All that said, right now, it seems that choosing SteamOS over a Windows box means sacrificing a significant amount of performance on many (if not most) graphically intensive 3D games. That’s a pretty big cost to bear, considering that Alienware sells its Windows-powered, console-style Alpha boxes at prices that are only $50 more expensive than identically outfitted SteamOS machines. That’s not to mention the fact that Steam on Windows currently has thousands of games that aren’t on SteamOS – including most AAA recent releases -while SteamOS has no similar exclusives to recommend it over Windows.
Hopefully, Valve and other Linux developers can continue improving SteamOS performance to the point where high-end games can be expected to at least run comparably between Linux and Windows. Until then, though, it’s hard to recommend a SteamOS box to anyone who wants to get the best graphical performance out of their PC hardware.
This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. Windows and DirectX clearly reign supreme, with graphics card vendors focusing most – if not all – of their driver development on that platform.
This is the horse. The cart will follow.
Exactly, this is all about gaining public mass and then the driver optimization will come.
So will Christmas!
Trouble here is, where is the public mass going to come from when it is clearly a far inferior product?
Optimization needs to happen now for it to gain any sort of support at all. As much as I hate Windows for what it has become, it is clearly the superior product for a gaming OS. I don’t see Linux becoming suitable for serious gaming any-time soon unfortunately.
Disregarding the graphics performance, is it really such an inferior product? Windows isn’t as suitable in the living room. So, consider that the competition isn’t Windows, it’s the other consoles. They don’t perform any better, and the games libraries aren’t bigger. There are more Linux games on Steam than there are PS4 games.
Granted, none of them are GTA V.
Well, when you’re playing graphics-intensive games, graphics performance is kind of a big deal. I don’t game myself, but several of my friends are hardcore PC gamers, and they want nothing to do with these Steamboxes, for this very reason.
At the risk of being modded down into oblivion, when are people going to accept the fact that desktop Linux is never going to go mainstream? We’ve been having these discussions on this very site since at LEAST 2001, and it still hasn’t gone anywhere 14+ years later. It was never even a contender.
Edit: And no, Chrome OS doesn’t count
Edited 2015-11-17 00:16 UTC
No. Steam machines != Desktop Linux. Valve did not intend to make steam machines your next Linux desktop, but maybe your next gaming console.
Yeah, but when these things were first announced, people on here were talking like this would be an inroad to Linux on the desktop …
Why haven’t you been modded down into oblivion? Linux is the most mainstream OS on the planet. Unless you’re an Apple hardware completist, you probably own several devices running Linux: anything Android, Kindle and most other e-readers, almost all WLAN routers, most “smart” TVs. Linux is far more widespread than Windows at this point.
The only thing it doesn’t dominate is the desktop and gaming. But even Windows doesn’t dominate gaming, with late and buggy console ports being the norm.
How many of them have the quality and hassle free use of a PS4 game on a HDTV screen?
The PS4 isn’t hassle free.
It is when compared to GNU/Linux.
Just pop a DVD into it and play.
But not compared to a Steam Machine.
And yet it beats the pants off of Windows when it comes to non graphics performance (there’s a reason nobody sane runs Windows on supercomputers). The issue is not Linux, it’s the GPU vendors writing drivers that have horrible performance for it. I get better preformance on my Linux desktop rendering on the CPU than I do on the Radeon R7 GPU with AMD’s third-party drivers. The same goes for a Quadro K620 and NVIDIA’s drivers. This means that their drivers are severely under-utilizing the hardware.
Actually it has more to do with the price per licenses than anything else.
If the choice was between commercial UNIX and Windows, I bet more would be running Windows nowadays.
Linux advocates have been saying that for 20 years…not gonna happen.
The simple fact is, which I’m sure will royally irk most Linux advocates but most users do not care, they do not care about privacy (they post their sex lives on FB for Pete’s sake, think they care what MSFT finds out?), they do not care about the OS being locked down, all they care about is “Does it work as simply as possible when I push the button” and again I’m sorry that this is gonna royally PO the Linux fans but Linux? Really not in the same ballpark as Windows on simplicity and ease of use.
As much as I hate Windows “all your data belongs to us” 10 Spyware Edition I have to give ’em credit, I honestly see no way to make an OS more simple, its total handholding and “push button get bacon” levels of easy. Something goes wrong? Windows will tell you that it needs to fix itself and will do all the work for you with a lovely little tutorial that walks the user through using system restore, if that doesn’t fix the issue? Again it holds your hand and walks you through a PC refresh, ZERO knowledge or even the ability to read beyond a fourth grade level required.
