Valve announce Linux based gaming OS for 2014

[LordEC911]

I have yet to see a controller that can beat a mouse for FPS.

True, but I have a feeling this is going to close the gap against more traditional controllers.

[STEvil]

I have yet to see a controller that can beat a mouse for FPS.

Agree

This controller is a step in the right direction at least though.

[zalbard]

Agree

This controller is a step in the right direction at least though.

Hopefully.

But we don't know that yet.

[radier]

Here are the specifications for Valve's 300 prototypes.

The 300 prototype units will ship with the following components:
GPU: some units with NVidia Titan, some GTX780, some GTX760, and some GTX660
CPU: some boxes with Intel : i7-4770, some i5-4570, and some i3
RAM: 16GB DDR3-1600 (CPU), 3GB DDR5 (GPU)
Storage: 1TB/8GB Hybrid SSHD
Power Supply: Internal 450w 80Plus Gold
Dimensions: approx. 12 x 12.4 x 2.9 in high

[stuffme]

I wonder will those components be cheaper from valve or just buy them on your own?

[Hornet331]

In b4 people scream at 450W and titan

[tajoh111]

http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/04/v...ecs/#continued

A bit more Details. Pretty odd that AMD got locked out of the steambox. I guess AMD lack of support for OPEN GL and poor linux drivers in general did it.

Seems to balance things out a bit better for AMD and Nvidia. With AMD getting consoles, this at least helps(but it doesn't come close to equalizing things for Nvidia) helps Nvidia a bit.

What this could do if Nvidia is willing to put its foot forward is it gives them a real chance to counter Mantle. If I were Nvidia, i would give Valve an insane amount(20 million, considering the figure thrown around for other deals lately) of money to get involved in building the next source Engine and build it around Nvidia hardware and a new low level API.

[LordEC911]

http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/04/v...ecs/#continued

A bit more Details. Pretty odd that AMD got locked out of the steambox. I guess AMD lack of support for OPEN GL and poor linux drivers in general did it.

Seems to balance things out a bit better for AMD and Nvidia. With AMD getting consoles, this at least helps(but it doesn't come close to equalizing things for Nvidia) helps Nvidia a bit.

What this could do if Nvidia is willing to put its foot forward is it gives them a real chance to counter Mantle. If I were Nvidia, i would give Valve an insane amount(20 million, considering the figure thrown around for other deals lately) of money to get involved in building the next source Engine and build it around Nvidia hardware and a new low level API.

Where do you see AMD locked out of anything?
Nvidia is simply supplying their hardware for 300 prototypes...
There will still be many Steambox designs using AMD hardware.

[tajoh111]

Where do you see AMD locked out of anything?
Nvidia is simply supplying their hardware for 300 prototypes...
There will still be many Steambox designs using AMD hardware.

I guess not locked out, but not being put into the prototype reference design seems odd considering they are sending these out for free and the higher cost associated with using Intel and sort of using Nvidia. Considering how buddy buddy Valve and Nvidia have been lately. I could see Nvidia at all costs, trying to get into the steam machine considering the shrinking desktop market and AMD getting the consoles. I could see Nvidia putting some serious cash down(an amount AMD couldn't afford) to ensure that Steam alliances are tied to them. Nvidia could write a cheque to valve for 100 million dollars and easily afford it. Nvidia said in a recent interview that Nvidia is collaborating with Intel and it seems like this would be it.

What would give Valve a reasonable reason outside of cash to do put Intel and Nvidia hardware is steam statistics. A larger majority of users that make up steam hardware survey are Intel and Nvidia users. It would make sense for Valve to use the brand more commonly found in their own stats.

In addition, these boxes are being used to beta and find bugs in the software and hardware. Considering AMD's reputation in regards to their linux drivers. I would think they are in need of testing most of all. So if I was valve and I was truly going to be hardware agnostic(and the low price of AMD hardware ), I would have sent AMD steamboxes along with the Intel/Nvidia ones.

In addition, I think at the very least, this rules out the idea that Mantle was going to be the defacto standard for the steambox.

[LordEC911]

SNIP

Sure Nvidia could try to do that but it seems unlikely that Valve would accept an offer like that.

