AMD Catalyst Linux Driver Catching Up To and Beating Windows 136
An anonymous reader writes: Along with the open-source AMD Linux driver having a great 2014, the AMD Catalyst proprietary driver for Linux has also improved a lot. Beyond the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver closing in on Catalyst, the latest Phoronix end-of-year tests show the AMD Catalyst Linux driver is beating Catalyst on Windows for some OpenGL benchmarks. The proprietary driver tests were done with the new Catalyst "OMEGA" driver. Is AMD beginning to lead real Linux driver innovations or is OpenGL on Windows just struggling?
Always struggling with a Dodgy NVS mobile... (Score:3)
... So with OSS drivers this will almost certainly be my next graphics card / chipset.
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I hope you enjoy your system crashing and acting erratically.
Re:Always struggling with a Dodgy NVS mobile... (Score:4, Funny)
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Well, 2008 anyway. My AMD 4870's blue screen'd Windows XP and then Windows 7 on boot pretty regularly (and yes, I sent them back for testing but all appeared okay per DiamondMM). I finally replaced them with a pair of nVidia boards which just has the driver bail every once in a while and killed Firefox until I disabled the hardware acceleration option in Firefox.
[John]
Re:Always struggling with a Dodgy NVS mobile... (Score:4, Insightful)
Both of you probably have a piece of shit power supply. Buy a new, high quality power supply and most of your crashing will go away.
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...or perhaps you have cooling issues that you need to deal with. Nvidia cards run hot. In a small enclosure, this can be a problem.
I had an nv based Mac Mini cook itself to death and had a similar Revo nearly do the same.
Fans are not the enemy!
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That wasn't the case until recently. Every time I shop around for new cards, performance per watt while still having decent performance is perhaps my highest priority (it already gets too hot in my room during the summer, and cooling solutions simply displace the heat, not get rid of it.) The last two I bought were AMD mid-grade cards for this reason. The only cards Nvidia offered that were comparable were just way too slow. However today Nvidia seems to be doing a better job than AMD, as the GTX 970 seems
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Re: Always struggling with a Dodgy NVS mobile... (Score:1)
I've never had crashing or overheating problems with any of our AMD cards...
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Could be. However, I can attest to Firefox not playing well with nVidia drivers on Windows. Firefox stutters and freezes often when scrolling unless I disable HW accel. It's fine on Linux, for some reason. Also fine were Catalyst on Win and Linux, and the open Radeon driver on the latter (I replaced an old 5570), which rules out a bad HW component. Another change I saw was the Windows logo animation - Catalyst would freeze it for two seconds and then resume normally. Nvidia seems unable to load it, showing
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Corsair 750W.
[John]
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Now entering slashOCP. Eesh.
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LOL THAT IS SO FUNNAY
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The Corsair CMPSU-750TX got really good reviews back when I was looking at building my own system. What would you suggest would be a better PSU for a system where I'm not using the higher end video cards for gaming?
[John]
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Well when you are replacing a Zembronics http://zebronics.com/ [zebronics.com] 450W with corsair its comparatively solid gold.
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Yea, fuck you too monkey boy.
[John]
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That's why you aren't seeing any issues. AMD's Windows drivers tend to run quite well, once you get them installed. The trick is installing the drivers for their higher end hardware (as opposed to simple Rage-derived chipsets for workstations and servers). It can be a Sisyphusian task to upgrade the software some times.
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Re:Always struggling with a Dodgy NVS mobile... (Score:4, Interesting)
... but no problems with AMD/ATI as of several years now (2D only)... ...and that is important to me because there are just two main vendors in the graphics category.
Slowly it's becoming three, with Intel's HD Graphics and Iris hardware. ...
[bold part by me]
If we're talking about 2d only, then it's definitely at least 3 vendors, and there are some others that are perfectly fine in that realm.
