includes more-or-less all the possible libraries it could need. That also includes a whole web-browser. It would be an entirely different thing if it was compiled as a dynamically-loadable binary and used system-provided browser engine.
Does this help justify its size for you?
Nah, not really. I just checked the installed size and it’s a whopping 900MB (for those interested, it’s in ~/.local/share/Steam).
Even with static binaries and a browser that’s just silly.
Edit: I guess it could be including debug symbols, since it’s a beta and all, but still…900Mb.
Edited 2013-02-02 05:11 UTC
Steam included the game files, 5G is probably what you want if you downloaded a few smaller games.
I recently bought Farcry 3 and the install footprint of that was 16GB
If I understand correctly, game developers could release the game source code, but keep the creative aspects (art, music, story, etc) proprietary. So you could build your own game using the source code, but would need to provide your own creative elements. I would imagine there’s more concern over the Steam DRM.
Yes this is pretty much the way that it’s done with all commercial games which has later been open sourced.
The code is released under GPLv2/GPLv3, meanwhile (non-copyleft) copyright is retained on the game ‘assets’.
This means that you can port the game to just about any platform and run it there, but you need to ‘own’ a copy of the graphics/sound/etc data, which in practical terms mean that you need to own the original game if you want to play the game as ‘intended’.
Obviously releasing the source code opens up lots of possibilities for ‘modding’ and other ventures which doesn’t rely on the original game data.
Yeah. It’s a common way for companies to open-source the engines for games like DOOM and Arx Fatalis.
It’s also how free games like Sauerbraten and Frogatto and Friends are done. The engines are open-source and you’re encouraged to reuse them but the default assets bundle is merely freely redistributable with no derivatives allowed.
(Frogatto and Friends was actually written specifically to encourage more 2D indie platformers by providing a good free engine and an example of what it can do and how it’s used)
The inverse is also popular with indie games. (Using things like music and art assets under licenses like CC-BY-SA)
GPLed code doesn’t affect assets unless they’re compiled right into the executable binary because there’s no code linking going on and Creative Commons assets don’t affect code for the same reason.
(Copyleft licenses cover derivation, not aggregation)
That’s the way things go when people (i.e. iD) go down that route, however there are other issues with releasing the source to AAA games.
Firstly, the industry competes fiercely on technology, and licenses their engines and tooling for 10s of thousands, or even millions of dollars.
Secondly, any major AAA game engine also supports consoles, and there’s a legal liability if they expose any portion of the SDK. They could do a lot of work factoring out and removing #ifdef XBOX’s, maybe even treating the cleaned source code as another build target, but that’s rather a lot of work for little gain. More so to retrofit it. You might have to not include any version-control history either, lest comments reveal secrets.
Then there’s the overhead of accepting upstream patches, and telling contributors that, no, we can’t take your patch because it doesn’t work well with the secret stuff we can’t disclose to you, and we can’t provide any more than the vaguest of hints to redirect you, because you could then infer super-secret stuff we can’t tell you and Legal will have our asses.
Honestly, a better approach is to go the other way around — begin the project entirely open source, and then treat yourselves as a third party using the code-base. However, you still have problems forcing the codebase to be console-friendly without maintaining a whole lot of private code replacing things whole-cloth, or just branching entirely.
Really, the whole thing idea falls apart when you touch closed platforms (which is not a rebuke of consoles, just an observation.)
You can’t even really point to iD’s releases as a model, as iD itself isn’t really actively looking to FOSS contributors to provide iD with upstream patches. Their source code releases are essentially gifts to the community and insurance that their games will remain playable into the future.
The engine can be open-source even without the developers accepting any upstream patches at all. Accepting such is not a requirement.
You could always place the console-specific portions in separate header – and code – files and use ifdefs, and as such, that’s not really as big of an issue as you would seem to believe. It is some extra work, but not much — especially so if you plan the code-base accordingly from the get-go.
> Secondly, any major AAA game engine also supports consoles, and there’s a legal liability if they expose any portion of the SDK.
Why do console OEMs do this? Do they think that restricting access to the SDK will provide MORE good games?
DRM there is more annoying than “closed-sourceness”. I wish GOG already would start competing in the same field but with DRM free approach.
