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Science Girls Anime RPG & Visual Novel Released On Steam For Linux
By , 21 March 2014 at 4:16 pm UTC

looks fun and promotes more science to girls :)

NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15x Performance Gains, With Slides
By fedso, 21 March 2014 at 3:07 pm UTC

Quoting: pd12[...]the solution to crappy Windows and D3D is not WINE[...]

Moreover there is the Oracle v. Google appeal ruling still in the air (maybe this summer?). I'm not competent in legislation but if API will be considered covered by copyright law (most likely reading about the appeal) and a different implementation isn't fair use (this is the answer I'm nervous about), anyone using WINE could be easily targeted by Microsoft, and Valve, as a Microsoft competitor, would have an hard time defending.

NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15x Performance Gains, With Slides
By Sabun, 21 March 2014 at 2:08 pm UTC

QuoteWhat nVidia GPU have you got?
I have an Nvidia GTX 680 running the Nvidia 334 drivers on Ubuntu 13.10 currently :)

QuoteThe Intel drivers are fantastic, their hardware is the bottleneck.
I agree with you on the hardware being a bottleneck, but the drivers aren't that good yet. I just recently tried running Portal 2 on my Intel HD4600 2 days ago, and can barely keep 20 fps at 1920x1080 with everything else set to maximum low or off. Yet, in Dota 2 with the same settings I can reach 120 fps. There isn't a proper consistency in the Intel driver yet (at least not on Ubuntu in my test runs). Still leaves a lot left to be desired in terms of performance.

QuoteSTFU unless you OWN/currently use them.
I'm pretty certain we're all speaking from personal experience with our own hardware here. Don't rush to assumptions too fast.

NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15x Performance Gains, With Slides
By , 21 March 2014 at 1:58 pm UTC

AMD RadeonSI is coming along it performs well at this point, everything older is doing really well. Some graphical error but no more than the opensource intel driver. Very smooth gameplay for it's lack of raw FPS.
AMD catalyst is running great. No more giant memory leaks and performances is damn good. GPU lock ups using things like wine are also vanishing. Higher fps and lower power consumption than the opensauce one.
Intel does pretty good, unlike what most people say I think the driver lags behind Windows by some margin (this is true for all Linux drivers). Some graphical errors but for the most part one of the better Linux experiences.
Nvidia Their binary is top notch, it has been slipping as of late and there is a performance impact in some games (e.g. MLL) vs Windows despite what phoronix may say. Again it lags behind it's Windows counterpart but mostly in utility and features as the performances is very acceptable.


I own all the cards, I use them all. I love everyone parroting things they don't know anything about.
Go NVIDIA! unless you want to use the latest xorgserver and kernel because they have been lagging.
Go Intel! Wintel is a thing. Intel supports Linux but are they themselves becoming more DRM friendly and lest not forget how evil this corp is and has been.
Go AMD! Support?... Support?... Support?... Bueller?

Seriously people, all your parroting without owning products you're talking about is mind numbingly awful. STFU unless you OWN/currently use them.

Qbeh-1: The Atlas Cube First Person Puzzle Game Has A Trailer, Hooray!
By killx_den, 21 March 2014 at 1:50 pm UTC

Looks great imo, would love to play that game on a Rift :)

NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15x Performance Gains, With Slides
By , 21 March 2014 at 1:48 pm UTC

is it just me or no one noticed this? there is much more important news here than x* speed. the 3 big companies seem to be openly collaborating instead of competing for the first time with huge improvement

NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15x Performance Gains, With Slides
By HadBabits, 21 March 2014 at 1:42 pm UTC

Quoting: Anonymous
Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: AnonymousJust wondering Liam what GPU have you got and how is it in Linux?
Nvidia 560ti and it's fine :)
Lucky :P Sorry for my rant earlier on. Just bit fed up with AMD linux support that all.

Hey, friend; I know exactly how you feel. I got a rig with a GTX 645 a month or so to replace my AMD computer and I haven't looked back. :)

NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15x Performance Gains, With Slides
By , 21 March 2014 at 1:28 pm UTC

It's funny how there's all this business and hype about low level GFX API with Mantle and DX12 while OpenGL already has low level stuff if you want it.
The benchmarks at Phoronix.com are great and do show you how well the nVidia binary blobs perform (and how crap the FOSS nVidia drivers are, unfortunately). AMD's Catalyst and FOSS drivers sit somewhere in the middle, although I think the FOSS drivers are better than Catalyst at times, and I remember one of the game devs on steam recommended the FOSS drivers over the Catalyst ones after recommending the Catalyst ones first. At least AMD is working on the FOSS drivers as well whereas nVidia only wants to work on the binary blobs.

