Valve Releases Debian-Based SteamOS Beta 211
An anonymous reader writes that, as promised, "Valve has put out their first SteamOS Linux operating system beta. SteamOS 1.0 'Alchemist' Beta is forked from Debian Wheezy and features its own graphics compositor along with other changes. Right now SteamOS 1.0 is only compatible with NVIDIA graphics cards and uses NVIDIA's closed-source Linux driver. SteamOS can be downloaded from here, but the server seems to be offline under the pressure."
Torrent (Score:5, Informative)
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Slashdotted even before the story hits SlashDot?
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do sites even get /.ed anymore?
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Torrents are for sweaty people.
Nobody's staying cool and dry with all this Steam.
Debian! (Score:3, Funny)
The one distro to rule them all!
Re:Debian! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Debian! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Also, Valve is telling developers to develop for a specific open-source runtime environment, rather than the OS: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime
You could in theory run Steam and the games on any Linux on which you can get the runtime set up.
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It's interesting that this seems very similar to what Google's doing with Google Play Services on Android.
Debian is now the "distro franca" of Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Although Debian is not one of my desktop distros (which are Gentoo and NixOS), I recognize that it has become the most reliable and best supported distro with the largest community and the most respected pedigree. It's also the most common base or parent for other distros like Ubuntu, so clearly it has the largest slice of the pie. And here's a little secret that is no secret: it just works.
I use it occasionally on little ARM boards like the awesome BeagleBone Black, where you have to overwrite the pile of junk Angstrom distro that comes on the board out of the box. Debian is totally painless and just works in that role. If you need a replacement distro that you can depend on, Debian never disappoints.
It's the "distro franca" of Linux, the GOTO choice for those who don't like pain.
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The "distro franca" in 1994 was Slackware. All distros was a relative pain (and lots of floppies) to install in 1994, but Slackware was the clear leader.
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You had me almost sold there.
Not until after Potato (Score:2)
The Potato installer was terrible. At that time, Red Hat had a decent installer, and Debian was a masochistics delight. I once figured that it took me a day of interactive time (not counting waits where I did something else) to get Debian up. Red Hat was up in a couple of hours.
The next time I looked, Debian had totally changed their installer, and was better. (I think that was about the time grub was pretty much debugged.)
N.B.: There never was much to choose between Debian and Red Hat on the basic sys
Re:Debian has ALWAYS been the top distro. (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'm not the OP, but thought I'd correct a few misconceptions you seem to have.
Re:Debian! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Debian! (Score:5, Insightful)
For a console system, you need sprites, high-speed polygon placement, built-in shaders and deadline-based updates (it has to be damn smooth, if it's going to compete with the alternatives).
What you do not need are windows (beyond picture-in-picture), client-server overheads (consoles aren't likely to be connected to X terminals in a different room, city or country, unless you're using a VERY big monitor), memory overheads from components never used in this context, or support for multiple users with one or more displays each on a single console.
Now, I haven't inspected the code yet, so can't say how far they've gone. Nor do I know if anyone still works on KGI or GGI, although those would be far closer to console requirements than X.
(Hey, I love X, I actually have made a lot of use of redirecting screens several hundred miles for diagnostic purposes, I think there is a lot of life in the system yet, but vanilla X is totally wrong for consoles and even modded X won't give the experience console addicts crave.)
Besides, Valve isn't a desktop flavour. If you want a desktop flavour, one that wows desktop users (just as the desktop market starts dying horribly, it's anguished cry half-drowned in the blood and tabletness flowing forth like a monstrous, misshapen river) then you need to make one.
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the games wouldn't be compiled against this new compositor, afaik. too much work in that. just opengl, but this is for the steam portion of it. I'm not so sure it makes any difference that they went this route vs. doing it in x and memory overhead is neglible from that anyways.
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For a console system, you need sprites, high-speed polygon placement, built-in shaders and deadline-based updates (it has to be damn smooth, if it's going to compete with the alternatives).
Sure, you do need all of those things.
What you do not need are windows (beyond picture-in-picture), client-server overheads (consoles aren't likely to be connected to X terminals in a different room, city or country, unless you're using a VERY big monitor), memory overheads from components never used in this context, or support for multiple users with one or more displays each on a single console.
Memory is cheap now, and you definitely need support for windows for all kinds of features. You don't need the rest but it doesn't weigh much by modern standards.
