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My point is, given the state of AMD's drivers, I can't imagine that anyone would want a Steam Machine with an AMD card. Consider the options: * AMD GPU /

My point is, given the state of AMD's drivers, I can't imagine that anyone would want a Steam Machine with an AMD card. Consider the options: * AMD GPU / fglrx: good hardware, terrible drivers. * AMD GPU / radeon: good hardware, good but incomplete drivers. Why would anyone interested in gaming opt for a dramatically worse experience by choosing AMD? You can't play games with the radeon drivers, and the fglrx drivers don't work. It's not about the hardware. AMD's hardware is great. You just can't actually use it reliably when running Linux -- you get to pick between having a working, but limited, set of features (radeon), or having the full set of features and crashing once a day or more (fglrx).

drivebyacct2 13y ago
Well, in the other corner you have NVIDIA, who still won't (and I'm willing to partially blame Canonical) step up and say for sure that they will support KMS and/or Wayland. Without that, it's going to always be something of a workaround to output wayland-on-nvidia and won't be a really good experience.
jlgreco 13y ago
If AMD can get their ass in gear to make a driver suitable for Sony, why can't they get their ass in gear to make a driver suitable for Valve? The reason fglrx is shit right now is because they really don't have any good reason to care. @drivebyacct2, who is unfortunately hellbanned, makes a good point too: "Well, in the other corner you have NVIDIA, who still won't (and I'm willing to partially blame Canonical) step up and say for sure that they will support KMS and/or Wayland. Without that, it's going to always be something of a workaround to output wayland-on-nvidia and won't be a really good experience."
- ginko 13y ago
  I would guess that AMD just opened up all specs of their GPU to Sony and Sony did most of the driver/API design along with some help from AMD. You also have to consider that the PS4 graphics APIs will likely be a lot simpler and down to the metal than DX9/10/11 and (especially) OpenCL.
  - tadfisher 13y ago
    Also consider that Valve has been hiring Linux graphics people for a long while.
- Jasper_ 13y ago
  Basically, NVIDIA has come out and said that they don't want to be in the business of supporting window systems, they just want to be in the business of providing modesetting and direct rendering. They're proposing new things into EGL like the new EGLDevice abstraction and EGLStreams so that NVIDIA can tie less into Wayland and simply allow people to do cool stuff with their driver. They're not going to support KMS immediately, as it's too simplistic for the full range of stuff that they would need to do (complicated modes, stereo support, etc.). The FOSS driver people are working on atomic modeset and atomic pageflip, which NVIDIA will investigate the API and see if it fits their needs. They're also happy to support this stuff if we give them an API that ties into their driver and allows them to drop some of their code, but we first need to do that, with their feedback. The community is actively working on that.
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nilved 13y ago
What do you mean by "don't work?" I don't like fglrx because it isn't open source, but I use it for gaming without issue. The times I run into problems are when the kernel is updated before the kernel module.
- fulafel 13y ago
  "crashing once a day or more" ? It's a kernel driver so triple the fun. They should just follow Intel and switch effort to the free drivers, fglrx has been in this rotten state for years and years and it's clearly not getting fixed.
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hug 13y ago
Understandably this is all purely anecdotal, but installing fglrx using smxi on Crunchbang 11 was actually a relatively painless experience. My gaming machine has always been in "Windows only" territory due to the fact that I tend to run configurations that are slightly outlying -- my current machine has three monitors and two AMD 6970 videocards, with two monitors attached to one videocard, one attached to the other. I was incredibly surprised to find that this configuration worked 'out of the box' on #!, and continued to work perfectly after the install of fglrx drivers. No issues with hardware acceleration, no crashes, no difficulties whatsoever (beyond having to increase the 'virtual' resoluting in xorg.conf so I could move screens where I wanted in xrandr.) All this brings me in a roundabout way to my point: If my wacky configuration can work relatively seamlessly in an arbitrary distro, I tend to think that AMD will probably be able to manage to get fully supported configurations running on SteamOS in a straightforward fashion.
- Karunamon 13y ago
  Likewise on smxi, unfortunately the specter of "Your card is incompatible with this driver" has stuck me firmly in the free driver area. If linux gaming becomes as much of a thing as Valve are making it to be, my next card is going to be Nvidia. That, or I can pray they make the free driver at least somewhat useful. Currently, it seems you get what you pay for..