The fact that Valve is stating you can "buy/build your own Steambox and configure it with any hardware you want," would mean a pretty big backtrack on Valve's part and would go against the entire idea behind this project.

I don't recall anyone saying Mantle would be a defacto standard, at least anyone in reality, but it does fit into the equation quite well, so it seems likely it will be used.
I expect people/gamers of a budget concise mind will be using pretty old components they have lying around to build their Steamboxes, especially if can only stream most of your Steam Library initially, don't need much of a system to stream.

[blindbox]

http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/04/v...ecs/#continued

A bit more Details. Pretty odd that AMD got locked out of the steambox. I guess AMD lack of support for OPEN GL and poor linux drivers in general did it.

Seems to balance things out a bit better for AMD and Nvidia. With AMD getting consoles, this at least helps(but it doesn't come close to equalizing things for Nvidia) helps Nvidia a bit.

What this could do if Nvidia is willing to put its foot forward is it gives them a real chance to counter Mantle. If I were Nvidia, i would give Valve an insane amount(20 million, considering the figure thrown around for other deals lately) of money to get involved in building the next source Engine and build it around Nvidia hardware and a new low level API.

Definitely not locked out. In an interview with AMD, they're just less vocal about it.

I wonder how linux users are with AMD these days. A guy I know who uses linux and AMD GC said everything that has been said about how terrible AMD is on linux is false (he's on HD 7950).

[Evantaur]

Definitely not locked out. In an interview with AMD, they're just less vocal about it.

I wonder how linux users are with AMD these days. A guy I know who uses linux and AMD GC said everything that has been said about how terrible AMD is on linux is false (he's on HD 7950).

AMD drivers works quite well, tho i have not tried 'em for gaming

[blindbox]

AMD drivers works quite well, tho i have not tried 'em for gaming

I tried linux myself. Drivers work pretty well, don't see any bugs, I tried stepmania but I need to try more games. AMD driver problems are honestly the least of the issue in linux. There was some sort of tearing when moving windows around, unlike Window's impressive DWM which is silky smooth but I think this is the desktop manager's problem rather than the drivers themselves.

Here are the problems that Valve needs fixing in linux. I used Crunchbang for testing. I admit that this is not the most widely used linux distro, so I'll try Ubuntu next, as that's the majority.

1) Audio is a pain in the ass to switch (an understatement, it's a lot worse). I had to restart a few times and go into a few command lines, cfg files and a lot of googling. A normal user would've been clueless. Nice thing is though, they support native audio duplication, meaning you can play the same audio on multiple sound cards at once.
2) Multimonitor is a bloody NIGHTMARE. If you switch between single and double monitor frequently (i.e. laptops).. don't.. just.. don't. No auto-fallback that windows does. Nothing whatsoever. Though, this might be desktop manager dependent. This is not driver dependent.
3) Plug and play-ability. This is related to 1). Plugged my USB DAC in, no way to switch.. had to go into some command lines and cfg files, and restart linux.
4) Linux not giving the game the maximum performance, as mentioned, my OpenGL performance on a weak laptop was not as good as in Windows on the same laptop. The next hardest thing I found to do in linux is running a game in full screen. Pretty annoying. Game I tested with is Stepmania btw, and they run in OpenGL
5) Lack of fallback. This is related to 2). I managed to kill my linux installation by switching between two and one monitor back and forth. Now the desktop is rendering for two screens although I have only one screen plugged in (the laptop screen). What does that mean? It means I can't see the freaking login screen and can't log in.
6) Permission problems. IDK if this is related to an app permission or what but apparently a user-run application can't seem to edit files in the ~/.whateversettings folder. It reads settings from there, but it tries to write in a read-only superuser-only folder apparently. This might be application specific but Windows seems to handle all this legacy better.
7) Buggy file manager. Again, this is app related but if Valve really want this to go well, they have to ensure that their QC team is very, very detailed. I can't even drag and drop copy. Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V didn't work either. Right click copy, right click paste didn't work either! (options are there)

I'm going to try out Ubuntu next and report my results I understand Crunchbang is somewhat a minority, hence take this with a grain of salt. This time, I'll take a majority and post my test results. Though, you see, this is why I use Windows despite myself being a power user, and very, very capable of running linux.