Edited 2013-01-30 03:22 UTC
Definitely. I buy all my indie games via either Humble Bundles or Desura and limit my GOG use to stuff too old and/or mainstream to have any significant chance of a native Linux port.
Heck, on the rare occasions when I can’t wait for an indie game, I make sure to buy it through the Humble Store because that ensures I don’t have to re-buy if it shows up in a future bundle.
If GOG started offering Linux versions of games not ported as part of a Humble Bundle, they’d command an even higher portion of my entertainment budget.
The only reason I care about Steam on Linux at all is because my brothers use it and, as a side-effect, it’s pushing improvements in the nVidia binary drivers.
Edited 2013-01-30 03:39 UTC
FOSS != Stallman’s attidude.
I dunno, by making good games that people want to pay for?
Besides, if what we’re told about how rampant piracy is on closed-source platforms is true would open sourcing your game really make things worse?
Good point. Assuming a particular game has already been cracked (if cracking is required) – then surely pirating said cracked or leaked game binary is much easier than compiling the ‘free'(ly available) source code.
As been has said a million times, copyright would still protect others from reselling your title. and (presuming the game /physics engines employed by the original developer were actually developed and release by a 3rd or 4th party anyway) and they were just releasing the extra code for their models, level design, textures etc.. then, yeah, I see no (Big, Real) reason while games couldn’t still be release, and sold, and be profitable whilst also being open source.
Obviously that is containing the caveat of having an available free to use game engine available.
I was recently working on an OSS license project whose terms were basically “you do whatever you want the source at home and with other licensees, but if you start to spread it around without following our redistribution conditions, our lawyer pack can sue the hell out of you”.
The redistribution conditions were initially set to “you must redistribute the source along with derivatives you publish”, and then individual projects could add or remove extra terms as long as they do not contradict this basic principle. Point was to decouple the core open-source principle that users should have access to the source of the software they legally acquired, from software distribution conditions themselves, so as to allow for commercial software development.
Discussions with the OSI to have it lawyer-approved had come to a stall though, I’d have to start working on that again one of these days…
Edited 2013-01-30 06:36 UTC
No, it doesn’t (seriously, google/wiki what “begging the question” is :p )
@Wafflez:
Forums? pfft the article is about Steam not about games, so this needs to be here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux
And BTW do show me a game with a forum, with customers and without problems? geez
@WorknMan: There are plenty of F/OSS engines out there that support Linux, say iD’s, yet no CoD clone (in popularity geez) has spawn in the mean time. The thing is that the code to drive the logic is just a piece of the puzzle, having the gigabytes of F/OSS textures and models is the problem, hence the likes of OpenArena which took a while to get where they are.
Edited 2013-01-30 00:00 UTC
Except that for such a small Desktop fraction they generate so much issues.
’cause they’re generating the issues and not the game+OS interaction, right? geez
I dislike Linux, sue me.
Out of curiosity, whenever you dislike something do you always act like a baboon, with no sign of maturity of any kind in sight?
I feel others have already rebutted your comment quite well, but I’ll just add my own here: how well did Steam function on OSX, for example, when it was first released? Or under Windows, for that matter? It is certainly not unfathomable for such a system to experience some birth pains. Linux – devs are crafty people and where they can’t fix something themselves they’ll atleast be able to point someone else to the problem, so I can’t quite agree with your assessment here.
Do you understand what a beta is?
If you install it on 64-bit Ubuntu, make sure you install the i386-libs package (or whatever it’s called) before hand, otherwise you’ll have problems that aren’t always resolved if you install after.
And, if you have a laptop with nVidia Optimus (and have Bumblebee installed) remember to run Steam with optirun or else it just won’t work.
Also, I wonder how it’d work under FreeBSD with Linux emulation.
UT2004 was just awesome under FreeBSD, getting +30% higher frame rates than Linux with the then-current GeForceFX.
Unfortunately, KMS doesn’t work well enough for the Intel driver to work for my laptop yet (though it should work). Having both the Intel HD3000 and an nVidia chip surely complicates matters.
Well, I guess it’s time to try it again.
