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> Has anyone announced plans for a VR-capable Steam Machine? This is basically a non-starter until the video driver situation on Linux gets resolved. The core
by exelius 11y ago
> Has anyone announced plans for a VR-capable Steam Machine?
This is basically a non-starter until the video driver situation on Linux gets resolved.
The core of the problem is that AMD/Nvidia only produce optimized drivers for their cards for Windows (and presumably the consoles who source from them). Those optimizations provide such a significant speed boost (~30-40% in real-world usage) that trying to do VR without them is going to be difficult, at least until the first few generations of VR drive demand for exponentially more powerful video cards. Of course, the drivers are optimized over the course of years by tweaking them to work with specific games, so until there are more games being released on Linux, they won't get the opportunity to optimize the drivers.
So it's a chicken-and-egg problem: the drivers aren't optimized because there aren't any games, there aren't any games because there is no demand, and there's no demand because the performance sucks and the driver situation is hella confusing. Valve is trying to work on the demand/supply side with SteamOS, but everyone on both sides is kinda hesitant unless the driver situation gets resolved.
Right now, Steam Machines are just a convenient way to order a gaming PC without a Windows license. Everyone I know who has bought one ended up installing Windows on it within the first week and just running it in Big Picture mode.
- SXX 11y agoYou seriously overestimate "driver optimization" importance for modern games. Optimizations are of course important, but in most of cases it's not more than 5-10%. For instance Nvidia proprietary driver without any special optimizations can easily achieve 50-80% of Windows performance depend on game in Wine which translates D3D9 API calls into OpenGL. There is also Gallium3D Nine state tracker that usable on AMD open source drivers which is implement D3D9 natively on Linux. It's can easily achieve 80-95% performance in some cases and this is with very limited number of developers.
- exelius 11y agoI think you just proved my point. No company would want to support this setup for the small number of users on Linux. It might be possible to support something narrow like SteamOS, but most of the times D3D wrappers end up failing as a porting strategy (see Final Fantasy XIV for a recent example).
- SXX 11y agoI don't argue with fact that Linux isn't first class gaming platform, but your argument that driver optimizations have anything to do with that is wrong.
- the_af 11y agoI game on Linux. Haven't touched a Windows PC for gaming in about 5 years. It's true many games underperform in Linux, and I don't play the latest AAA games, so that helps. Still, many games are very playable. I've played and enjoyed Portal 2, L4D2, Insurgency, and of course many platformers and indie games on Linux, so the situation isn't that dire. I own a large collection of Linux games from Steam, Humble Bundle and GOG. It's possible Linux is still not ready for the Oculus, but it's not hard to use it as a gaming platform either. I repeat, the situation is not that dire.
- exelius 11y ago> It's possible Linux is still not ready for the Oculus, but it's not hard to use it as a gaming platform either. I repeat, the situation is not that dire. Well, that's why I said Linux is 3-5 years behind Windows rather than say it's impossible to game on Linux (which obviously is not true!) VR systems like the Oculus are going to remain a AAA feature for some time to come, though. You know how AAA games usually don't have a Linux port, or if they do it's a year later? This will be like that. IMO the way to look at the Oculus is as a $2000 console. It's first-generation tech, which means it will eventually get better and cheaper, but for now it's only for the people willing to pay early adopter prices.