To the AC GP, It's also not at all fair to say you haven't seen any problems for a few years while qualifying that you've only used 2d. The whole damn article is about 3d performance, and that's the part of the driver that is the most complex and has the most proprietary bits. I haven't had any problems with my AMD/ATI cards on my headless servers either, but that's hardly relevant.
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AMD's Windows drivers tend to run quite well, once you get them installed.
I've never had that experience. AMD's drivers have been crashing windows for me since the Mach32 on Windows 3.1.
The trick is installing the drivers for their higher end hardware (as opposed to simple Rage-derived chipsets for workstations and servers). It can be a Sisyphusian task to upgrade the software some times.
That's funny, with nVidia I just let GEForce Experience tell me when there's a new driver, and it downloads and installs the right one, and then my system works. Or on Linux, I just let the distro deliver me a driver.
Re:Always struggling with a Dodgy NVS mobile... (Score:4, Funny)
you whippersnappers these days, we had to ctrl alt delete 5 times a day and liked it! no one had ever even gotten one to run for 40 days uptime anywhere. did i mention our clock speed was 120mhz and we had to reinstall windows from 54 floppy diskettes and had a 1 gb hdd!
Re:Always struggling with a Dodgy NVS mobile... (Score:5, Funny)
you whippersnappers these days, we had to ctrl alt delete 5 times a day and liked it! no one had ever even gotten one to run for 40 days uptime anywhere. did i mention our clock speed was 120mhz and we had to reinstall windows from 54 floppy diskettes and had a 1 gb hdd!
You hipsters - we had to do a power cycle to restart, and no windows, floppies, of hard disks - just a 1mhz cpu, a couple of tape drives, and a serial port. And we had FUN!
Re:Always struggling with a Dodgy NVS mobile... (Score:4, Funny)
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Paper? Paper? Back in my day all we had was clay and stone tablets!
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Stone tablets!?
All we had back in the day was a few nitrogen-containing nucleobases, deoxyribose and maybe a phosphate group if you were lucky! And we liked it that way!
Computers? Bah humbug!
Re:Always struggling with a Dodgy NVS mobile... (Score:4, Interesting)
you whippersnappers these days, we had to ctrl alt delete 5 times a day and liked it! no one had ever even gotten one to run for 40 days uptime anywhere. did i mention our clock speed was 120mhz and we had to reinstall windows from 54 floppy diskettes and had a 1 gb hdd!
You hipsters - we had to do a power cycle to restart, and no windows, floppies, of hard disks - just a 1mhz cpu, a couple of tape drives, and a serial port. And we had FUN!
You really don't want to hear what booting a PDP-8/e involved. Oh, you do!
First, utter magic incantations (perhaps under one's breath or inaudibly) while turning the key switch which powered it on. Check for no error lights (hence the magic incantations) recalling that this was in the days before LEDs. Next, toggle in an address on the binary switches on the front panel and latch it. It's best if this is a fairly low address, as this will save some time. Then toggle in an instruction and latch it. Luckily, this was a 12-bit machine, so addresses and instructions were short, being limited to 0-4095. Increment the toggled address, and toggle in another instruction. Repeat for a short while, then set the toggle switches to the first address, and execute the program. Now it's in read-in mode! Toggle in an address which is above the last one used, and latch it. Then toggle in and latch a succession of instructions (read-in mode automatically increments the addresses for you). After sufficient instructions have been entered, the toggles are set to the start of this program, and execute the program is commanded!
The machine will now read in the bootstrap card (a card full of resistors and capacitors which had traces cut to provide ones and zeroes), and execute the bootstrap loader program which it finds there. On our PDP-8, this had a simple driver for a tape and would read in the OS from a tape drive. You did remember to load the correct tape, didn't you? If not, it's back to square one.
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Hate AMD's linux drivers. Only go Intel or NVIDIA unless you are absolutely certain the driver works well on Linux. I suffer daily on Linux with AMD drivers. Only reason went AMD was because I was suckered by AMD fanboys assuring me that the shitty drivers are a thing of the past. NOPE! Their drivers still suck ass!