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Re:Debian! (Score:5, Informative)
I'll wager that this compositor is temporary until Debian ships Wayland and Nvidia has drivers that work with it. This thing is still running Xorg, just using a customized compositor.
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Pretty sure Valve has their own priorities, and (gasp) they probably arent the same as yours or Linus'.
The good news is that their effort doesnt stop anyone elses efforts to the contrary.
Re: Debian! (Score:2)
Of course they forked, they wanted to spend their time and effort developing a product to ship instead of constantly justifying their own decisions to a project gatekeeper. Sounds fair to me, its their time... Democracy is great but dictatorships get things done MUCH faster...
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Eh, forked the graphics subsystem? They are running X with a modified XCompmgr as compositor, the latter has been around for ages and was likely chosen because it runs on anything that can run X.
There's no 'fiefdom of incompability' here.
Imagine if they had chosen Shuttleworth's os (Score:2)
Imagine if they had chosen Shuttleworth's os. Now they still support his os, but also many more, apart from itself.
Hail Debian, the mothership.
TORRENTS! (Score:4, Insightful)
Time for new underwear (Score:4, Funny)
Seeing as i cream my pants every time Valve announces something, it is now time for some new underwear.
At least it isn't like the time I got an auto-reply to my job application at Valve. Sure, they didn't end up hiring me into their utopia, but if you ask me one shitty bed is a fair price to pay at heroin-like bliss.
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His first sentence is all about ejaculating uncontrollably into his own clothing, somehow because of video games. Interesting, perhaps, but it surely is not insightful.
Actually, his first sentence makes a cognitive leap from observing an involuntary visceral reaction to the Valve branding, to concluding that it is now time for some new underwear. An average slashdot moderator is not in the habit of thinking this far ahead.
Why does UEFI matter? (Score:5, Interesting)
UEFI boot support is in the list of HW requirements, which I've managed to avoid so far. There's no mention of TPM but maybe that's the reason?
Re:Why does UEFI matter? (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't realize how much easier UEFI makes things until you figure it out and start using it.
UEFI can do other fun stuff, but by default it runs "\EFI\Boot\bootx64.efi" on the first fat32 partition it sees.
No more dealing with trying to backup custom bootloaders, or trying to figure out why grub install isn't letting you dual boot. Just rename a shell with a default script to bootx64.efi and you're good to go. Hell, those shells even include their own editor.
I wonder how many people realize that UEFI means that as long as a USB drive is fat32 they can just drag and drop the files without worrying about formatting the thing with a bootloader.
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as long as a USB drive is fat32
Does this mean that I am paying to Microsoft if I buy an UEFI motherboard? AFAIK they still extort money for their FAT file systems. Why did somebody choose FAT? If I am clever enough to dual boot than I am also clever enough to format a drive with the completely free ext2.
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as long as a USB drive is fat32
Does this mean that I am paying to Microsoft if I buy an UEFI motherboard? AFAIK they still extort money for their FAT file systems. Why did somebody choose FAT? If I am clever enough to dual boot than I am also clever enough to format a drive with the completely free ext2.
Because just about every OS and it's mother reads fat32. I run Linux, but all I ask from motherboard manufacturers are easy to follow open standards. Like it or not fat32 is the de facto inoperable file system.
Are you really saying that you want bios coders to understand NTFS and HFS+? Because you can't have them reading ext2 without those as well. Plus all the OS's touch the EFS partition. If anything you should be grateful that one of those two didn't win.
Besides, I use btrfs not ext2. Expecting bio
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Like it or not fat32 is the de facto inoperable file system.
(Emphasis mine.) That's worth a chuckle, at least.
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Regardless, I'm sure there's already BIOS supported images out there as it's not difficult to make a usb drive bootable and install grub on it. You could even do it in Windows [sourceforge.net].
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Ah. Thanks
Re:Why does UEFI matter? (Score:5, Informative)
Son of a Bitch. They do say it's required in the FAQ. It appears they are using it to simplify the boot from USB installation process based on the FAQ. I'd imagine if your board supports booting from USB you are probably ok but they may have hardwired support for UEFI in the installer (such that it will only look for UEFI instances for installation media) so you won't know till you try.
My bad for misleading you.
UEFI Booting is Required (Score:5, Informative)
Not required, supported. The list is supported hardware. I would assume standard BIOS is supported as well but they wanted to point out that newer UEFI only boards are also supported.
Seems you got modded up, despite being WRONG. UEFI booting is required for the installer, which is why UEFI Support was listed as a hardware requirement in the FAQ you looked at. The requirement is also mentioned further down in the FAQ. Also reference:
http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown [steampowered.com].