That ends my experience with linux for 8 hours straight. Again, going to try ubuntu next, so I'll have a lot more hours of experience with desktop linux (I only deal with linux in Android, servers or compilation VMs).

If Valve could fix all this with SteamOS, I'm in. Funny thing is, I wasn't bothered about the inability of using windows app. I was more bothered by the fact that a lot of standard stuff is pretty damn broken. My list of problems probably won't matter for Steam Machines because they're more like consoles rather than a real computer.

[BrowncoatGR]

I tried linux myself. Drivers work pretty well, don't see any bugs, I tried stepmania but I need to try more games. AMD driver problems are honestly the least of the issue in linux. There was some sort of tearing when moving windows around, unlike Window's impressive DWM which is silky smooth but I think this is the desktop manager's problem rather than the drivers themselves.

Here are the problems that Valve needs fixing in linux. I used Crunchbang for testing. I admit that this is not the most widely used linux distro, so I'll try Ubuntu next, as that's the majority.

1) Audio is a pain in the ass to switch (an understatement, it's a lot worse). I had to restart a few times and go into a few command lines, cfg files and a lot of googling. A normal user would've been clueless. Nice thing is though, they support native audio duplication, meaning you can play the same audio on multiple sound cards at once.
2) Multimonitor is a bloody NIGHTMARE. If you switch between single and double monitor frequently (i.e. laptops).. don't.. just.. don't. No auto-fallback that windows does. Nothing whatsoever. Though, this might be desktop manager dependent. This is not driver dependent.
3) Plug and play-ability. This is related to 1). Plugged my USB DAC in, no way to switch.. had to go into some command lines and cfg files, and restart linux.
4) Linux not giving the game the maximum performance, as mentioned, my OpenGL performance on a weak laptop was not as good as in Windows on the same laptop. The next hardest thing I found to do in linux is running a game in full screen. Pretty annoying. Game I tested with is Stepmania btw, and they run in OpenGL
5) Lack of fallback. This is related to 2). I managed to kill my linux installation by switching between two and one monitor back and forth. Now the desktop is rendering for two screens although I have only one screen plugged in (the laptop screen). What does that mean? It means I can't see the freaking login screen and can't log in.
6) Permission problems. IDK if this is related to an app permission or what but apparently a user-run application can't seem to edit files in the ~/.whateversettings folder. It reads settings from there, but it tries to write in a read-only superuser-only folder apparently. This might be application specific but Windows seems to handle all this legacy better.
7) Buggy file manager. Again, this is app related but if Valve really want this to go well, they have to ensure that their QC team is very, very detailed. I can't even drag and drop copy. Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V didn't work either. Right click copy, right click paste didn't work either! (options are there)

1) If you use pulseaudio, KDE or both you can actually switch between audio cards using a graphical interface
2)Actually this IS driver dependent and is an issue for Nvidia afaik.
3) Is simply not true. You just have to use pulseaudio, which Ubuntu does by default, and use "pulse audio volume control" to select the default audio output. This should work for all pulseaudio aware applications.
4)Well that depends on both the drivers and the app. Regarding 3d AMD and most Intel hw will have worse performance. Nvidia will be about the same.
5) You can get access to the command line by switching TTY using Alt+CTRL+FX(e.g. F2). F7 is were the graphical desktop usually resides.
6)That is not legacy stuff. It's a security feature. You can run any app with superuser permissions to allow them to write to those files.
7)Were you running a beta? That should not happen and is not a common issue at all.

[blindbox]

1) If you use pulseaudio, KDE or both you can actually switch between audio cards using a graphical interface
2)Actually this IS driver dependent and is an issue for Nvidia afaik.
3) Is simply not true. You just have to use pulseaudio, which Ubuntu does by default, and use "pulse audio volume control" to select the default audio output. This should work for all pulseaudio aware applications.
4)Well that depends on both the drivers and the app. Regarding 3d AMD and most Intel hw will have worse performance. Nvidia will be about the same.
5) You can get access to the command line by switching TTY using Alt+CTRL+FX(e.g. F2). F7 is were the graphical desktop usually resides.
6)That is not legacy stuff. It's a security feature. You can run any app with superuser permissions to allow them to write to those files.
7)Were you running a beta? That should not happen and is not a common issue at all.