Is there anyone who actually believes there’s going to be any truly open-source system for commercial 3d gaming? Not happening, ….ever.
Question. Do we need one? From a practical standpoint.
Honestly, absolutely not. People who think everything should be open & free will tell you otherwise but of course none of those people are in the business of selling video cards (and who prefer to continue doing so).
I don’t have to think that ‘everything should be open & free’ in order to want to be able to use hardware I bought in the operating system of my choice.
From a practical standpoint I am stuck with functional hardware only on systems that the hardware vendor sees fit to support.
This is where open source drivers come in and are very important, if for now other reason than them preventing system lock-in.
If there were no open source drivers then systems like Linux, BSD etc would have gotten nowhere. Companies like NVidia did not support these systems from ‘the get go’, they only supported them once their potential customers where using said systems.
Those customers would never had been able to use said systems unless countless of open source developers had spent huge amounts of time working on open source drivers for a huge array of hardware, thus making it possible to run Linux/BSD etc.
As for wheter a ‘system for commercial 3d gaming’ will ever be ‘truly open-source’, I don’t know.
Perhaps if combined cpu(s) + gpu(s) architectures like those of Intel’s Haswell and onwards keep improving in performance as their drivers are fully open source.
It doesn’t really matter to me though, as I don’t need a ‘system for commercial 3d gaming’ for anything important.
Meanwhile the overall desktop market for discrete GPU’s keeps shrinking, people find that they get good enough performance for their needs from the built-in graphics solutions which keep improving quite rapidly with each new hardware generation.
Tell that to Crysis 3 when it comes out.
Actually the main author is wrong, Gallium3d HAS lived up to it’s promise. there is now OpenGL 3.0 shipping on ALL Intel/ATI/NVIDIA cards in Open source drivers. If the author bothered to follow the Phoronix.com news website he’d know the current state of OpenGL on Linux, it’s rapidly gaining ground across all major cards/drivers. The NVIDIA cards for instance have implemented 90% of all card functions across the cards in the last 4 hardware generations. Lacking only power management to unleash the full power of the cards. New Kernel releases are starting to really amp up the features of these drivers. I expect within 2 years the open source Nvidia support will have overtaken the closed drivers. It’s only ATi that seems to be seriously lagging.
While in the meantime the closed-source drivers ship OpenGL 4.3.
Hardly. Even Nouveau’s own wiki still paints a lot of red: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix
Naive.
Take another look. The majority of the newer cards have most of their features implemented or in progress, with only Video Decoding, TV output, Video input and SLI not implement for NV50 and NVC0 cards series. the main one with the redblocks are the absolute newest cards series.
Read into the details and you would avoid this sort of a mess
All the kinda things you want from a premium graphics card. Nvidia’s Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD drivers have been far better than Open Equivalents for 3D for ages, especially in terms of performance.
I use Nouveau on Fedora because I do my gaming in Windows and it is fine for desktop stuff, but I wouldn’t want to play any Triple A games on it.
Titles like Crysis 2 and FarCry 3 pretty much take any system resources you got (I have a GeForce 660 GTX card and one of the better Core 2 duo chips, and it uses anything it can grab).
Crysis 3 gets launched next month and I am pretty sure I will have to over-clock the CPU.
Edited 2013-01-30 12:50 UTC
I couldn’t care less as long as they’re closed-source binary blobs.
No new games for you then.
And in the next version they’ll probably support 3.1, the radeon driver already has it in Mesa git:
OpenGL vendor string: X.Org
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on AMD RV730
OpenGL core profile version string: 3.1 (Core Profile) Mesa 9.1-devel (git-0642437)
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 1.40
OpenGL core profile context flags: (none)
OpenGL core profile extensions:
OpenGL version string: 3.0 Mesa 9.1-devel (git-0642437)
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.30
(Note that you need a new glxinfo to show anything above 3.0 for these drivers as they only support >3.0 when requesting a Core Profile).
Radeon has more features implemented: http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
Well, if you would have looked a year ago there would have been alot more red which has now turned into orange/yellow/green.
I don’t think that the open source drivers will have overtaken the proprietary ones but I’m certain that they will have decreased the gap further.
