Rich Geldreich On The State Of Linux Gaming, And It's Not Good

SteamOS success depends on whether Valve can deliver a improved experience over the PS4 or Xbox One.I think it has huge potential to make console gaming exciting again.But we should all wait before making assumptions on whether SteamOS will be a success or failure because the Steam Machines are not even out yet and SteamOS is still in Beta.

the mis-information here..
Borderlands2 and Borderlands TPS are excellent ports.

I can only speak for BL2 and I must say - from the perspective
of an AMD GPU user - it is NOT a good port.

Performance is abysmal compared to the same computer running BL2 on Win7.
Yes, they stated that at release time and even marked AMD "unsupported".
Still, *I* want an update on that matter. What's the reason for the bad performance?
Is it really just the well known "it's AMD drivers quality and we're waiting for a fix"?
When can we (AMD user) expect an update which *significantly* improves performance?

Go talk to AMD. They LAID off all of their Linux Driver Team in 2010 and expect the community to develop their driver for them. I have bought Nvidia ever since. Yes they are close source driver but guess what, every game I have tried works without issues. Nvidia close source drivers work with every distro so I dont know why people get so upset if its close source. As a gamer all I care is for my games to work on the OS I want to use.

Trolling post is obvious.
Is there are chance we can leave out the FUD from this and try some reasonable discussion?

How is this trolling?? He is expecting the developers of the game to find a solution for the current state that AMD drivers are in. I responded to why AMD drivers are horrible in Linux, why I use Nvidia only since 2010. I then voiced my opinion why i really don't care that the Nvidia Drivers are not build into the Kernel. I just want to play games.

Sorry if you feel I was trolling.

Dropping SteamOs development after that much efforts and money invested feels kind of big.

My other point is can you thrust MS on the long run?

Personally, I don't. They have the right to implement the Big Picture mode in Windows 8, but what about windows 9 and 10? Don't forget that Steam Machines are in direct competition with XBone (even win8 with big picture).

What if MS decides to pull the plug, once Valve has dropped Linux support?

Valve will have to start all over again... What a waste of time! It doesn't make sense to me. Valve would still be dependant on the goodwill of MS. I would not be safe if I were Valve.

I think he kind of misses the point of the whole "open source" thing. If Intel is dropping the ball with their driver with respect to games, then Valve can take care of business. In fact, this is THE classic use case that inspired the creation of the whole "Free Software" thing.

I don't feel "deprived" as a Linux user running Civ 5. I am not sure why I should feel bad about the current state of things.

If some marginal gaming benefit were enough to drive me to Windows, I wouldn't be a Linux user to begin with. I'm not sure how much such marginal advantages will matter once even current Windows users are able to leave that platform behind.

the mis-information here..
Borderlands2 and Borderlands TPS are excellent ports.

I can only speak for BL2 and I must say - from the perspective
of an AMD GPU user - it is NOT a good port.

Performance is abysmal compared to the same computer running BL2 on Win7.
Yes, they stated that at release time and even marked AMD "unsupported".
Still, *I* want an update on that matter. What's the reason for the bad performance?
Is it really just the well known "it's AMD drivers quality and we're waiting for a fix"?
When can we (AMD user) expect an update which *significantly* improves performance?

Go talk to AMD. They LAID off all of their Linux Driver Team in 2010 and expect the community to develop their driver for them. I have bought Nvidia ever since. Yes they are close source driver but guess what, every game I have tried works without issues. Nvidia close source drivers work with every distro so I dont know why people get so upset if its close source. As a gamer all I care is for my games to work on the OS I want to use.

Trolling post is obvious.
Is there are chance we can leave out the FUD from this and try some reasonable discussion?

The reports from actual AMD users seem to be at best "mixed". That's not "FUD". That's just the way it is. That's why I have avoided their kit for years.

the mis-information here..
Borderlands2 and Borderlands TPS are excellent ports.

I can only speak for BL2 and I must say - from the perspective
of an AMD GPU user - it is NOT a good port.