I solved 1), 3), and 7) by going Ubuntu. Remember that I did all the above on Crunchbang and not Ubuntu.

As for 4) it was my bad, I found out how to set game to full screen.
Number 5), I know that already, but that doesn't mean I actually know how to reset the graphical desktop if it royally screws up.
Number 6), I didn't need superuser permissions to overwrite anything in the home folder. All I need to do is make sure I'm logged in while editing it. Why would an app that i am running with only user permission not do the same? I can't deny the possibility of a buggy app though, and maybe that the file was set to read-only.

I don't have my 2nd monitor with me to try 2) again with ubuntu. I'm on ATI, btw.

Also, a quirk about the installation was how unobvious things are. With Windows, the advanced mode gives you guidance on what to set. Hell, you just pick a blank space and it will partition that properly and not touch anything else. With Ubuntu, I didn't know that you have to set one partition to / and another partition to swap if you so prefer to use the advance mode. The help button tells you absolutely nothing. So, fine, I picked the easy mode, where it says it will replace the installed OS with Ubuntu.

Well... easy mode also deleted my ntfs data partition while at it. That was painful, although luckily I have already backed up what's important. This is kinda unexpected given the instructions where it says it's just replacing the old OS. Sigh, still, a pain now that I have to restore everything again. Have another PC for reading wiki ready to really understand what everything means before installing. I googled it out and find out I wasn't the first one caught by this trap.

I'm staying on ubuntu for a while to try out wine, but I think I should get another laptop just to try ubuntu out instead. This is my work machine.

Among other things that will make people stay are video encoding and the whole encoder/decoder chain. madVR is quite painful to leave but I guess for people not obsessed with quality, they won't mind.

Now that I think about it, I might not leave Windows 7 for SteamOS at all. All depends whether I could use madVR with wine or not.

EDIT: To sum it up, despite my negativity, I don't really see a problem with SteamOS if you're strictly going for gaming. It might not be too bad but I can't leave Windows and all the tools that I use in Windows. It's simply too big of a deal breaker. There's probably isn't much left for them to fix from what I just experienced.. but damn, losing a partition still hurts whether you have a backup or not.

EDIT2: Aaannd my testing with ubuntu comes to an end. I've fixed all the issues I've listed. My only gripe is the fact that ubuntu is slow in updates. Their firefox build is 20, but mozilla has already released version 24. This is also affecting the drivers. While it is unimportant for most drivers, graphics card drivers preferrably needs regular updates.

[uOpt]

I wonder how linux users are with AMD these days. A guy I know who uses linux and AMD GC said everything that has been said about how terrible AMD is on linux is false (he's on HD 7950).

Is he using the binary drivers or the open source drivers?

[blindbox]

I tried both the open source and the binary drivers. Desktop experience is more or less the same for both Windows and linux (linux is a bit worse in stutter in dragging windows or scrolling but doable. A better graphics card should fix it.). What I have the most problem is with their video player. Stuttering and jitter is terrible in them. As for games, I didn't test the frame rates but I could enable vsync in an opengl game without a problem to get rid of the jitters. Take this with a pinch of salt as I only tested a game: I tested openGL with stepmania and it's stuttery although the fps looks fairly high. This is probably my weak laptop card, as I was barely managing to get Stepmania to be smooth on a Windows system with directx8. Can't compare the two when the rendering pipeline are different though.

So what's up with the jitter? I tried to find a way to enable vsync in the various video players but none of them has that feature. I even tried to get mpc-hc running with wine, but that didn't work too well.

Keep in mind that I've tried a lot of things(latest linux catalyst beta, latest kernel), and this is my experience with a Radeon card. My concern is less on the gaming side, but more on the desktop experience. I won't replace my OS if all it does is be good in games, unfortunately. I would love to hear from an enthusiast with nvidia cards or a better radeon card that took a plunge into linux. Most of the people in the ubuntu forums doesn't seem to be the kind of person who tries every single cfg to get the best out of his card, or is hugely pedantic about the smoothness of video playback like I am (loving my XySubFilter + madVR + MPC-HC + LAV setup).

