Valve Confirms Official AMD-Powered Steam Machines For 2014 | Hacker News Reader

Valve Confirms Official AMD-Powered Steam Machines For 2014

forbes.com

91 pointsconductor42 comments

So... what drivers will these machines be running?

The linked article doesn't mention this possibility, but perhaps the reason that Valve made no mention of AMD machines is because AMD's Linux drivers are complete and utter crap.

From the sound of it: any.

The initial run has Nvidia, Valve has been working with Intel on their graphics drivers, and are going with AMD for some sort of run of Steam Boxes next year? Sounds like any. I don't see how that is too surprising; that is how they roll on Windows too.

What I find surprising is the idea that AMD must necessarily be out of the running. Both the Xbox One and the PS4 are getting AMD GPUs, so how irrelevant could AMD possibly be?

My point is, given the state of AMD's drivers, I can't imagine that anyone would want a Steam Machine with an AMD card.

Consider the options:

    * AMD GPU / fglrx: good hardware, terrible drivers.
    * AMD GPU / radeon: good hardware, good but incomplete drivers.

Why would anyone interested in gaming opt for a dramatically worse experience by choosing AMD? You can't play games with the radeon drivers, and the fglrx drivers don't work.

It's not about the hardware. AMD's hardware is great. You just can't actually use it reliably when running Linux -- you get to pick between having a working, but limited, set of features (radeon), or having the full set of features and crashing once a day or more (fglrx).

If AMD can get their ass in gear to make a driver suitable for Sony, why can't they get their ass in gear to make a driver suitable for Valve? The reason fglrx is shit right now is because they really don't have any good reason to care.

@drivebyacct2, who is unfortunately hellbanned, makes a good point too:

"Well, in the other corner you have NVIDIA, who still won't (and I'm willing to partially blame Canonical) step up and say for sure that they will support KMS and/or Wayland. Without that, it's going to always be something of a workaround to output wayland-on-nvidia and won't be a really good experience."

I would guess that AMD just opened up all specs of their GPU to Sony and Sony did most of the driver/API design along with some help from AMD.

You also have to consider that the PS4 graphics APIs will likely be a lot simpler and down to the metal than DX9/10/11 and (especially) OpenCL.

Also consider that Valve has been hiring Linux graphics people for a long while.

Basically, NVIDIA has come out and said that they don't want to be in the business of supporting window systems, they just want to be in the business of providing modesetting and direct rendering. They're proposing new things into EGL like the new EGLDevice abstraction and EGLStreams so that NVIDIA can tie less into Wayland and simply allow people to do cool stuff with their driver.

They're not going to support KMS immediately, as it's too simplistic for the full range of stuff that they would need to do (complicated modes, stereo support, etc.). The FOSS driver people are working on atomic modeset and atomic pageflip, which NVIDIA will investigate the API and see if it fits their needs.

They're also happy to support this stuff if we give them an API that ties into their driver and allows them to drop some of their code, but we first need to do that, with their feedback. The community is actively working on that.

What do you mean by "don't work?" I don't like fglrx because it isn't open source, but I use it for gaming without issue. The times I run into problems are when the kernel is updated before the kernel module.

"crashing once a day or more" ?

It's a kernel driver so triple the fun.

They should just follow Intel and switch effort to the free drivers, fglrx has been in this rotten state for years and years and it's clearly not getting fixed.

Understandably this is all purely anecdotal, but installing fglrx using smxi on Crunchbang 11 was actually a relatively painless experience.

My gaming machine has always been in "Windows only" territory due to the fact that I tend to run configurations that are slightly outlying -- my current machine has three monitors and two AMD 6970 videocards, with two monitors attached to one videocard, one attached to the other. I was incredibly surprised to find that this configuration worked 'out of the box' on #!, and continued to work perfectly after the install of fglrx drivers. No issues with hardware acceleration, no crashes, no difficulties whatsoever (beyond having to increase the 'virtual' resoluting in xorg.conf so I could move screens where I wanted in xrandr.)

All this brings me in a roundabout way to my point: If my wacky configuration can work relatively seamlessly in an arbitrary distro, I tend to think that AMD will probably be able to manage to get fully supported configurations running on SteamOS in a straightforward fashion.

Likewise on smxi, unfortunately the specter of "Your card is incompatible with this driver" has stuck me firmly in the free driver area. If linux gaming becomes as much of a thing as Valve are making it to be, my next card is going to be Nvidia.

That, or I can pray they make the free driver at least somewhat useful. Currently, it seems you get what you pay for..

I would be surprised if a Steam Machine with AMD hardware comes configured with anything other than the fglrx driver. The open source driver radeon driver is still lacking in performance.

TBH, I didn't have many problems with AMD's recent Catalyst drivers.

The graphics performance is good and they have the fastest and most feature complete OpenCL implementation by far. Early buffer swap latency problems have been ironed out.

The only real gripes I have is that vsync with multiple monitors doesn't work too well and KMS isn't supported.

And at least with AMD I can be sure that my card will keep being supported by open source drivers once Catalyst support is dropped.

I don't agree. The graphics performance is far worse than the Windows drivers. I see that a game which runs at full normal speed in Windows tends to run at an unplayable crawl in Linux.

The open source drivers are a terrible power drain on laptops.

Perhaps some of this varies depending on the part? But none of this inspires confidence.

There is a rumour floating around that Mantle, a new low level gpu api from AMD launching on desktops soon, is the same api the next gen consoles are using. All they have to do is launch with strong linux support and they will own all three next gen platforms.