Performance is abysmal compared to the same computer running BL2 on Win7.
Yes, they stated that at release time and even marked AMD "unsupported".
Still, *I* want an update on that matter. What's the reason for the bad performance?
Is it really just the well known "it's AMD drivers quality and we're waiting for a fix"?
When can we (AMD user) expect an update which *significantly* improves performance?

Go talk to AMD. They LAID off all of their Linux Driver Team in 2010 and expect the community to develop their driver for them. I have bought Nvidia ever since. Yes they are close source driver but guess what, every game I have tried works without issues. Nvidia close source drivers work with every distro so I dont know why people get so upset if its close source. As a gamer all I care is for my games to work on the OS I want to use.

Trolling post is obvious.
Is there are chance we can leave out the FUD from this and try some reasonable discussion?

How is this trolling?? He is expecting the developers of the game to find a solution for the current state that AMD drivers are in. I responded to why AMD drivers are horrible in Linux, why I use Nvidia only since 2010. I then voiced my opinion why i really don't care that the Nvidia Drivers are not build into the Kernel. I just want to play games.

Sorry if you feel I was trolling.

AMD did not lay off their driver team, they do not expect the community to develop drivers for them.

I am sorry they did. In 2012 they laid 25 people off that dealt with Linux Driver Primarily.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/09/amd-shutters-linux-support-lab-as-part-of-company-wide-layoffs/

In 2010 something else happen and thats when I quit supporting them. I grew up in Austin, so I always tried to support companies from my home town. Finally yes the open source drivers are BETTER then the close source drivers. Guess who pays to develop them? I can tell you it's not AMD.

Thanks

Whether this guy is a bit butthurt or not is arguable. Most of his points are not though. Too much of what we are getting (AAA's anyways) are ports of games that are built on engine that were not originally designed to use OpenGL to render. The Borderlands games run twice as well for me in win as they do in Linux and I AM using Nvidia cards. Even if I run borderlands using my single monitor xorg_single.conf @ 1920x1080 in Linux I still only get about the same FPS as I get in windows running ALL THREE monitors @ 5760x1080. That is simply absurd.

Then we have the unity based games.. which they all suck in terms of performance for any platform for what actually end up on screen. The engine is simply not optimized very well for ANY platform.

I never really thought about the steam machines in the way he put it, but I kind of have to agree with him. Valve got what it wanted, to scare MS just a bit. Then they really shot themselves in the foot by delaying SteamOS claiming it was because of the controller.. everyone should be able to read between the lines and realize the controller was a scape goat. SteamOS STILL isn't ready for prime time. If it was I MIGHT believe they actually postponed it due to the controller.

Then there is the fact that we still don't really have any games to get people to purchase them anyways.. COD and Battlefield sell game consoles. Guns of Icarus (although fun as hell and my new addiction) and heavy bullets do not. I'd guess %75 of our games(or at least something comparable) can be had on mobile and usually for cheaper.

At the end of the day, most people don't care if their game console is running BSD, Linux, windows or fracking UnicornOS2000.. they just want to play the games they want to play and without fuss. Something Linux just does not give right now.

I have high hopes for wayland and these new gen game engine that are being built with Linux/OpenGL in mind... but anything AAA using them is still looking like Q3 2015 at least. Then theres wayland.. who knows when we will see mass adoption of that.. it won't be next year and possibly not even the year after that. The UE4 game demos still run far better for me in Windows than they do in Linux. The Linux ones got a bit better now being compiled with 4.5 but still slower FPS wise than in Windows.

This right here is what I talk about in my post above. Ferals work on Xcom is the exact opposite of garbage, it's one of the best ports to Linux so far, and to sit an spew out stuff like this on forums on the net... We're just in no position whatsoever to do so!

A lot of people contact me after reading my comments about Feral. We talk and I recommend them contact Feral and ask them don't port any more games on linux. So, I don't need to argue with you here. Sorry, nothing personal. What I need is just leaving my comments and do what I do.

Just thinking about it... The problem is not the fact that Steam doesn't run on Windows 8. It always did.