EDIT: You're talking about the guy I know? He's using the binary drivers, and he does most of his gaming with WINE. Seems to him that video playback is very smooth. As for my problems, there's also the likely chance that hybrid crossfire is causing issues.

[HelixPC]

I am very excited for this OS, i have a spare 64GB ssd which i will use for the steam OS

[figuretti]

http://www.maximumpc.com/valve_steam...ve_nvidia_2013

[STEvil]

we already knew they wouldnt be

[uOpt]

Some video players are naive in their approach to performance.

When it gets hard I use mplayer with prebuffering, e.g.
`mplayer -cache 128000 video.avi`

I used to use `mplayer -cache 128000 -framedrop -mc 100 -autosync 30 video.avi` when playing HD-DVD on too wimpy systems. Dunno whether any of this still does anything real but worth a try.

[blindbox]

Some video players are naive in their approach to performance.

When it gets hard I use mplayer with prebuffering, e.g.
`mplayer -cache 128000 video.avi`

I used to use `mplayer -cache 128000 -framedrop -mc 100 -autosync 30 video.avi` when playing HD-DVD on too wimpy systems. Dunno whether any of this still does anything real but worth a try.

Sorry for turning this thread into a linux discussion but anyway, I will try your recommendations. I'm currently dual-booting to linux mint. Is that mplayer or mplayer2?

Apart from the non-smooth video, I also have tearing, and these are with the latest drivers (tried everything, tried to force vsync and use opengl, tried to use sudo aticonfig --<stuff> etc). I've checked that Hybrid Crossfire are not working (you can't enable them), so perhaps it's just the drivers not being good enough. I kinda expected 13.4 drivers on linux to be equivalent to a 13.4 driver on windows. That's pretty dumb of me.

Are you on an AMD card? If you don't experience my problems, then maybe my laptop card isn't just well supported on linux. Also, you have to try madVR with smooth motion force enabled. I couldn't watch another video without it again.

[uOpt]

Sorry for turning this thread into a linux discussion but anyway, I will try your recommendations. I'm currently dual-booting to linux mint. Is that mplayer or mplayer2?

Apart from the non-smooth video, I also have tearing, and these are with the latest drivers (tried everything, tried to force vsync and use opengl, tried to use sudo aticonfig --<stuff> etc). I've checked that Hybrid Crossfire are not working (you can't enable them), so perhaps it's just the drivers not being good enough. I kinda expected 13.4 drivers on linux to be equivalent to a 13.4 driver on windows. That's pretty dumb of me.

Are you on an AMD card? If you don't experience my problems, then maybe my laptop card isn't just well supported on linux. Also, you have to try madVR with smooth motion force enabled. I couldn't watch another video without it again.

It's a svn version from a couple months back. Not sure when the 2.x cutoff was, but I've been using the above for years.

I don't use AMD video cards except in my work mac.

It's still worth letting mplayer deal with it. If there are problems be sure to gather the output and post it so that we can see what it used.

Another trick is not to use "xv" as the backend, there are alternatives. In some contexts I had best success with "-vo gl" which tells mplayer to use OpenGL as a backend instead. xv kinda stinks.

[Metroid]

Given how big Valve has become past all these years and concerning it's primary business activity, I'd say Valve has the resources to make it happen and to mention thousands of loyal customers to back it up. I just hope Valve will not drop support for all other OS's.

[[XC] Lead Head]

Given how big Valve has become past all these years and concerning it's primary business activity, I'd say Valve has the resources to make it happen and to mention thousands of loyal customers to back it up. I just hope Valve will not drop support for all other OS's.

I wouldn't say Valve has the resources honestly. They can barely keep up with all the projects they have going on now, to the point where Dota2 has over 1200 documented bugs, yet some weeks not a single bug gets fixed/patched.

To put it in perspective, EA makes about 2-3x the revenue of Valve, but has 30x the employees. Riot games makes about 1/5-1/7th Valve's revenue but has 3x as many employees.

I'd wager for what Valve's trying to do right now, they're horribly understaffed.