Not with the latest cards. While some games that are 4 or 5 years old will probably run okay on lower end hardware you just miss out on performance on the faster cards. My 8800GT while very good when I bought struggled with modern games, I had to upgrade to a 660GTX.
ATi cards while slightly cheaper and higher performing for some games have always had crap drivers. Nvidia closed drivers is the only one that gives me everything cross platform.
Not technically possible with nvidia imho.
NVidia opensource driver team plays permanent catch-up by legally reversing the original driver. They will always be behind in terms of new card support, performance and features, because they will need to see a working upstream driver first, and also get their hands on the hardware.
when it comes to AMD video cards :
AMD opensource team works with the upstream documentation – the company in question actually helps here.
Some of those developers are employed at the company and can develop some things in advance, their code and the official tech documentation for people outside of AMD has to get through lengthy legal review before it can be released out to the public.
The legal part is the biggest problem here. It stalls the documentation release significantly.
Then comes the design of the AMD video cards. More recent models have done away with separate 2D acceleration engine, and 3D engine does all the acceleration (2D, video playback, 3D). Full spec is required to get basic things done, except for maybe setting the resolution and getting things put on the screen, albeit with no acceleration.
Previously, there were separate docs released and things could be incrementally implemented – mode setting, 2D acceleration, video acceleration, 3D acceleration. Nowadays, it’s not so easy.
Also, for older cards, there are a lot of problems stemming from undocumented quirks of hardware (check out how long did it take to get HyperZ working due to various unexplained lockups of GPUs, or how often radeon developers stumble upon CS related crashes, even when they have access to official documentation).
If AMD picks up their documentation release effort, so will the development of open source drivers for their cards. Right now developers are bringing up support for subsequent opengl specs up in opensource drivers (radeon drivers are coming close to opengl 3.1 atm) and fixing various performance bottlenecks in existing features.
And when it comes to most recent cards – they are waiting for technical documentation. Which is stuck in legal review.
I think that Valve has actually done a good job with the implementation of Steam. It used to work pretty well in wine and now I am able to run the native Linux version for those games which are ported (the list is growing day by day, they even ported 15 year old Half-life!).
The fact that I need proprietary drivers for this doesn’t bother me a bit, I am all for foss, but I also want to have a usable system. I have been using Linux exclusively for 10 years and I enjoy that I can play a nice looking game after working with a aterm filled Fluxbox desktop all day!
I love the fact I can log onto another machine with my Steam account and have my whole library available (be it for the platform the client is on of course). They have ridiculous low prices during their seasonal sales where a casual gamer like me can pick out enough to keep entertained for months for next to nothing.
And very importantly, Steam allows me to pay with my online banking account through iDeal (a system used by Dutch banks) which makes my experience more hassle free.
Too bad that only crap games are available on Steam for Linux.
I guess that 2013 will be the year of the Linux desktop again.
I didn’t realize that the Left4Dead series, Serious Sam 3, Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life were considered crap games.
Pretty much the only people who *DON’T* think these games aren’t crap are FPS Fanboys.
FPS is my preferred genre, that doesn’t make me a “fanboy”. The game industry as a whole seemed to think those games were pretty ground breaking.
So lets add to the mix then, shall we? What about Amnesia, Dues Ex, Crusaders and Kings, or is World of Goo more your thing? None of those are FPS games, and they are all pretty good. But I bet you think all games are crap anyway, regardless of the genre. To each their own.
So, what you’re saying is that only FPS fanboys think those games are crap. Maybe. I like those games and I’m not an FPS fanboy. So, my own experience is consistent with your claim
.
We (and by we I understand the whole floss community) won’t play any steam games on GNU/Linux unless they open the sources for both games and Steam client under GPL v3 or later. We won’t even install proprietary Nvidia or AMD drivers unless they open source them.
We don’t want our beloved free software world to be tainted by free proprietary crap.
As RMS has sung:
Join us now and share the software;
You’ll be free, hackers, you’ll be free.
Join us now and share the software;
You’ll be free, hackers, you’ll be free.
Hoarders can get piles of money,
That is true, hackers, that is true.
But they cannot help their neighbors;
That’s not good, hackers, that’s not good.
