If Valve is indeed targeting console gamers with SteamOS, this makes perfect sense. Every game needs to work out of the box or -- for someone who just wants to enjoy their games without first learning the ins and outs of their new system -- the experience will be inferior. For those of us familiar with linux a clear "Needs additional software:" section on the store page would suffice, but to me this seems purely a marketing/business decision. After all, if Valve's gambit pays off, we will soon be a tiny minority compared to the Steam Machine gaming crowd. At least for a while.

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Quoting: DrMcCoyAlso, uff, the Director's Cut eats way more RAM. Right of the bat ingame, it allocated nearly 3GB. I'm not sure my 4GB of RAM will be enough to actually play this game.

Should be enough. 4GiB is the official minimum requirement.

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Ignore this. I'm an idiot and replied to an old post.

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Quoting: Styromaniac... but all of this Nvidia worship I've heard and practically repeated ...

It can hardly be called worship if someone says: "I bought/use an Nvidia card because it's the most practical choice for Linux Gaming right now." And that's pretty much exactly what you keep hearing here on GOL.

(I'm not trying to "defend" Nvidia, just not a fan of hyperbole.)

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Quoting: Sn3ipenBut how am i supposed to know that it still runs on Linux when i buy the game?

I think the idea is that the developers should fix their games to actually work on SteamOS before Valve is willing to advertise them as such. Steam badly needs at least minimal quality control. If a game is for sale, it should work out of the box. Otherwise there's going to be a lot of refund requests and disappointed customers.

Quoting: MaelraneOh, easy to tell, because in Linux you have shared-libraries, where under Windows you statically link everything.

No you don't. Windows has shared (dll) libraries as well.

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Quoting: EikeThat's why levels make more sense. Level 3 is super-duper today, medium in two years and low-end in say five years, when level 5 is the new super-duper.

How would you decide what sort of hardware corresponds to a level? With a benchmark? Should there be a validation process where Valve tests and grades each and every Steam Machine on the market?

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Quoting: alexLanguage? Hello kitty script?

Yes, our main product is a virtual knickers-untwister written in Hello kitty script. Although personally I prefer to prevent having my knickers in a twist by going commando.

(In case you're not getting it, I'm not interested in a shit-flinging match with you. You don't seem interested in a civil, productive discussion so just take a deep breath, assume I'm a troll and/or an idiot and go about your business.)

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Quoting: alexThe mirv example was well documented and if this is true then yes thats a good and specific example. But when you explain in terms of " magic" and such it's just completely obvious you dont know anything about software development.

Damn. Busted. I wonder how our software design business lasted for ten years before anyone found out I have no idea what I'm doing. Please don't tell our clients. :'(

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Quoting: alexWhy? Well because it's impossible. That's why. Just like all this pseudo-programming bullshit

Obviously it is impossible as proven beyond any doubt by your most enlightening anecdote. If they don't detect every programming mistake or lost optimization opportunity imaginable, surely it is impossible to hack around anything at all. The rest of us are simply talking out of our asses. Glad that's settled then.

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Quoting: alex>> My understanding is that Nvidia hacks around a lot of common mistakes and bad practices in OpenGL code. <<

This quote is just waaaaay wrong. The driver cannot change the way your app uses OpenGL. If you do things in a bad style then it will perform badly. This the driver cannot change. You should use OpenGL in the "approaching zero driver overhead" way.

Nvidia's driver can and does detect and catch OpenGL call patterns and outright errors that can severely affect performance. Sometimes this is game or application specific and sometimes based on heuristics. There's tons of "magic" like this in their drivers (and to lesser extent in AMD's as well), accumulated over the years. This is pretty much common knowledge. I won't do the research for you though if this is the first time you've heard of it.

I am a bit curious. Why would you think it can't be done? OpenGL is a rather messy group of specs, at least up until the latest versions. AMD's and Nvidia's blobs implement these specs as they see fit, without official validation or compliance testing available, let alone enforced by Khronos or anyone else. The oss drivers all (?) share mesa's implementation, but the proprietary drivers roll their own.

I'm not calling Nvidia evil or anything, drivers that magically make bad code work fine is just good business for them even if I think it's bad for the spec, bad for developers and - in the end - bad for end users. This is similar to (but not the same as) how MS crippled the web until a few years back with IE's liberal and wilful perversion of the web standards.

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