Hacker News Reader

Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

I am still wondering, however, whether we will really see Steam on "Linux" or Steam on "A Single Distro", which would probably happen to be Ubuntu. If that does happen, that would further consolidate the domination of Ubuntu in the Linux World (at least in numbers) as an unintended consequence.

I do not see Valve releasing clients for every distro out there.

For Linux/Ubuntu to be really strong in gaming, Steam is a big plus, however we also need strong driver support from nVidia and ATI. As far as I know, the best drivers on Linux are still not on par with their equivalent on Windows in terms of performance. If playing the same game on Linux means losing 10 fps on your favorite game, this may not be a very enticing alternative if you have both systems installed.

View on HN

> As far as I know, the best drivers on Linux are still not on par with their equivalent on Windows in terms of performance.

Forget performance, ATI drivers are so unstable it's barely usable (eg. Gnome 3 restarting regularly, like once per hour), and that's just plain desktop apps (Vim/browser), trying to run some version of VLC from default repo instantly crashed the PC (needed to restart), when I tried to play games random graphics bugs were everywhere (texture artifacts, framebuffer not clearing properly, etc.) All distros I've tried so far have problems with closed source drivers, and the OSS ones don't have HW 3D I think because it's slow as hell. Also - you can't alt-tab from full screen games. I looked it up, found a post that started with "you need to modify your xconfig" closed the tab. I think linux needs a lot more polish to be viable for everyday use as multimedia/gaming desktop OS, I would love to ditch the windows partition and rebooting but I don't think it's going to happen soon.

Weird. I run HB games (from Trine to Limbo) without particular problem on my machines with Radeon cards and the proprietary driver. From what I heard around, only people running Ubuntu seem to have serious problems with Catalyst. Are your running Ubuntu?

Interesting - I haven't had problems with any closed source drivers for years, gaming works fine. I am using a ATI card right now, and it works completely fine. Maybe there's some other problem?

I only tried to play HoN - the game did work and din't crash or had any performance issues - but there were many glitches and alt-tab not working made me give up. Most of the issues with stability I had were with Gnome 3 + closed source driver (Unity as well, but I haven't tried Ubuntu since 11.10 Alpha). I also tried to play some games with Wine and that didn't work so well (NvN, HOMM) - again random glitches and crashes.

What are you playing with exactly ? Any 3d games?

I can vouch for this too... I play World Of Warcraft (aging.. but still 3D) using the ATI drivers and it actually runs better than it does on Windows. The only thing I have issues with when using the closed source drivers is standby (it never comes back ._.)

I'd actually recommend the open source drivers. Its true that you're giving up half the FPS on 3D games, but that's a small price to pay for a stable desktop - and the 2D performance is usually better.

Honestly, Intel integrated graphics have been getting better very quickly recently, and already have pretty good Linux drivers. Maybe you wouldn't want to run Crysis on them, but for, say, Team Fortress 2 it should be good enough.

What can you run with the latest Intel Chipsets ? I haven't been following up on their progress. Are they somehow closing some of the gap between integrated graphics and dedicated GPUs?

Both Ivy Bridge and AMD's new Trinity IGPs offer playable frame rates at low-medium settings in many newer titles, with Trinity generally having a slight edge:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5831/amd-trinity-review-a10-46...

It's enough for Diablo 3 on a MacBook Air with Intel graphics.

Does that mean an Air can run SC2?

Yes. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=macbook+air+star...

I do not see Valve releasing clients for every distro out there.

I guess that would depend on how the client software is built and if they utilize the shared libraries included in the Linux distribution. If dependencies are compiled into the distributed binaries, it's really not that hard to repackage the artifacts into different packages for different systems.

Video drivers in OS X are dreadful and games run substantially faster in Windows on the same hardware. I would assume "linux" will be even worse.

Actually it's better in Linux than OS X. My Macbook with Ubuntu runs OpenGL games 10-20 fps faster compared to OS X.

The thing is, somebody updates the GPU drivers on Linux, with OS X most of the time you're tied to the drivers that came with your OS installation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com