When we have enough free software
At our call, hackers, at our call,
We’ll kick out those dirty licenses
Ever more, hackers, ever more.
Join us now and share the software;
You’ll be free, hackers, you’ll be free.
Join us now and share the software;
You’ll be free, hackers, you’ll be free.
I consider myself a part of the F/OSS – community and yet I do not agree, ergo your assessment of “the whole floss community” is incorrect.
I do.
I hate to point this out, but… obvious twitterfire trolling is obvious. There’s a reason why almost no one bothers to reply to this guy’s comments anymore, he’s getting almost as hysterical as mrhasbean/ourcomputerbloke before his ban.
Edited 2013-01-30 11:09 UTC
Ah, well, I haven’t seen the guy before. Thanks for the warning.
That’s because you, as oppose to twittefire, aren’t mentally challenged.
Don’t assume you speak for everyone, you certainly don’t speak for me. Who do you think you are, Stallman?
IMHO you must be either subtly sarcastic, or a troll.
I love F/LOSS, yet I like to play high-powered games on my laptop. I don’t like proprietary drivers, at all, but so far it’s my only option for a fast, non-hanging GPU experience.
Thanks to Valve’s involvement with Linux, whatever their reason, I can now enjoy decent graphics on my hybrid GPU (Radeon-Intel) laptop. because AMD condescended / was pressured to update their drivers.
I don’t think I’ll ever buy games from Valve, though (well, my teenage son does, and with my money… whatever).
Actually the steam client works fine with open source drivers and so do some of the games (tried World of Goo, Amnesia and the Half-Life 1 beta, even TF2 worked although rather slow on low settings), so no the closed source drivers are not mandatory (although for now they are recommended).
Note this was with the radeon drivers on arch.
Here’s my recent experience with proprietary drivers in Linux.
I recently just got a new graphics card to drive a new 2560×1440 monitor I bought.
My integrated graphics was Radeon HD 4xxx and I figured I needed something beefier.
I went with a Radeon HD 7770 and it was terrible.
I tried various distros (Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10, Mint 13 and 14)
I tried various drivers including AMD’s newest 13.1
I tried various desktop environment flavors of each OS (Unity, XFce, Compiz, Cinnamon)
There were either performance issues, glitches, or both in every combination I tried.
By performance issues I mean hardware acceleration not working (close to 100% CPU while watching BluRays movies).
The glitches were unbearable. Everything from huge artifacts to screen flickering.
I returned it for an NVidia 650 Ti.
The performance is great and no glitches.
My only complaint is that my virtual terminals are 25×80 (pretty ugly on a 27″ 2560×1440 monitor).
I’d love to see KMS on the proprietary NVidia drivers.
I’m going to return my montior because it (and the replacement I got) both have bad backlight bleeding.
I’m looking at getting the Dell S2340L which only has VGA and HDMI.
The problem here is that supposedly NVidia only outputs 16-235 over HDMI and not 0-255.
There are fixes out there for Windows involving registry edits…. no clue how to do this on Linux.
What a mess
It’s not naïve at all. There have been benchmarks comparing the closed NVidia driver underclocked to the same core speeds as the open source nouveau drivers, and the Nouveau drivers outperformed the NVidia drivers. What will happen is Gallium3d is rapidly gaining OpenGL 3.2/3.3 support, OpenGL 4.x features are already being implemented. The GL levels will catch up to NVIDIA’s closed drivers. The performance is already very good, core clock/memory clock not withstanding (and that’s already being reverse engineered quickly, checkout the link in the feature matrix for clock speeds). As that work gets implemented it’s going to become much easier to get newer cards supported. Each new generation of cards doesn’t need to have the entire GL stack reimplemented. As much as possible is being rolled into Gallium which is lowering the needed dev time to get working drivers. Geforce 9×00 to 6×0 series cards are already very well supported and gaining quickly. Most of the “Red” is on old cards that no one should be using anyway. VDPAU support is mostly implemented. Based on current progress two years is actually a pretty good estimate. I’ve been following this stuff for more than 10 years, I’ve also done enough development and been around the Linux Game Development community to be able to say that this is coming along unbelieveably well. It’s going to be like the Wifi drivers, in Two years graphics card support will Just Work on Intel/Nvidia and maybe even on ATi (I won’t hold my breath on ATi).