Re:Always struggling with a Dodgy NVS mobile... (Score:4, Informative)
Ad hominem attacks will get you nowhere. But then again I guess that's why you're an AC.
That article is from 2008 (seven years isn't exactly "nearly" a decade in my book) and reflects an issue specifically involving causes of crashes for Windows Vista about a year after the OS came out. And you'll notice that while Nvidia is the largest single contributor to that pie, less than 30% of crashes were their fault. And, actually, if you read the original article from which Engadget derived their story [arstechnica.com] this is a study from specifically around the launch of Windows Vista, not its entire lifecycle. And the data is very vague, as they say in the article, "in theory, NVIDIA's proportion of total driver crashes could be inflated by a relatively small handful of systems with severe driver issues." So this statistic is actually pretty useless without additional data.
That also doesn't indicate anything having to do with non-system-crash related issues, such as non-fatal crashes or poor system performance. It's also reasonable to assume that Nvidia has since fixed that issue with Windows Vista, as I don't remember there being any kinds of crashing plagues involving Nvidia hardware in Windows 7, 8, 8.1, or even 10 Technical Preview.
From when, and in what categories? I'm not denying that AMD makes a good graphics card and they have delivered, and do deliver the most bang for your buck at certain price points, but your claim is flimsy at best since Tom's updates these almost quarterly, as GPU manufacturers release new hardware throughout the year, and across several performance/price points. So naturally when AMD releases a new GPU they're likely to take the top spot in the high performance category, just as it's likely that when Nvidia releases a new GPU they might take the top spot.
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It's also reasonable to assume that Nvidia has since fixed that issue with Windows Vista, as I don't remember there being any kinds of crashing plagues involving Nvidia hardware in Windows 7, 8, 8.1, or even 10 Technical Preview.
It's interesting that you mention Vista and Drivers, because for the longest time AMD had released no official Windows 7 drivers for the AMD R690M chipset in my Gateway netbook (really a subnotebook.) So you were stuck on Vista. Installing the Vista drivers on Win7 resulted in being able to use suspend just once, on subsequent attempts the video hardware would never come back. But they were shit on Vista, too, and I regularly had crashes in the video driver...
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Re:Always struggling with a Dodgy NVS mobile... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you ever want to see just how bad nvidia is in Linux, get a laptop that has their Optimus abortion. My laptop at work regrettably has that.
With stock Intel drivers, display works but there's no acceleration, so performance is shit.
With stock nvidia or nouveau drivers, performance is great but can't use external monitors (because they are tied to the Intel chip)
Getting both working at once required a kernel built from source, a backported package from the testing build, a package from a PPA from a child distro, three dependencies built from source because of conflicts between the distro packages and the bleeding edge kernel I had to use, and the nightmare that is bumblebee. I don't dare run an update on this system because fuck knows what will break.
Meanwhile, my last three laptops at home have been AMD-based. Install Catalyst, reboot, everything is beautiful. It is remarkable how far things have swung. I remember AMD being verboten back when I first got into linux because of how godawful the support was.
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Not to mention using Steam on PlayOnLinux... yeah, it's a pain.
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It is possible that Optimus has improved a bit in the past year. A large part of my woes stemmed from my particular card being relatively new and hence requiring a bunch of bleeding edge packages for support, and trying to get bleeding edge stuff to play nicely together is often painful.
I'm sticking with AMD for my Linux boxes for the time being, and NVidia for my gaming PC. I've had more troubles with AMD in Windows than in Linux the past few years.
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Meanwhile, my last three laptops at home have been AMD-based.
...and don't do what Optimus does. So yeah, they don't have that problem, but they don't have that feature, either.
Optimus on Linux is pathetic, no question. But AMD doesn't even offer the same functionality.
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Sure they do. AMD has had hybrid graphics for years, and both Catalyst and the open-source driver have had support for quite some time. I've used laptops that had AMD's hybrid setup and it was far simpler to set up.