drivebyacct2 13y ago

Well, in the other corner you have NVIDIA, who still won't (and I'm willing to partially blame Canonical) step up and say for sure that they will support KMS and/or Wayland. Without that, it's going to always be something of a workaround to output wayland-on-nvidia and won't be a really good experience.

jlgreco 13y ago

If AMD can get their ass in gear to make a driver suitable for Sony, why can't they get their ass in gear to make a driver suitable for Valve? The reason fglrx is shit right now is because they really don't have any good reason to care. @drivebyacct2, who is unfortunately hellbanned, makes a good point too: "Well, in the other corner you have NVIDIA, who still won't (and I'm willing to partially blame Canonical) step up and say for sure that they will support KMS and/or Wayland. Without that, it's going to always be something of a workaround to output wayland-on-nvidia and won't be a really good experience."

ginko 13y ago
I would guess that AMD just opened up all specs of their GPU to Sony and Sony did most of the driver/API design along with some help from AMD. You also have to consider that the PS4 graphics APIs will likely be a lot simpler and down to the metal than DX9/10/11 and (especially) OpenCL.
- tadfisher 13y ago
  Also consider that Valve has been hiring Linux graphics people for a long while.
Jasper_ 13y ago
Basically, NVIDIA has come out and said that they don't want to be in the business of supporting window systems, they just want to be in the business of providing modesetting and direct rendering. They're proposing new things into EGL like the new EGLDevice abstraction and EGLStreams so that NVIDIA can tie less into Wayland and simply allow people to do cool stuff with their driver. They're not going to support KMS immediately, as it's too simplistic for the full range of stuff that they would need to do (complicated modes, stereo support, etc.). The FOSS driver people are working on atomic modeset and atomic pageflip, which NVIDIA will investigate the API and see if it fits their needs. They're also happy to support this stuff if we give them an API that ties into their driver and allows them to drop some of their code, but we first need to do that, with their feedback. The community is actively working on that.
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nilved 13y ago

What do you mean by "don't work?" I don't like fglrx because it isn't open source, but I use it for gaming without issue. The times I run into problems are when the kernel is updated before the kernel module.

fulafel 13y ago
"crashing once a day or more" ? It's a kernel driver so triple the fun. They should just follow Intel and switch effort to the free drivers, fglrx has been in this rotten state for years and years and it's clearly not getting fixed.
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hug 13y ago

Understandably this is all purely anecdotal, but installing fglrx using smxi on Crunchbang 11 was actually a relatively painless experience. My gaming machine has always been in "Windows only" territory due to the fact that I tend to run configurations that are slightly outlying -- my current machine has three monitors and two AMD 6970 videocards, with two monitors attached to one videocard, one attached to the other. I was incredibly surprised to find that this configuration worked 'out of the box' on #!, and continued to work perfectly after the install of fglrx drivers. No issues with hardware acceleration, no crashes, no difficulties whatsoever (beyond having to increase the 'virtual' resoluting in xorg.conf so I could move screens where I wanted in xrandr.) All this brings me in a roundabout way to my point: If my wacky configuration can work relatively seamlessly in an arbitrary distro, I tend to think that AMD will probably be able to manage to get fully supported configurations running on SteamOS in a straightforward fashion.

Karunamon 13y ago
Likewise on smxi, unfortunately the specter of "Your card is incompatible with this driver" has stuck me firmly in the free driver area. If linux gaming becomes as much of a thing as Valve are making it to be, my next card is going to be Nvidia. That, or I can pray they make the free driver at least somewhat useful. Currently, it seems you get what you pay for..