It isn't even a rumor really, based on the conference they held Mantle was actually more like the opposite, a port of console style API to all platforms.

> AMD's Linux drivers are complete and utter crap.

<Shrug> ... worksforme...

I have AMD Radeon cards on my machines at work. Work fine with Linux drivers, even have a 3 monitor setup going.

PS4 and XBox using their chips as well, right? Junky but cheaper, I suppose.

Just in time for the Q3 2013 Advanced Micro Devices Earnings Conference Call. Thursday, October 17, 2013 :)

It was interesting how they had this announced. First they said "we certainly are planning to make AMD hardware for SteamMachines, but ask Valve yourselves" and then Valve issued a press statement (probably slightly under pressure).

I like how they are refering to semiaccurate articles as amusing theories... then going on on their own.

Could it be that AMD plans to release a revamped binary driver for Wayland?

Well, that’s less surprising than announcing steam-powered AMD machines.

So they are going the Chromebook route, hardware from every other company? The reason current gen consoles lasted as long as they did is certainly not because they had lots of fragmented platforms with vastly different performance characteristics.

That model seems to appeal to nobody but tech people.

Four of the top 10 best selling laptops on Amazon are Chromebooks. Not sure how that translates to only appealing to tech people.

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-Lap...

The fact that #1 and #2 are Chromebooks is worth mentioning. I found that surprising.

It really does. I always think Chromebook is pretty bad in this decade given how terrible Internet speed is outside your super fast office connection.

Really? I have a lot of complaints about ChromeOS (I have a chromebook, and nuked ChromeOS off of it), but that isn't one of them. Gigabit connections may be rare in the US, but some form of broadband is typically ubiquitous. You have to get pretty far out into the country before you find people who can only get dialup. Just a few Mbps is perfectly fine for ChromeOS purposes.

I guess I am saying reliable and extremely consistent speed. I mean using that at school is a challenge for a lot of people. I can't get fios yet and I am stuck with this inconsistent, horrible connection that works excellent only after midnight at home.

In general, that's very true for a lot of places in the US. While I can find a lot of free wifi in NYC these days, they are slow and some of them aren't secured either. So while chromeOS might be secure as OS, I still don't quite trust the connection.

It's not that surprising. These are the cheapest option if you want a decent computer.

You don't get to Windows until #4. The world has changed.

I think valve would probably say they're trying to go the PC gaming route. that's traditionally been valve's market. Steamboxes don't exist to kill playstation and xbox, they exist to take over the PC gaming market from windows and the threat of the microsoft store on windows 8, which is clearly aimed as a competitor to steam.

To me it reads like a slightly different model- they make plenty of money in their primary business on Windows, and had no quarrel with Microsoft for many years. Now as they feel threatened by Microsoft, they are attempting to grow into a new market space- somewhat of a "blue ocean" strategy- namely, people who already like consoles but have always found PCs too intimidating or too much work. I doubt they want to cannibalize Windows; growing into a new market provides them additional revenue and security in the event Microsoft starts to take over some of Valve's old market share.

It's not quite "red ocean" and not quite "blue ocean" because they are targeting the gap between the two markets, and many customers will probably own both a console and a Steambox, or a PC and a Steambox, but of course some may forgo all but the Steambox.

It would be painfully easy for Steam to integrate some hardware polling with a database ranking the parts to give a rough estimate of how well you can run any given Steam game.

I'd argue it surely beats sitting on decade old hardware an entire console cycle. That was probably one of the primary motivators for SteamOS as a consolesque platform - Sony and Microsofts inertia circa 2012 was presenting a gaping hole in the market, and Nintendo's Wii U was (and still is) underwhelming. If Valve could get an open platform with vendor competition and constant product iteration in the living room, it would cement them there as much as it did on Windows digital distribution.

That plan might not have come to complete fruition the way they were hoping, though - both of their chief competitors will have months and a holiday season ahead of them, and SteamOS hasn't announced any launch titles or exclusives to attract early adopters (of the whole living room platform and haptic controller, at least).

They already do the hardware polling, and if they're already supporting this variety of GPUs on Windows, I can't see the Linux situation being that much worse:

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

It really is that much worse. Hardware companies work far harder on their Windows drivers. On Linux we are mostly dependent on third party volunteers to write or fix drivers which support our hardware, because the vendors don't care.

Then Linux takes the blame for worse driver support, impairing adoption. It's a vicious circle.

AMD/ATI is in all new major consoles, and with what they are trying to do with "Mantle", things may radically change, and more PC's could start getting memory unified between CPU/GPU, like in consoles.

Only on machines with SoC's though ("APU"). Discrete graphics, the most common gaming configuration, will always require bussing data across PCI.

The real ray of sunlight is that huma (heterogeneous unified memory access?) might close some of the gap.

Consoles already have discrete chips and have unified memory...

Sure, the new generation will have unified memory access, but my parent was talking about PC's. What happens in console usually has little bearing on what happens in PC.

Not something introduced in the new generation; the last generation had it as well. And the generation before that. And before that.

They are not trying to introduce a console, IMO. It's a play for the gap between consoles and PCs. Some of the console "plug-n-play", some of the PC "performance-price-spectrum".

If we are comparing Valve to Google, then Steam-machines/SteamOS is more akin to Android than Chromebook imho. Valve provides platform/appstore, 3rd party devs provide apps.

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