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I have a laptop with optimus (Lenovo T440p with GeForce GT 730M), and external monitors work fine for me. (I just tested this with 'optirun glxgears'.)
I'm using Sabayon, and the only thing I had to do was install the Nvidia drivers - after that it worked perfectly. Sabayon made optimus support one of their selling points back in 2013, so it's possible it has a better default configuration than Ubuntu / whatever you're using.
Of course, it's entirely possible that your specific laptop is designed such that th
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My note also has optiumus and works properly, testes with Skyrim over wine. The only thing that doesn't work is sound over HDMI using the nvidia card.
Who does the work? (Score:3)
Who does all this hard work? Didn't AMD just fire a bunch of Linux developers?
Either way, at this point both the FGLRX and RADEON driver seem to be almost as good choice as Intel HD Graphics for Linux use. Good job.
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The "Community"!
That's the beauty of Open Source and especially Linux. Stuff just happens (at no cost)!
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Who does all this hard work?
We don't know.
AMD writes and supports the Catalyst driver for Linux. Most of the open source graphics software comes from freedesktop.org and xorg.
That's no achievement! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well, what you say is actually related to the truth. Very vaguely related. It's like truth's second counsin's wife's nephew. They met once, in passing, when you had the idea of saying Catalyst on Windows isn't hard to surpass, then never saw each other again. Considering how crass, dismissive and injust what you said was, it's no wonder truth didn't want to see it again. Which is funny, since pretty much everyone, after some thought, seems to think truth has those exact same characteristics.
But I digress. I
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Particularly for OpenGL (Score:2)
If you bench one of the few games that do both DX and GL on Windows (like Earth 2150 or something) you find that the program will run at equal speeds on nVidia drivers. nVidia has declared both DX and GL to be native APIs and they both have first flight support. Then you try it on AMD an you find GL running slower. This is never mind feature issues, crashing or anything else.
AMD just doesn't do well for OpenGL. I dunno why they haven't fixed it, but it is a real issue. Most gamers don't care since not a lot
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Re: That's no achievement! (Score:2, Informative)
Its not only about open source, its also about choice and not being rail roaded into walled gardens like a few os's today
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Re: That's no achievement! (Score:1)
That's the 'maintained garden'. I have zero restriction preventing me from installing stuff outside the repos. There is also plenty that can just run straight off the bat, the last non repo software I used was the xmpp Spark client which I was able to just unzip and run the executable.
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And either way, this story isn't about open source, it's about AMD's proprietary drivers. Says so in the summary.
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this story isn't about open source
It does say that the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver is closing in on the Catalyst drivers.
And either way, it is a fairly important issue for open source, since one of the things that prevent people from using Linux at home is games. There are fewer games available for Linux, and what games there are sometimes don't perform well. If Linux were on parity with Windows as a gaming platform, I think you'd see more people using an open source operating system.
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Linux is about open source.
No, Linux is a tool. So are you, but Linux is at least useful.
Video Playback? (Score:3)
The OpenGL stuff is nice for gamers, but what about for the HTPC? How well do the drivers do on video playback acceleration? Can they do MPEG-2 and H264 in HD resolutions with minimal CPU?
I don't suppose they can play a 1080i video and get the fields consistently correct for letting the TV handle the deinterlacing (or keep it interlaced if the TV is an old tube HDTV)?
Re:Video Playback? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Well, the xbmc team did completely give up on trying to use hardware acceleration with the AMD prioprietary fglrx driver and switched to the OSS radeon driver in late 2013.
Which means, for those who aren't paying attention to the radeon driver, that it will only work properly on a minuscule subset of AMD hardware. Caveat emptor. I feel the same way about Linux lovers who bought hardware with Optimus in it. What are they, total fucking idiots?
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Thanks, that's good to know. So many people talk about gaming performance, and at one point the open source drivers were getting good at some 3D without the video acceleration piece.
As to the other question, I'm probably one of the few people with a HTPC who has a tube HDTV that is 1080i. It's really a great TV (36"), and I don't have to worry about the little one knocking it over. Or maybe the HTPC crowd has lots of early adopters, but the rest have moved on to bigger and thinner.