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamuniverse/discussions/1/648814395741989999/ [steamcommunity.com]
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/12/valve-releases-steamos-beta-early-build-your-own-system-requirements/ [arstechnica.com]
One benefit to this is that people won't be trying to install this on an old piece of crap and then complaining it's slow.
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Welcome to Slashdot, a division of Dice tolling media. You must be new here, otherwise you would know factual relevance has little to do with moderation.
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my older core2quad PC should be able to run games still quite nicely at medium settings, but unfortunately the ASUS P5K mobo is not UEFI compliant so no dice, not sure why UEFI should matter really...
Secure Boot (Score:2)
One benefit to this is that people won't be trying to install this on an old piece of crap and then complaining it's slow.
But wouldn't it be harder to boot from USB on a UEFI system? Most UEFI systems that I'm aware of default to Secure Boot with Microsoft keys. On the other hand, I guess people smart enough for beta are smart enough to figure out how to go into UEFI configuration and turn off Secure Boot.
How widely deployed is x86-64 UEFI pre-2.2? (Score:2)
Secure boot was only recently added in v2.2.
And every (non-Apple) x86-64 PC and PC motherboard since the release of Windows 8 has shipped with Secure Boot.
10s if not 100s of millions of shipped systems predate that by many years such as every Intel Mac, Itanium systems from both Intel and HP, etc.
I thought Intel Macs were just EFI, not UEFI. And according to the FAQ [steamcommunity.com], this distro is designed for x86-64, not Itanium. I understand Windows 7 Service Pack 1 for x86-64 supports UEFI [technet.com], but did most Windows 7 PCs come with UEFI pre-2.2, or did they come with legacy BIOS?
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UEFI has been avalible since at least the Core 2 Duo era, there's plenty of old pieces of crap that will run this. Most any mid-range computer from 2007 forward should run this just fine. My $100 intel motherboard I bought in January 2008 is a UEFI bootable board. That's six year old hardware at this point.
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Intel started providing UEFI as an option since the turn of the millennium I believe. And Intel stopped
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My $95 Intel DF33FB board was decidedly mid-range and UEFI, if you bought a bottom tier (http://ark.intel.com/products/50377/Intel-Desktop-Board-DG33FB
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One benefit to this is that people won't be trying to install this on an old piece of crap and then complaining it's slow.
I was thinking the same. When you have slightly beefier hardware, all the inefficiencies of Linux will be nicely swept under the rug.
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Heh... I've got a ball-buster PC when I bought it that's still a bit of one- and it DOES NOT BOOT UEFI.
That kind of pisses me off, all things considered- I have to go buy a bunch of new boards that have it as an option just to try this out.
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UEFI booting being required for the installer may not mean it's required to run an installed OS. Linux is rather portable, and it may be that writing an image or modified image may be written to disk then booted on non-UEFI systems. It is certain folks will work on this.
I can see Valve having their agenda, but they DID use the very, very versatile Debian as a base.
A barrier to entry for some things can act as an idiot filter while allowing those so inclined to do their thing. It isn't being unduly "leet" to
The "only compatible with NVIDIA graphics cards" i (Score:4, Interesting)
The Catalyst and Mesa drivers are present on the system, but SteamOS Beta 1 is being advertised as NVIDIA-only.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU0MzY
Re:The "only compatible with NVIDIA graphics cards (Score:5, Insightful)
They probably don't want to hear any square pegs complaining that they only get 2 fps out of the AMD drivers.
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Isn't it specifically designed for a specific system that specifies a specific model of nVidia graphics controller?
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At this time, nVidia is trying to go it more alone, while ATI is closely coupling itself to Microsoft and Sony.
It's turned out well for nVidia so far, but the reason they can't give us driver sources like they're doing with Tegra is that they got too far into bed with Microsoft...
Re:Why nVidia only? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that ATI drivers for linux have ALWAYS been terrible.
Re: Why nVidia only? (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems like since this is only in beta, its a little early to start making the accusations that they wont support ati. Wait till they actually release the full version.
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I bet someone does a re-spin that supports it- it wouldn't be hard since it's Debian derived and in order for it to "work" as they claim, they need OpenGL support- so...
Re:Why nVidia only? (Score:4, Informative)
Probably because Nvidia was shamed into better supporting Linux before AMD? Because Nvidia has been working better with Valve on this project? Because the optimization for those AMD cards isn't done?
