Intel & NVIDIA Dominate The Initial Linux-Based Steam Machines

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel & NVIDIA Dominate The Initial Linux-Based Steam Machines

For anyone that didn't get a chance yesterday to look at the Steam Machines up for pre-ordering, these SteamOS loaded devices all come with Intel CPUs and NVIDIA GeForce graphics...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-NVIDIA-Steam-Machines

[dungeon]

Article should be called "AMD seems banned from Steam Machines project?" or whateverr like "It seems there will not be CPU/GPU competition on Steam Console"

"Dominate" really isn't appropriate word as there is no single machine with AMD hardware

According to latest survey 28.15% of AMD GPU users on Steam deserves to be informed properly . To me (as one of those users) this means that they do not care completely about neither AMD hardware, neither flgrx, neither radeon/amdgpu driver - it is simply banned completely while let say 99% of games works fine on those hardware/drivers .

[Figueiredo]

Ok, so AMD does not have a decent, consumer ready, OpenGL driver, but I doubt Vulkan would be an issue, considering it is derived from Mantle. Furthermore, wouldn't an AMD Vulkan driver be merely whaterver SPIR-V front-end Valve is developing stitched to the AMD LLVM backend?

[d2kx]

AMD will have a Vulkan driver ready later this year, but the horrible Catalyst OpenGL driver is a dealbreaker for most OEMs.

[Danny3]

So there's no way to support Valve without supporting the assholes from nvidia?
Iwill not buy anythig until they have free drivers

I have enough spyware in my Windows pc and Android phone

[BreezeDM]

Article should be called "AMD seems banned from Steam Machines project?"

I think of it as AMD fails to show up. Valve is creating the perfect market for them. AMD's hardware is perfect for this market, but they don't have the drivers yet. It is like Valve is throwing AMD a huge party and they didn't show up. I would love to build an APU Steam Machine and if they have their drivers in order by November, I will. AMD's driver strategy to make the open source ones better is great, but I am not hopeful.

[dungeon]

AMD will have a Vulkan driver ready later this year, but the horrible Catalyst OpenGL driver is a dealbreaker for most OEMs.

He, he, it is not like that.. It is more like if Radeon GPU equiped machines are there, then AMD will improve drivers - things does not work other way

As a long time linux user i must say Windows does not ban anyone like this

[edoantonioco]

I wonder if the performance of the radeon driver will be in the future as good as it has to be.

[jrch2k8]

mmm what bothers me isn't actually the lack of AMD gpu, since that i can understand since fglrx is not stable enough for mass consumer use and since they are based on debian probably is hard for them to upgrade mesa too and may not worth it because radeonsi still lack certain extensions for gl4+(just try to imagine all those average joe raging the latest AAA game don't run yet on amd hardware). I expect AMD to do very good in the second generation steam machines since probably mesa will have complete gl4 support and newer GPU will work with official upstream packages(remember amdgpu is out of tree for now).

Now what actually bothers me as hell is the fact i expect the first generation of steam machines to fail miserably, they are too expensive, there is no baseline hardware for developers to optimize and for christ sake 499$ for a freaking intel only GPU steam machine?????. I mean i respect you intel guys but intel gpu even on boradwell CPU are not powerful enough to run most games with a level of detail high enough to convince average joe to buy it instead of a PS4.

now for the second generation steam machines(once valve get the fact steam machines are a mess in this generation), i do expect AMD to smoke it since they can do all the hardware chain in house and if HBM prove to be as good as it sounds this year, we could see very interesting options for Zen+gcn2.0+hbm APU's as the default hardware baseline at an actually competitive cost with sony and microsoft consoles

[Deavir]

I am a huge AMD supporter, to balance Intel processors but also because of the free drivers. Saying that for a consumer product for driver quality and game developer support nvidia is where it is at right now. I wouldn't want to risk making steam machines fail based on a bad experience, this will be alot of peoples first linux computer I have faith that AMD will get there sooner then later and when steam machines really get popular they will have some great price points much like they won the consoles.