So I’m sorry Linux fans, your OS simply does not have a chance. With gaming its even worse, most are ports so you have that overhead and talking to programmers DirectX is several leagues ahead of OpenGL, both when it comes to ease of use and driver support. When was the last time you saw a major triple A release where it was OpenGL only? I honestly can’t remember one after 2002 or so, its ALL DirectX.
You do not see OpenGL-only releases for two reasons:
1) The Intel OpenGL drivers have been borderline useless for as long as I can remember (20 years). Only very recently you can begin to expect an OpenGL 3.3+ application to work on the majority of hardware in Windows and Linux.
2) There is no point. OpenGL 4+ and Direct3D 11 are so close to each other in feature sets that you might as well just target both at the same time. So that’s what the major game engines do. Once you already have the Direct3D target available, why would you require the user to use OpenGL? Especially when you consider the Intel situation.
As for the difficulty level on each API, I find them somewhat the same. I slightly prefer Direct3D, but only because linking with OpenGL is a bit of a pain and COM is easier to RAII from a C++ perspective.
Steam Big Picture mode is identical on all platforms, so no contest there.
Edited 2015-11-17 00:58 UTC
And yet, all the top scientific computers in the world run either Linux or AIX (IBM’s Unix knock off, although last time I checked, only 8 of the TOP500 list used it). It’s also worth noting that I get significantly better performance using CPU based rendering on Linux than I do using GPU based rendering on Windows with a brand new GPU, on the exact same hardware.
Is Linux a good choice for most people on desktop systems? No (although Android is Linux, and if it had the ability to do windowing, it would make an amazing desktop OS). Is Linux going to go away? No, because almost every person in every first-world country in the world in some way depends on something that runs Linux at it’s heart (Unless you have an Apple AirPort router, your wireless router probably runs Linux, as do all Android devices, TiVo, all chrome books, a large majority of good networking equipemnt, a decent percentage of phone equipment, some smart cars, and a lot of other things that people take for granted).
Most of those are a consequence of Linux being free and most companies are freetards.
Also Android userspace has nothing to do with GNU/Linux.
Even Linux (the kernel) is not a standard one.
If tomorrow Google replaced it with BSD, Darwin, QNX or any other POSIX like kernel no one would notice.
Except that… SteamOS is _not_ our OS. SteamOS doesn’t care about privacy (it runs Steam for christ’s sake), it does not care about locking it down (it’s designed to give Valve money), it’s entirely designed to be easy to use (I guess) by people who are amongst those with the most expertise in game development (Valve).
So I don’t understand why you had the need to troll about Linux?
LOL so its “trolling” when somebody gives the classic “year of the Linux desktop” meme wrt SteamOS and I point out that you are more likely to win the powerball than that to occur?
Believe in fairytales and invisible unicorns but the numbers don’t lie, Linux was less than 2% a decade ago, it was less than 2% 5 years ago despite Shuttleworth literally throwing away a huge chunk of his fortune trying to gain users, wanna guess what the current numbers are? Yep its STILL below 2%.
And frankly who cares that it runs on scientific equipment,as we saw last week major airports are running Win 3.11, does that mean we should be talking about “the year of Win 3.11”? We are talking about CONSUMER space here, a section which frankly dwarfs pretty much every other sector and we have already seen what the future is, its locked down appliances either running MSFT,Apple, or Google proprietary systems.
Call me names all you wish but mark my words and mark them well, in less than 2 years Gaben WILL abandon SteamOS, after the OEMs end up with warehouses full of unsold hardware. At its best it runs less than 5% of the Steam catalog, is slower than Windows in every.single.game. (even Gabe’s ancient DX9 era games could only come close to equality, it couldn’t beat it) and now that MSFT is giving away Windows it doesn’t even have “free as in beer” going for it!
Do I like this? FUCK NO, because I’ll have to spend more time “de-spying” Windows default installs than I do infected systems now, but we simply cannot fight the future and the future is users willing to give away everything for the sake of convenience and simplicity, like it or not. And Linux users better get used to running Pre-NSAed Raspberry Pis, because everything else will be securebooted.
Windows is “push button easy”? You must not administrate many Windows workstations.
This is not new. Linux drivers were always slower than Windows.