Had you been paying attention, even in the slightest, in the past few months, you would have known what has been going on and what the plan is for SteamOS. Perhaps you should actually do some reading on it instead of just saying that Valve is "screwing a large group of people."
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Beta is beta. they've said before they intend to support AMD, but the first gen of hardware is all nVIDIA.
Re:Why nVidia only? (Score:5, Insightful)
You are screwing a large group of people
That large group of people are the ones at fault here.
AMD/ATI has never attempted to even approach NVidia's commitment to make hardware run well with Linux. Yet you people keep buying their hardware. The small cost savings of AMD has always been enough to get even regular Linux desktop users to buy their stuff despite their chronic indifference to anything other than Windows.
The best thing that could possibly happen at this point is for gamers to ignore people like you and buy Steambox compatible hardware, meaning not AMD, in large quantities. Then, maybe, at long last, at least fifteen years too late, that fucking company will finally step up and deal with the problem.
Linus not withstanding, NVidia has provided me with up-to-date, stable, performant Linux drivers for their hardware without fail for almost twenty years. Recently, NVidia has invested even more effort and collaborated with Valve to capture the Steambox platform. If this Debian based, open gaming platform succeeds we all have NVidia to thank. NVidia has EARNED this outcome, and people like you, with your sad-sack AMD crap need to reconsider your behavior.
But you won't. Nope. Instead, you'll download Steambox and try to run it on your Windows-only video hardware, watch it catch on fire and the bitch up a fucking storm all over the Internets about how Steambox is a giant POS.
If Steambox succeeds it will have to be despite you god damned AMD buyers, as always.
Re:Why nVidia only? (Score:5, Informative)
If Steambox succeeds it will have to be despite you god damned AMD buyers, as always.
Oh, but haven't you heard? AMD are the good guys now because they occasionally trickle out some of the information you need to make a half-assed open source video driver which supports some of their older cards.
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Linus not withstanding, NVidia has provided me with up-to-date, stable, performant Linux drivers for their hardware without fail for almost twenty years. Recently, NVidia has invested even more effort and collaborated with Valve to capture the Steambox platform. If this Debian based, open gaming platform succeeds we all have NVidia to thank. NVidia has EARNED this outcome, and people like you, with your sad-sack AMD crap need to reconsider your behavior.
Not that I disagree, mostly; I've been spared the most of the horrors of the proprietary NVidia driver I keep reading about, it's been mostly fine. However, one word rebuttal to your argument: "Optimus". (yes, I know, bumblebee, have it installed. it's still a hack)
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AMD/ATI has never attempted to even approach NVidia's commitment to make hardware run well with Linux.
Ah, that's why AMD publishes specifications and supports the community implementing free drivers.
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Q: What are the SteamOS Hardware Requirements?
A: NVIDIA graphics card (AMD and Intel graphics support coming soon)
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It's that kind of shit that made me look for a nvidia card on all my new laptops and desktops in the future - nvidia might not opensource their drivers, but at least they work under xorg, and they also offer proper CUDA support for the same (used it for min
Re:Why nVidia only? (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
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AMD's typically shitty driver situation, it's no big surprise that they're proritizing nVidia machinery first. Once AMD grows up, presents some decent drivers, and puts on their big boy pants, I'm sure Valve will be more than happy to include their drivers as a part of the system.
Wait. Were you using the same nvidia drivers that I was using among others for the last year, where it was fubared, beyond fubared. And got so bad at one point, that the drivers were causing hard locks across all 400-500-600 series cards. And to top it off, made a shit mess causing massive crashes, again across the board all the while claiming it was "on the users end" until it finally got so bad that they were offering to pay anyone in the continental US to have their rigs shipped to California so they c
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Nvidia's got their own driver shittiness. Their drivers take friggin' forever to install on my system. Hybrid hard drive, i7-3930k, 16 gigs of DDR3-2133 in quad channel, dual GTX680 video cards. I started the installation of the latest GeForce experience and R331 game ready driver just about 3 hours ago. About 2 hours of solid grind for no reason I can figure and then an hour or so where everything looks idle and the progress bar doesn't move. Based on experience, I assume it will finish eventually if
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Okay, so I just drivers for my 7950GT installed on one machine, then went to the other one and reinstalled the latest drivers for the GTX460. Both times, the cards installed in less than 5 minutes. Both AMD-CPU systems, far slower (one's a dual-core 4850e out of an Acer, the other an Athlon X4 620. Both 4GB RAM.)