If you want to know why the FOSS games have bad graphics/lack of creative assets it’s simple: It’s the Tools. Where is FRED/FRED2 for every FPS clone out there? Where is the Mission editor for all of these games? Not the random python script to code a mission but the easy drag/drop 3d editor that lets me place bad guys and script events using a mouse and some text boxes? This is why FLOSS games suck, there’s no tools to make them unless you are a full programmer versed in Python/GIMP. The other issue is from an art perspective. There are very few tools that artists use on Linux. On windows there are about 20-40 3d modelling packages, each has it’s own workflow and artists pick 1-3 and stick with them because it fits a style they fall into. Linux only really has Blender and Maya. Maya is fine if you’re rich, but if not it’s Blender or nothing. This unfortunately leaves out everyone who’s using Lightwave/3dsmax/truespace/rhino3d etc. There’s also a lack of tools like DeepExploration for format conversion and some other tools on Windows like one I saw that reloads all texture images on a model when you click it’s screen. So you use two screens, photoshop/3d editor on one screen and the other is the model viewer, as you edit the textures or geometry, you shift the mouse to the second screen and instantly see the changes to your model. Linux has nothing like this which means modders/artists will continue to use Windows.
Edited 2013-01-31 07:09 UTC
Yeah okay then! </sarcasm>
Sorry unless the open drivers are being delivered by the manufacturer I doubt they will be on par with the latest hardware.
Unless it is the latest and greatest most intensive 3D renderings and Games with the latest OpenGL, the benchmark is pretty mute.
Games running in Direct X 9 on my hardware were fine on an older card at 1680×1050, but DirectX 11 was unplayable at the same resolution.
Lets see how these drivers stack up against the closed source drivers once the latest OpenGL is supported.
But that doesn’t really matter. The artists does not have to create their artwork using Linux.
Tried the Steam beta using Ubuntu 12.10 32-bit using Bumblebee with optirun and primusrun. Serious Sam 3 BFE runs but the frame rates are abysmal making the game essentially unplayable. I wish nvidia would release even an alpha version of some Optimus drivers. This situation is just ridiculous. My video chipset is Intel HD4000/GTX 670M and I’m using the experimental 310 drivers for the nvidia side of the house. My screen res is 1600×900.
The Unigine Heaven benchmarks are crappy too. I get roughly 9-12 fps. The Tropics benchmark is somewhat better at 15-22 fps. Is anyone out there getting any better frame rates than those I’ve posted?
Federation of German Consumer Organizations claims Steam users own the games they purchase and should be able to re-sell them.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/german-group-sues-valve-6403307
Now that is getting interesting…
There are a lot of incorrect assumptions and facts in this article.
First of all Steam is just a regular application. It will work on any system compatible with basic Linux 32-bit and you can use it without a powerful GPU at all. It’s also a launcher for applications, which brings us to…
…the system requirements for your video card depend on the application you want to run from Steam. Some games might depend on proprietary drivers but so far I’ve had plenty of success with open source drivers. You can find this information on the support forums or store page for each game.
Valve themselves have praised the open source stack implementation on Linux. They provided feedback which significantly improved the drivers, and they also took advantage of its open nature to find bugs in their own engine. You see, because with Mesa they’re not working against a black box they’ve been able to fix bugs that improved their games on all platforms, including Windows. They’ve highly praised it, and thanks to them and the several contributors that work on it the graphics stack on Linux improved quite a bit. You can find this information on their blog.
Finally, just because the drivers you have installed on your system report “OpenGL 2.1” doesn’t mean they’re that outdated. They may include functions required by programs from as recent as OpenGL 4.2. The problem is that if developers use 90% of 4.2, and Mesa covers 90% of 4.2, they still won’t report that they support 4.2.
For a more informed position on OpenGL coverage you could simply install and run games. Do they work with the OpenGL stack available on Linux? That would mean the OpenGL coverage is good. Again, you can find out for yourself by installing Steam and trying it out on your system.
Normally I enjoy the little rants you do on this site, but please try to be more informative on the subject before going off about it.