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What about also focusing on features ? (Score:2)
AMD's PROPRIETARY driver (Score:2)
Re:AMD's PROPRIETARY driver (Score:4, Informative)
OpenGL (Score:2)
What games on Windows even use OpenGL?
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ok so there's one that no one admits to playing
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OpenGL on Windows is used by things like SolidWorks, Maya, Photoshop, Lightroom, etc. All those "pro content creation" applications. Games tend to target DirectX.
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Mostly indie cross-platform ports. But most Unreal engine games had OpenGL support, unless the devs crammed too many new visual effects into the D3D renderer.
No.. they really haven't (Score:3, Informative)
All that was shown here is that AMD's *OpenGL* drivers on Linux aren't too far off from AMD's *OpenGL* performance on Windows.
Considering that AMD's OpenGL Implementation on Windows is kind of a joke compared to D3D, and considering that AMD is now even dumping D3D in favor of its proprietary* Mantle platform, this article basically proved that AMD's Windows OpenGL support is also lacking badly.
* Before anyone says Mantle is "open": AMD's executives promised an SDK published by the end of 2014... didn't happen. AMD has made zero efforts to make Mantle work on any OS other than Windows... hell, while DX11 ain't an open standard at least I can go online and get docs on how to write a program using DX11 and make it work on Windows... you can't even do that with Mantle!
Also with regards to Mantle (Score:2)
If it is actually "close to the core" like AMD claims, then it is something that'll only work on their GCN hardware, and when they change that, it'll stop working. Realistically they are probably lying and it is just another API, particularly since game performance has been very mixed, being only slightly faster at best and slower occasionally.
Gaming on linux (Score:2, Informative)
I've got both Windows and Linux boxes in my house. Basically my windows boxes are for gaming because... well... Linux sucks for Gaming.
But recently my 7yr old got his first computer so I gave him Kbuntu. Wow... I was really suprised how well it's performing game wise. Thanks to Valve there's a huge number of games available on Linux. New games are almost guaranteed to be OS agnostic. And the games that aren't... Wine has made amazing progress at emulation. With a relatively small amount of effort you can ge
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Wine has made amazing progress at emulation.
Wine is NOT an emulator.
It's a set of API that provide Win32 interface - it's a different implementation. Calling it an emulator is like calling Mono an emulator for .Net
WINE Re: Gaming on linux (Score:2)
WINE is NOT emulation. The name was not chosen just because it is a clever reverse acronym. Emulation implies that there is translation going on at the binary instruction level. An emulator system like MESS takes binary executables from a completely different system, such as an old 8 bit Z80 or 6502 based home computer, and interprets them one instruction at a time by translating on the fly into native instructions and hardware calls.
WINE does none of that. With WINE the windows executable runs directly wit
Re:WINE Re: Gaming on linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Using your definition a Z80 emulator is merely an environment of Z80 CPU instructions, which just shows the distinction is inconsistent with itself.
You don't get to redefine the English language just because you have a popular FOSS project, especially when the term is well established for the same process in every other domain of computing.
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...hmmm... the WINE website seems to disagree with you:
http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#hea... [winehq.org]
The way they describe it:
"Wine is not just an emulator" is more accurate.
I'm dealing with WINE daily as my kid finds more games he wants to work. The fact that there's a virtual "Bottle" that's the Windows file system... and the DLLs needed for web content and such get opened in wrappers... that's either an emulator, or close enough for the distinction to only matter to annoying Neckbeards.
It seems that WINE is an emulator that has a whole bunch of tools that make us
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I wish they'd make it easier to install (Score:2)
I'm really glad they're making strides on the performance of their Linux driver, but I really wish they'd focus on making it easier to install. On Fedora the Radeon driver is darn near impossible (without some serious binary hacking) to get the thing installed. They "officially support" CentOS 7, but not Fedora? Is it really that hard to support a modern kernel and modern version of X?