You've got something configured incorrectly or your operating system is fucking swiss cheese and you need a fresh install.
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Any excuse for a trip to Newegg. It seems GPUs have come a long way since I last bought one.
Oh shoot, I have a Nvidia EVGA GTX-570; It's outdated now if the running beta of BF4 counts.
Sadly they still want the same price for one (no SLI in my future).
Re:Graphics Cards (Score:5, Funny)
NVIDIA, Fuck You! [youtube.com]
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Re: Graphics Cards (Score:4, Informative)
nVidia has already taken notice because they are one of the companies working with Valve: https://developer.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/akamai/gamedev/docs/Porting%20Source%20to%20Linux.pdf [nvidia.com]
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Which nobody sane actually cares about. Graphics drivers are about performance and features, not the legal state of the code of the fucking driver.
Re:Graphics Cards (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a very early release. I'm not surprised they decided to limit it to just one set of drivers, and Nvidia's drivers, while not that great in an absolute sense, are in a much better state than AMD's (and Intel's hardware just isn't sufficient for gaming).
I really do hope they get support in soon, though I suppose that depends more on AMD than on Valve. I'm not particular to either vendor - both Kepler and GCN are pretty good hardware, and they're each doing some very interesting things in the software side.
PS3-class and indie gaming on Intel (Score:3)
and Intel's hardware just isn't sufficient for gaming
An Anandtech review [anandtech.com] points out that the integrated GPU in Ivy Bridge (previous generation Intel Core) runs Skyrim playably: 46 fps at 720p. From what I've read about the PS3 port of Skyrim, the PS3 doesn't do much better. And because indie PC games tend to be lower budget, they also tend to be lower detail, which means they just might work on Intel.
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And because indie PC games tend to be lower budget, they also tend to be lower detail, which means they just might work on Intel.
Unfortunately they also tend to be MUCH less optimized.
Re:PS3-class and indie gaming on Intel (Score:4, Interesting)
For my purposes (and, I suspect, most others') there is a difference between "sufficient for gaming" and "able to run certain games". Any computer can run games - Doom has been ported to damn near every 32-bit system, and many indie games may as well list requirements as "CPU: Yes".
I'm not denying that you can play a respectable number of games on a recent Intel GPU. But it is enough of a restriction that you have to be aware of your hardware limits when purchasing games.
Skyrim, incidentally, is not a very good example. It scales rather well to low-end hardware, especially on the GPU (it is less forgiving of CPU or RAM weaknesses). Looking at the same review, Battlefield 3, at minimum settings, 768p, runs at 37fps, which for a shooter is essentially unplayable. Civilization V was down to 15-20fps at low settings - not even remotely smooth, although I suppose since it's a turn-based game you could technically call it playable.
Don't get me wrong - Intel is improving quickly, and they're already good enough that SteamOS needs to support them eventually. They're already good enough for occasional gamers. But they are not something purchased by anyone who considers "gaming" a primary concern - and SteamOS is purely aimed at gaming. If you're installing an OS that boots into a game menu, you're already in the gaming niche.
That said, one of SteamOS's niches is as a game streaming box. Have a big, beefy (coughWindows-runningcough) box sitting elsewhere in your house, streamed to a small SteamOS box hooked up to your TV and controller. This is right up the alley for an Intel GPU, and I suspect this setup could become a primary use for SteamOS.
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Most any game under $25 on steam will run on an ivy bridge laptop without a fancy/expensive/hot graphics card. The number of vidya games that require a non-intel graphics card is pretty small unless all you play is console ports. Even console ports like "mark of the ninja" run at native 30fps in native 720p resolution on Ivy Bridge laptops. Any game made before ~2009 will run just fine on an ivy bridge laptop.
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Any game made before ~2009 will run just fine on an ivy bridge laptop.
Saying that just days before 2014. Rather like saying pretty much anything made in 2000 will run a game from 1995. ;)
Granted the advancement of tech hasn't been quite that dramatic lately, but 5 years is multiple generations on the desktop.
Most any game under $25 on steam will run on an ivy bridge laptop without a fancy/expensive/hot graphics card.
meh... I agree they don't need one that's fancy or expensive, but "Intel integrated" is oft
50-year-old movies (Score:2)
Any game made before ~2009 will run just fine on an ivy bridge laptop.