But like Valve and GabeN said (check the recent AMA on reddit and Steam Dev Days 2014 on youtube), the solution to crappy Windows and D3D is not WINE (although that's great for legacy stuff) but encouraging developers to go Linux native, which is gaining traction with all the game engines coming to Linux now, and OpenGL being pretty cool in general. Valve - leading the way in Linux gaming by at least 1 year =P.

NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15x Performance Gains, With Slides
By , 21 March 2014 at 1:19 pm UTC

AMD is so bad. No support for TrueHD or DTS-Hd over HDMI with Catalyst.

Have FOSS driver support for this? Or i must change from AMD to Nvidia?

I have a HD 6850.

NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15x Performance Gains, With Slides
By , 21 March 2014 at 1:11 pm UTC

Quoting: GuestIntel I haven't tried, but I've not heard good things about their drivers.

The Intel drivers are fantastic, their hardware is the bottleneck. They're only just starting to squeeze in at the low-end of their competitors with their best offering when it comes to performance.

NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15x Performance Gains, With Slides
By , 21 March 2014 at 1:09 pm UTC

Quoting: SabunI'm not Liam, but just to chip in, Nvidia's binary driver almost has no real issues and performs very closely to that of the Windows driver (at least in my experience over the past year and a half). It's currently the only real deal if you want the best performance in gaming on Linux, from my perspective.

Hm I see thanks :) What nVidia GPU have you got?


Quoting: GuestI would have thought the AMD bashing to take a little longer. AMD support the FOSS driver, which last I checked was pretty damned awesome for stability, and for older cards has basically caught up with performance.

Yeah AMD FOSS driver are awesome and I am using it because it actually got less issues than catalyst but unfortunately it still not maxing my card potential :( However I do appreciate the fact that FOSS developers are working hard at it :)

NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15x Performance Gains, With Slides
By Sabun, 21 March 2014 at 12:55 pm UTC

QuoteAs for DX12, I suspect that's basically Mantle in disguise.
DirectX12 scares me, as the thought of it coming out now would mean that Wine is getting further and further away from being able to support most Windows-only games. It also means Microsoft doesn't want anyone touching it's piece of the pie, so it's going brute force.

Wine definitely isn't the solution to bringing games to Linux, thankfully we have Unity3D and what looks to be like Godot + CryEngine 4 + Unreal Engine 4 + Leadwerks for that exact purpose.

It just seems sad that Wine is still only in DirectX 9 land (not undermining their work though!). With how DX10 and DX11 were pretty much ignored, I can safely assume DX12 will be as well. It was always cool to show off games running in Wine when there wasn't a native version. It's becoming harder to do that.

A Sneak Peak Of This War Of Mine From The Anomaly Developers
By killx_den, 21 March 2014 at 12:49 pm UTC

Quoting: GuestGiven that Anomaly is a game that is still sold even though it does not even start, I’m sure to avoid that one.
What?

Anomaly even starts and runs smooth on my Jolla phone which uses a virtual machine to run android apps.

NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15x Performance Gains, With Slides
By Sabun, 21 March 2014 at 12:35 pm UTC

QuoteSorry for my rant earlier on. Just bit fed up with AMD linux support that all.
I can't blame you for feeling that way, 2012 was probably the worst year for AMD's Catalyst driver in Linux. It got so bad, that my desktop became unusable and I went with Nvidia for 2013 (only ever owned one Nvidia card before that in my lifetime).

I will say this though, I have setup a small SteamOS machine and it's running with an AMD HD 5750. I thought it wouldn't work at all after my experience with the HD6850, but to my surprise the AMD driver that comes with SteamOS is actually performance worthy. No tears, no evil sudden drops in FPS, no weird nasty glitches in graphics, it's actually ok. I don't know though if this reflects other Linux distros.

I'm not Liam, but just to chip in, Nvidia's binary driver almost has no real issues and performs very closely to that of the Windows driver (at least in my experience over the past year and a half). It's currently the only real deal if you want the best performance in gaming on Linux, from my perspective.

Unity Confirms They Have No Plans For A Linux Editor
By , 21 March 2014 at 11:21 am UTC

Well, every voter can put up to 10 votes on an issue. So, from 10k votes, we can expect about 1k voters. I put all my 10 on that suggestion... And I would be one of the "developers who would buy it and develop on Linux" for sure. I use Linux for everything except playing Windows-only games. And I mean it: if I need to access my e-mail when on Windows, I switch back to Linux just to access it (an easy task once you have SSDs ;-) ).