I usually end up just running the open source driver because the Radeon driver is so complicated to get working on a modern
Encouraging, but not sure it's relevant any more.. (Score:1)
Gone are the days of instable, crashing Windows. Linux was a great idea for an alternative desktop for its stability, but nowadays there's really no issue with keeping a Windows system stable and running without any issue. Games run exceptionally well, and all the supporting software to go along with it (ie, TwitchTV streaming tools, chat, music, etc) are generally Windows only. Can you get things that run on Linux as well? Sure... but you're basically running Linux because you want to advocate for that as
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My experience is that games for Linux run surprisingly well, but the Linux desktop has become complete garbage.
Not much has changed in fifteen years.
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How has linux "become garbage" on the desktop?
Are you referring to Ubuntu's default window manager? Or is there something that switching to better window managers doesn't fix?
(I have my list of pet hates of things which are worse nowm but I'm curious about yours)
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It's padded already (on some systems) (Score:1)
I admit that I don't play many games, the only one I play at the moment is Left4Dead2 (though previous measurements when playing Counterstrike where similar).
All my testing show, in a highly scientific study of 2 computers, that playing Left4Dead2 in Linux (Fedora 20 and 21) uses less processor power, and less ram than playing in Windows 7(which both computers came with).
I don't have a program that tracks GPU usage, but tracking the temperature of the GPU's shows that they run cooler in Linux.
So using the s
So what I hear you saying is... (Score:2)
This is the year?
Hope it catches up to nVidia (Score:2)
Re: So what games run in Linux? (Score:1)
You must not keep up with these things. Here is a list of steam games that run in Linux. Some of which are incredibly popular games. http://store.steampowered.com/search/?os=linux
Re:So what games run in Linux? (Score:5, Informative)
Valve does. Hell, they've created their own Debian spin-off, SteamOS [steampowered.com] to try and woo developers away from Windows. And so far, I'd say they're doing a decent job as the number of games available on Linux has jumped since the announcement (let alone since the beta). Well reviewed titles like "Battleblock Theater," "XCOM: Enemy Unknown," "Super Meat Boy," "Borderlands 2," and "Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel" are all available on Linux through Steam.
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Not just the new ones - even some of the older games are being ported to linux now, though probably only en route to the promised Steambox.
I just finished Postal 2 on linux. Aside from steam achievements not being done yet, it worked flawlessly at max-everything. There is something satisfying in playing a character who responds to everyday irritations with outrageously over-the-top violence.
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That's why I mentioned "Borderlands 2," which was retroactively ported. Gearbox is a hell of a developer, though, continuing to provide support to their games (and ports) long after they've disappeared from shelves, so I wouldn't expect this to be the norm for your AAA titles like "Call of Duty."
I see no indications of that. The filter in Steam reads "Linux+SteamOS" imply
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Not just the new ones - even some of the older games are being ported to linux now, though probably only en route to the promised Steambox.
Totally wrong. The Steambox is nothing more or less than a PC. If the games come to the Steambox, then they're coming to Linux et al as well.
I just finished Postal 2 on linux. Aside from steam achievements not being done yet, it worked flawlessly at max-everything.
The engine they're using for that game has run on Linux for a long, long time.
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Something like a third of the 800 games on my Steam account "just work" on Linux.
It is, indeed, fabulous. There's honestly no excuse any more. If your game isn't Linux-compatible and Mac-compatible as well, it's just sheer laziness or being cheap.
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They already did 15 years ago. I put my money where my mouth is - I use Linux not just for the Freedom, but for a stable OS, and yes, I'll cheerfully pay retail for software. In fact, I just unearthed my copies when I cleaned my garage yesterday. All Linux branded versions of Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, UT GOTY Edition, UT2004, Soldier of Fortune, MechWarrior II, Descent 3d, and quite a few others from Loki Games. I even found my unopened l33t tin editon of Q3 for Linux.
Of course, now my son wants to se