Steam Linux Beta Build Surfaces In Steam’s Database | Hacker News Reader

Steam Linux Beta Build Surfaces In Steam’s Database

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73 pointsglazemaster14 comments

The rumours of the Linux desktop's death have been greatly exaggerated.

I am cautiously optimistic that this will push people to make the leap.

I hope that some gamers who want to squeeze every last drop out of their system will switch to improve performance. If enough games are ported (i.e., all the Source-based ones), this could very well happen. I know some hardcore gamers who primarily play one or two games, such as CSS and TF2.

It might be premature to think that. There has so far only been one set of benchmarks showing better performance and that was more to do with OpenGL vs Direct3D.

Unless games start taking more steps forwards in terms of graphical requirements I don't know if this is much of a concern anyway.

I have a ~3 year old PC and a ~2 year old mid level graphics card and I can still run most modern games with the graphic settings turned up pretty high.

> I have a ~3 year old PC and a ~2 year old mid level graphics card and I can still run most modern games with the graphic settings turned up pretty high.

Well there is a new console generation looming in the near future which probably will bump requirements of upcoming PC games too.

Perhaps , but I recall a report somewhere (possibly from Carmack) that next gen consoles really were more just catching up to the PC in terms of performance.

The industry seems more focused on new method of control and also on different monetisation strategies.

I think with graphics perhaps we are far enough into the uncanny valley that it's really going to provide diminishing returns in terms of horsepower/experience to gamers until we can get to the point where graphics can become literally photo-realistic.

> I have a ~3 year old PC and a ~2 year old mid level graphics card and I can still run most modern games with the graphic settings turned up pretty high.

Not all of us are able/willing to spend money so often. I know people who play CSS/TF2 with several-year-old PCs/graphics cards.

Game devs are used to writing for Windows. I think it's a safe guess that there are some things that you need to know to port a Windows-specific game to Linux without losing any performance at all. They might not have that knowledge.

That's what Valve has been working on. If they're truly interested in promoting gaming on Linux (as I believe they are), they'll probably work to make that information public, so that all developers can benefit from it.

With the mobile-ification of the other platforms and third party apps being slowly reduced to $1.99 sandboxed toys Linux might shortly be the only desktop with any useful functionality remaining.

It will certainly keep me on the Linux platform.

1995: The year of the Linux desktop.

That list of initial titles is pretty small, I hope it will soon include all the recent humble bundle games, since most (if not all) had linux ports as well as being steam-ified.

I know it won't do much in the way of making linux any more popular for the hardcore gamer, but it would at least make me happy

That's not the list of Steam Linux games, it's the list of games added in the Steam database recently for any platform.

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