At the beginning of the SteamOS adventure, the major points that Valve put forward was the need to be independant from MS thecnologies because they feared that MS may decide to stop supporting the Steam client, in a future version of Windows. It's all about the windows store being in direct competition with Steam and D3D12 being a nightmare for developers.

Being able to replace Metro with Steam Big Picture doesn't change that in any way... I might be wrong...

Well, I may have an above the average gaming rig, but I am playing through the Witcher 2 right now, and don't jhave any problems to report. The same can be said about Civ 5, Xcom, but I understand that people with more modest rigs are feeling the pain.

I do hope that the drivers business gets sorted out, but as someone pointed out in an earlier comment, this is a revolution, and it will take time to grow.

Also, I would like to think we shouldn't dismiss entirely the comments of someone who was working on OpenGL like Rich. Luckily, there are still people working on this who are more optimistic as to the outcome of gaming on Linux. We have nearly 20% of the whole steam library accessible to us in 2 years, that is quite a feat by itself.

In March 2014, this was the state of affairs for games on Steam:
Linux games: 375
Mac games: 750

See! We now have as many games as Macs in March! Of scourse the number of Mac games has gone up too, but still, we should be happy about the way things are progressing.

Over and out!

This right here is what I talk about in my post above. Ferals work on Xcom is the exact opposite of garbage, it's one of the best ports to Linux so far, and to sit an spew out stuff like this on forums on the net... We're just in no position whatsoever to do so!

A lot of people contact me after reading my comments about Feral. We talk and I recommend them contact Feral and ask them don't port any more games on linux. So, I don't need to argue with you here. Sorry, nothing personal. What I need is just leaving my comments and do what I do.

So, they port Xcom to 64 bits, your current distro is 32 bits (in a 64 bits able hardware), and you want them to stop porting games to the linux platform just because you dont want to reinstall your distro?
I really want to understand your point, but when I try I fail. Maybe you should contact steam support for a refund, that would make more sense, but I guess it's not possible due to you should had read the requirements of the game before buy it.

Many benchmarks have shown than the nvidia driver runs similar on both OS, so to think than the ports are not optimized as good as possible (or opengl is not that good) makes sense. I mean, if those are not the reason, and the nvidia driver is supposed to have similar performance on both OS? what else could it be? the kernel? (I dont think so). Just saying.

The lab shuttered was the Operating System Research Centre. Nothing to do with their driver teams.
AMD employs people to work on the FOSS drivers. And they continue with their closed source efforts. And they're trying to combine the two.

Try again.

Regardless, their drivers are garbage and offer little - if any - performance benefits over Intel's embedded offerings...

I won't be buying a laptop with AMD graphics again, it's NVIDIA or nothing.

I think it won't matter much in the future, since games / engines will go in the direction of Azdo for not getting too much API overhead - and that's supported for DX12 and OGL4.

This right here is what I talk about in my post above. Ferals work on Xcom is the exact opposite of garbage, it's one of the best ports to Linux so far, and to sit an spew out stuff like this on forums on the net... We're just in no position whatsoever to do so!

A lot of people contact me after reading my comments about Feral. We talk and I recommend them contact Feral and ask them don't port any more games on linux. So, I don't need to argue with you here. Sorry, nothing personal. What I need is just leaving my comments and do what I do.

Still bitter about the whole 32 bit thing huh? It's not Feral's fought that you're using an outdated system. I'm glad they didn't waste their resources on a few stubborn people like you and hopefully we will get more ports from them. :D

Did anyone who owns an Nvidia card put this in the Steam Launch options for the game:

LD_PRELOAD="${LD_PRELOAD} libpthread.so.0 libGL.so.1" __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1 %command%

On my machine this isnt't working with 650M GT. Games do not start with " __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1 " As a graphics boost is welcome at any time, someone might know a solution.

OT: What have his parents thought when naming their child? Anyone who understands english and german will confirm, or?

Many benchmarks have shown than the nvidia driver runs similar on both OS, so to think than the ports are not optimized as good as possible (or opengl is not that good) makes sense. I mean, if those are not the reason, and the nvidia driver is supposed to have similar performance on both OS? what else could it be? the kernel? (I dont think so). Just saying.

