Quoting: BlackBloodRumPorting houses usually don't get access to the update code until after the windows team has finished their part, by this time usually the update is announced and has a deadline.

With the broken Borderlands 2 they changed the status from "we fixed Mac and we'll get round to fixing Linux someday if we get round to it" to "we'll fix Mac someday if we get round to it" after it broke for a second time. That was months ago. There's no reason to think that they'll ever fix this one either. They haven't even said they will.

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QuoteAspyr Media, who ported it to Linux, still haven't even gotten Borderlands 2 and The Pre-Sequel updated on Linux since the last update almost a whole year ago.

I chose not to buy Civ 6 specifically because of that. They made it clear with that that they weren't interested in actually supporting their Linux releases. If Feral had ported it instead I'd have bought it.

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Quoting: MohandevirIn fact the GeForce now subscription is not about Netflix like access...

True, but those are the two models: buy and stream from your own collection (Stadia, Geforce Now) or stream from someone else's collection (the Xbox thing and the PlayStation thing).

Quoting: SalvatosI could see the Proton whitelist become the streaming lineup.

Yes, that was my thought, too.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyAny streaming service is gonna need a revenue model of some sort.

Also true. It wouldn't necessarily need to all be new revenue, though; as something that Steam provides that other services don't, it might reduce the pressure for them to lower their cut of sales, and if customers with potatoes have a reason to buy more expensive AAA games then revenues generally would go up without a specific line item.

Or it might never happen. That kind of scheme follows Valve's pattern of using what they already have to make things more attractive for customers and suppliers so they can keep the flow of money going, and fits the kind of work they've collectively found interesting enough to do so far.

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Quoting: MohandevirUnless the "Steam streaming service" goes free, there is a possibilty that there will be a limited set of games available, lacking lots of popular titles.

Time will tell, if it ever becomes a thing...

Free is the way that makes most sense. They have a shop, their client also already streams games;let the customer buy the games as normal but have the option to stream from Steam Machines In The Cloud as a value-add if the customer's Internet is better than their gaming rig. It builds on what they already know how to do. A Netflix-style subscription service would be quite a swerve.

It might still be a restricted selection, depending on which ones they get running on Linux and whether it's optional for the publisher for the game to be included in the service.

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Quoting: gradyvuckovicEvery time I hear a dev say they skipped Linux at launch I can't help but wonder, "Is there something that could be done to make developing software for Linux easier?". Is there some kind of SDK that the open source community should be putting together, something that reduces the burden?

It's not the development: they've already done that. Everyone that's put their game on Stadia has already done that.

It's QA and support costs that scare people away: they fear those costs are open-ended and they won't make them back from sales. Developers that use Linux themselves and are comfortable with how everything works can more accurately gauge those future costs (although they still might judge that the returns aren't there) but to ones that have only ever used Windows Linux is a big, mysterious, scary money hole just waiting to eat their company.

When you get influential devs in a company that fall into the former category they can champion our cause with realistic projections, or they do it as a passion project that isn't expected to make a big profit but isn't expected to make a loss either, and we get native versions. When all the influential devs in a company fall into the latter category we don't.

Games companies want reassurance that they aren't going to be on the hook for costs that will extinguish their profits. Either from someone inside that's trusted and knows what they're talking about with a costed support plan, or from someone outside that strictly limits the amount of future work they need to do as Google does with their only one hardware/software combo with Stadia. Or the prospect of future growth that will outpace future costs that games companies thought they had with Steam Machines.

We need growth, so that games companies feel there's enough potential income to offset the potential costs, and we need more developers familiar with Linux (which we may get as a result of people making Debian/Vulkan games for Stadia) so that they have a realistic idea of what those costs are, and can minimise them, and we need other games companies being bold and successful with their Linux games to show that they don't need to be so terrified.

Feral's attraction for games companies is that they don't need the games companies to do anything and they limit the support costs to their fee and whatever they take from sales they themselves generate. Their ports are great and their support is excellent, but Feral porting a game doesn't give the developers better Linux skills or more Linux mindshare, which means Linux stays as a bogeyman for the developers themselves.

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Quoting: randylIt better be powerful, the die size is enormous. From the blog link in the article, "....with a die size of 826 mm2".

For reference TU102 (2080ti) has a die size of 754mm2 and TU104 (2060, 2070, etc) has a die size of 554mm2.

The Volta V100, which is the predecessor of the part talked about in the keynote, has a die size of 815 mm².

The talk was about their HPC and datacentre stuff, and what they'd done with the $7 billion purchase of Mellanox, rather than GPUs. I'm quite interested in the actual details of the Ampere architecture, which I think are due on Tuesday.

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There never was a statement about opening the source to their drivers: that's just the fevered imaginings of wishful thinkers.

They were going to have a talk called "Open Source, Linux Kernel, and NVIDIA" in which they said

QuoteWe'll report up-to-the-minute developments on NVIDIA's status and activities, and possibly (depending on last-minute developments) a few future plans and directions, regarding our contributions to Linux kernel; supporting Nouveau (the open source kernel driver for NVIDIA GPUs, that is in the Linux kernel), including signed firmware behavior, documentation, and patches; and NVIDIA kernel drivers.

So maybe they have a plan to eventually stop making things hard for the nouveau people, and maybe they'll start actually making things easier for the nouveau people, but no announcement about open sourcing their own drivers has been made or implied.

I'm sure it would have been quite an interesting talk, though.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPI prefer cider, personally. But we don't really have that as software.

TransGaming's proprietary "Wine for Apples" was called Cider.

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