In the late 90s 3dfx have better support than NVidia, thay used to run about 85%-90%** compare to Windows version. While Nvidia were around the 70%. Plus Nvidia were incredible unstable running on a SMP machine.
An ATI support is no better than Nvidia (never were and sadly never will be).
** Remembering old articles and personal experience (I use to have a Voodoo 2 with a GeForce 256DDR on the same Dual Pentium 2).
I guess that the whole Linux world waits to get the Wayland into mainstream and stable state. Looking at current situation It don’t think this to happen any time soon however. Perhaps some times in 2017? Till then the X.Org is always there to slow things down. So perhaps with Wayland the graphics and gaming situation will improve on Linux.
Fedora used to release statements that their next version may have a wayland support. I think I am going to wait for Wayland for another 48 years.
Last time I attended FOSDEM (2012), Wayland was going to be released in the upcoming months….
Well one thing is Wayland release, another thing is a full support. All the distros currently shipping with Wayland (Fedora and Ubuntu) are using X-Wayland bridge because window managers do not support wayland yet and therefore the performance with XWayland is WORSE than clean X. Both KDE and GNOME as well as NVidia and AMD are hard at work to get the full stack working end-to-end with nothing but Wayland.
It’s released ages ago. Gnome supports Wayland, and you could probably run Wayland Gnome daily if you’re willing to adapt to its remaining quirks.
Wayland is much more about compositing than gaming. Bypassing compositing altogether is a key part of gaming performance. I think we’ve got a lot more to look forward to with Vulkan.
Very casual gaming: Smartphone
Casual gaming: Console
Hardcore gaming: PC
Steambox is aiming for the hardcore gaming but with console-level prices/easiness…great idea, decent execution. But decent execution is not good enough for this to become a mass market that console games should be.
2 years from now the same consoles will be relatively old and expensive so a 2017 SteamBox will be able to compete with them.
The biggest problem for SteamBox seems to be the marketing. Their primary users all seem to have a pc already and outside of that group they are invisible.
(unrelated to this article: Does anyone have a SteamBox and some experience with their fancy controllers?)
I have used the controller(s) with a steam link. Frankly they are different. “Not better” nor “worse” but different.
The problem though is control mapping. Each game has to be individually tweaked and there is little continuity between them at the moment.
A simple example, when I handed the controller to my girlfriend for the first time, she struggled to navigate around. Whichever console you chose there is a consistent “ok” and “back” button. With steam it varies
No, the biggest problem is available games. Not all the Steam games have a Linux version. There are some big absences.
The title on this article is very misleading and the summary doesn’t reflect the findings of the authors. For those who have not read it, the authors only tested 7 games of the several hundred available, so statistically their results are not significant. But of those 7 games examined, here are the results:
1 – performed better on Linux/SteamOS
1 – performed the same on SteamOS and Windows
3 – performed better on Windows, but not enough to visually notice a difference
2 – performed visually better on Windows
This means that 5 of the 7 games worked as well or better from the gamer’s point of view on SteamOS. And from that we somehow get “SteamOS gaming performs significantly worse than Windows,” The results mentioned in the article and the summary here do not match.
Also worth of note is the following:
In other words: tested on one home-made, two-year old machine only. This is in no way representative (especially not for the new steam machines) and definitely doesn’t warrant the clickbait title nor any conclusions drawn from this.
Edited 2015-11-17 13:12 UTC
You want to know what the entirety of the issue is?
It’s that the third-party graphics drivers for Linux absolutely suck. On my desktop box with a Radeon R7, I get better performance on stuff that uses just the CPU for the rendering that I do using AMD’s drivers, and have the same issue with another system I have a Quadro K620 in.
The vendors other than Intel have never cared about performance on Linux, and this is largely because traditionally, most people who do graphics intensive stuff on Linux either can throw ridiculous amounts of hardware at it (because they’re saving money by using Linux), or are doing CAD type things where accuracy matters more than performance.
On a separate note, if you feel that a game needs to be run at high quality graphics settings to be worth playing, then it probably isn’t all that good of a game to begin with.
There is a Linux distribution specifically for GPU based bitcoin mining. The guy behind oclhashcat uses it to build password cracking clusters because it comes pre-configured for GPU support. I’m not sure if it would actually make a difference for you or not but if you do that much CPU/GPU based rendering, it may be worth looking at. I’m also not sure the specific name as it was mentioned during a conference talk. Might be BAMT Linux or Slax Cryptominer.