Using Windows is a pain.

NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15x Performance Gains, With Slides
By , 21 March 2014 at 11:20 am UTC

Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: AnonymousJust wondering Liam what GPU have you got and how is it in Linux?
Nvidia 560ti and it's fine :)

Lucky :P Sorry for my rant earlier on. Just bit fed up with AMD linux support that all.

Do you get any issues with binary driver at all? Would you say the performance is same as Windows (If you ever tested it lol)

Thanks :)

NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15x Performance Gains, With Slides
By Liam Dawe, 21 March 2014 at 11:18 am UTC

Quoting: AnonymousJust wondering Liam what GPU have you got and how is it in Linux?

Nvidia 560ti and it's fine :)

NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15x Performance Gains, With Slides
By , 21 March 2014 at 11:14 am UTC

Just wondering Liam what GPU have you got and how is it in Linux?

NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15x Performance Gains, With Slides
By , 21 March 2014 at 11:12 am UTC Likes: 1

OMG what the fuck is wrong with AMD... They keep talking about how to improve performance and stuff but just take a look at their shitty fucked up driver. It is so awful in fact this summer it will be time for me to upgrade GPU and it will be nVidia.

Sharing Steam Games On Two Different Linux Distributions
By , 21 March 2014 at 10:54 am UTC

A better version, if you have network storage, is to place your steam library there.
I have 3 computers using the same steamlibrary over nfs, works perfectly.

Octodad: Dadliest Catch Has sold 90K Copies, Linux Sales Info Inside
By , 21 March 2014 at 3:25 am UTC

mac sales are about 10x linux on steam. i'm not sure how steam gives us the linux info it just does. it's definitely an estimate based on some combination of what platform they use the most and what platform they bought it on.

Starbound Stable Updates, New Weather & Encounters Available
By HadBabits, 21 March 2014 at 12:31 am UTC

I played for a few days. Has potential, but I'm gonna wait on it.

The Witcher 2 Massive RPG Looks Like It Will Be On Linux
By Orkultus, 20 March 2014 at 10:36 pm UTC

So excited to see it on my Linux steam list! Downloading now!

The Witcher 2 Massive RPG Looks Like It Will Be On Linux
By DrMcCoy, 20 March 2014 at 10:36 pm UTC

Quoting: oldrocker99using a PlayOnLinux script, which I've already deleted

That might have been premature. By the reports on the Steam forums, there isn't yet an executable in the download, only the game data. Looks like the Linux version is still in (closed) beta, and the public push of the game data might have been by accident.

The Witcher 2 Massive RPG Looks Like It Will Be On Linux
By oldrocker99, 20 March 2014 at 10:29 pm UTC

It's downloading on my desktop as I type; it's 16GB:O. I am beside myself with anticipation. I'd been running it (purchased from Steam) using a PlayOnLinux script, which I've already deleted:D. This is a 4+ star game by any standard, and now it's available for Linux!

Ground Pounders Linux Version Drops Tomorrow, From The Creators Of Sword Of The Stars
By Liam Dawe, 20 March 2014 at 10:11 pm UTC

Quoting: s_dWow! TBS! I hope we'll get to play The Pit someday too.

They are working on it, we covered the news a while ago, but no ETA.

Ground Pounders Linux Version Drops Tomorrow, From The Creators Of Sword Of The Stars
By s_d, 20 March 2014 at 10:08 pm UTC

Wow! TBS! I hope we'll get to play The Pit someday too.

Planetary Annihilation RTS Invents New Development Phase, Entering Gamma Stage Tomorrow
By Liam Dawe, 20 March 2014 at 9:53 pm UTC

Quoting: DavrosThey did not make that up. Developers at some point quickly forgot their Greek alphabet but Gamma testing is a term that I use to hear, if not often, as far back as more than 20 years ago. You can search for Gamma Test on Wikipedia so somebody thought of it before now.

Oh rly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle

No Gamma Test listed there.

Planetary Annihilation RTS Invents New Development Phase, Entering Gamma Stage Tomorrow
By , 20 March 2014 at 9:49 pm UTC

They did not make that up. Developers at some point quickly forgot their Greek alphabet but Gamma testing is a term that I use to hear, if not often, as far back as more than 20 years ago. You can search for Gamma Test on Wikipedia so somebody thought of it before now.