Valve’s SteamOS now supports Vulkan | Hacker News Reader

Valve’s SteamOS now supports Vulkan

steamfreecodes.com

31 points1gang12310 comments

The domain "steamfreecodes.com" is highly suspect-sounding, and it looks like this article is simply stolen from PC World:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3035020/linux/valves-steamos-...

OT, but that site is a giant scam and the content is literally copied and pasted from a different site - http://www.pcworld.com/article/3035020/linux/valves-steamos-...

It's kind of sad to see the nVidia recommendation. Vulkan is significantly based on AMD's work with Mantle -- it'd be nice to see them profit a bit from that work. Also we need to keep AMD around as a viable competitor to nVidia.

AMD is more than welcome to write better Linux drivers. And hopefully Vulkan makes that a bit easier by its low-level nature.

That's actually the reason why AMD's Vulkan is delayed on Linux. It's going to be based on the open source AMDGPU driver than on the old closed source firegl driver.

Well this is a good first step.

I still feel kinda bad for Valve on the whole vis-a-vis SteamOS. Everyone up to Linus Torvalds pins their hopes on Valve to mainstream Linux enough to be a serious gaming competitor to Windows [0]. That's certainly alot of pressure to put on a company that just wants to sell games (and, ya know, develop a game, once in a blue moon).

[0] http://news.softpedia.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Says-Linux-Bin...

SteamOS is what you might call an escape valve.

Valve make their money from selling games. Microsoft now have a store of their own. If Microsoft ever decide that they're the one legitimate way of selling Windows apps and turn Windows into a locked platform, then Valve are dead overnight. Having SteamOS gives them an option which is not beholden to anyone else. I'm not sure if the Steam Machine is ever going to be a viable console competitor, but doing it this way is a relatively cheap approach to gradually attempting to do that.

As you say I'm sure Valve saw the warning signs around Windows 8 and the possibility of Microsoft limiting 3rd party stores in some way.

I believe SteamOS probably gave them some bargaining power as a Dell AlienWare gaming machine was the only one Microsoft gave in to letting boot to something other than the Start Screen, it booted to Steam.

This was during the period where PC/Laptop vendors were crying out to be allowed to boot to anything that helped users work out WTF was going on with their new PC :)

Valve are getting developers on board slowly with Steam OS, the new Street Fighter being a pretty big release that has a SteamOS port at launch. They seem happy to play it slow at the moment, as always ;)

Looking forward to the Mesa 11.3 release, though I'm disappointed because it seems my laptops processor is a generation too old (sandy bridge) to use the new Vulkan driver. Maybe some day...

All 8 users of SteamOS will be excited to hear of this development!

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