Saying that just days before 2014. Rather like saying pretty much anything made in 2000 will run a game from 1995. ;)
People still enjoy 50-year-old movies. Why is a video game necessarily "expired milk" just because it's five years old?
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People still enjoy 50-year-old movies. Why is a video game necessarily "expired milk" just because it's five years old?
They're not always, but remember that many games don't have much of a story beyond a basic framework designed to push you through the various parts of the game. When a newer game comes along in the same genre, the old ones tend to be left behind unless they had something that made them important.
The original Wolfenstein, Doom, and Duke Nukem will probably be played forever since they were the defining titles of the FPS genre. The most recent releases in any of those lines, probably not. Need For Speed 3
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You weren't talking about games (which indeed are not "expired milk" just because they're old); you were talking about hardware.
Your claim is like saying a TV built in 2013 is just fine because it can barely display black-and-white 480i.
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Sorry for the non-PC (and non-PC) analogy, but that's like saying that just because things are built to be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act that being in a wheelchair is just as good as being able-bodied.
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I didn't mean to imply 5 year old games were at all expired. I was merely pointing out that a brand new entry level computer with intel graphics being able to play 5 year old games is not exactly a testament to how good intel graphics are now.
As for my view on 5 year old games, my /. user name makes a reference to StarControl2. I'm very much a fan of the classics. :)
Automatic system requirements checking (Score:2)
But it is enough of a restriction that you have to be aware of your hardware limits when purchasing games.
Which is where an online store like Google Play Store or Steam has an advantage over box sales: it can check your machine against the system requirements and hide the Buy Now button.
Skyrim, incidentally, is not a very good example. It scales rather well to low-end hardware
Then games that scale better to low-end hardware will end up with more sales to people with low-end hardware. Ideally, the same game would be able to produce PS3-class graphics on an Intel system and PS4-class graphics on a stronger system.
Yeah, but... (Score:2)
I love the idea of high performance integrated graphics to replace my console, but the trouble Valve is gonna have is the same problem 3DO did. I hadn't noticed it for years, but since Valve isn't making the hardware they're not _subsidizing_ the hardware. Even the PS4/XBone are barely profit
Valve is subsidizing the OS (Score:2)
and finally the 'Microsoft tax'
The article is about the lack thereof, unless you're referring to some patent royalty.
Valve is gonna have is the same problem 3DO did.
But not quite so much because the other console makers have caught up in price. The first commercial Steambox [theverge.com] will cost $500, the same as an Xbox One. Hopefully by then, Radeon drivers for SteamOS will have caught up.
but since Valve isn't making the hardware they're not _subsidizing_ the hardware.
If an operating system is a component of a computer system, then Valve is subsidizing development of this component.
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"At 720p?" Hah! I haven't ran a PC game at a resolution that pathetically low in over a decade. (The fact that modern HDTV-derived LCD resolutions suck makes people forget that PC gamers were running 1600x1200 (or higher!) on CRTs in the '90s.)
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Bullshit. The 20" CRT I had circa Y2K did 1600x1200 (or maybe even 2048x1536, but I wouldn't have used it at that because text would have rendered too small to read) and certainly cost no more than maybe $200.
Hell, even the 22" 1680x1050 LCDs I replaced it with only cost $150 each on Black Friday 5 years ago.
Now yeah, it's true that I wasn't necessarily running every game at full detail, lighting and AA settings at those resolutions, but I was indeed using all those pixels.
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Valve said people should wait a bit before trying the OS [slashdot.org] anyway, so no surprise here even if they did plan on a release of SteamOS on Steam.
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They might get in trouble for shipping the proprietary Nvidia drivers if it is shipped together with the Linux kernel which is GPL.
Bullcrap. The drivers have to compile a module. THE MODULE is not a part of the kernel, it is called by the kernel. OpenGL is the reason why the driver includes binary blobs in the modules that do not include source code, unfortunately OpenGL is not really open it is controlled by a trumped up consortium much the same as the MPGLA model. You cannot legally disclose the software api source but you can use it under license. The OpenGL is overseen by the hardware companies that design and make the chips, Micro
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. A lot of people care about what Linus says.
Re: (Score:2)
The other poster covered everything but also:
Not if they just asked nVidia. nVidia own that code and if they wanted to make an exception just for Valve, they can do. And given how closely they have been working together lately, and how beneficial it would be, it would be stupid not to.
It would take about ten minutes to make a "unless it's being distributed as part of a SteamOS installation" disclaimer and throw it into a licence agreement (new or old).