DING DING DING. Exactly this. Big time developers of AAA's spend years making a video game and optimizing it(for windows) along the way. Then they hand it to a small porting dev who throws a 1/4 of their already low resources at it and spend maybe 6-8ish months on and they want to call that optimized? NOPE.

I watched a talk from R. Gordon (icculus) from one of the steam dev days this past weekend. He was speaking to a ton of win/console devs and It was basically about porting games to Linux/Mac and OpenGL. I already had a good idea how it went and I was pretty much spot on.

They yank out the dx renderer, shove in an OpenGL one or even put in a dx to ogl translation layer(yuck), yank out dxinput and shove in SDL(hopefully SDL2) Compile, get compile error, fix error, rinse & repeat until it actually finishes compiling. Then they use the sub par tools available for Linux to attempt debug it and to try and iron out most of the major kinks. It is one HUGE band-aid job. It is NO WONDER that all of these ports that are simply afterthoughts don't run as well as they should/could, and they WONT until the the games are built with Linux in mind from the get go.

So, they port Xcom to 64 bits, your current distro is 32 bits (in a 64 bits able hardware), and you want them to stop porting games to the linux platform just because you dont want to reinstall your distro?
I really want to understand your point, but when I try I fail. Maybe you should contact steam support for a refund, that would make more sense, but I guess it's not possible due to you should had read the requirements of the game before buy it.

I have to agree. If you are complaining about the lack of a 32bit build on Linux in the year 2014 and you are running a 32bit install on 64bit hardware.. I mean.. c'mon. Backup your home folder and reinstall. It should literally only take a few hours to be back up and running exactly as you were before but on a 64bit os. You have nobody to blame but yourself here. Sorry Astro.

Well, I may have an above the average gaming rig, but I am playing through the Witcher 2 right now, and don't jhave any problems to report. The same can be said about Civ 5, Xcom, but I understand that people with more modest rigs are feeling the pain.

It is less about whether or not the games are playable. The witcher 2, borderlands, civ 5.. all of them are "playable" for me. If I am willing to play at sub par frame rates simply to play in Linux that is. All of those mentioned games run at or near twice the frame rate for me in win as they do in Linux. I have been playing the games that are not fast moving in Linux because frame rate is much less noticeable when the image doesn't move much or really quickly, and doesn't require cat like reflexes(and therefor the frame rate) to play. Wasteland 2, GoI, Anomaly WE, KSP.. I play those in Linux because as long as it is "smooth enough" they are enjoyable. The older titles that run well simply by brute force or because they were actually built with Linux in mind. I play those in Linux too. The modern FPS titles like Borderlands, Metro, Serious Sam 3 etc... Are basically all but unplayable with their <=30 fps even without vsync yet they run 60fps all day long with vsync in windows.. I'm still playing them there because that 60FPS frame rate and vsync is necessary for me to enjoy them.. and most other people as well.

I definitely have an above average rig with 3 monitors and multiple GPUs.. I enjoy my surround gaming setup A LOT and I'm not going to play on a single monitor just to play in Linux because the Linux Nvidia drivers don't utilize multiple GPUs properly and the games are horribly optimized.

NONE, of this is a stab at the wonderful devs and porting studios who have been bringing us games. I am just not delusional to the reality we are in right now. I think it WILL get better. The graphics drivers need work and it will take time to work out some of the major kinks.

Still bitter about the whole 32 bit thing huh?

Nope. Still cool with my 32 bit system. And more than that, I have a big list of games I want to play on my 32 bit system. I guess, it takes me at least 2 or 3 years to play all linux games I've already bought. So, no crying and no grieving about a few games I can't play natively on linux. If I wanted I'd play XCOM. There is no problem to use Wine for that.

Well… after reading comments on here and Phoronix, I think it's safe to say my next GPU will be AMD again. They need the money and I need the savings anyway. How about that freesync and the new open source driver? At this tipping point, I'd kick myself if/when Mantle comes to Linux and for whatever reason Nvidia can't or won't implement it.

It's FUD, he has probably been paid by Microsoft (or Apple / Sony / Nintendo) for saying this nonsense.