Can Linux Succeed As A First-Rate Gaming Platform?

[NoAsylum]

This topic is completely irrelevant. Linuxes success in gaming has nothing to do with the operating system itself. It all depends on the games, software and support it receives from OUTSIDE sources. A Texas Instruments calculator circa 1998 can be a kickass gaming machine if the right software is created for it.

[russofris]

Is Linux a good gaming platform? Hell no, and anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. Can it be? Well, if Android can do it then why not Linux?

You are confusing "Linux" with "Ubuntu/Fedora/Mint/Distributions", just as many people confuse "Darwin" with "MacOSX".

Re: Graphics drivers: The mesa portions of Intel seem to be coming along well and should serve as the reference implementation which the Radeon and Nouveau DRM/Mesa drivers can leverage to improve themselves. Radeon seems to have a lot of momentum at the moment. For a gaming platform, it is also important that output to a LFD (television) work reliably, which includes things like Over/Underscan, LPCM via HDMI, Bitstreaming over HDMI, etc.

Re: Better hardware support/setup: You need to elaborate on this a bit. Since you've covered GPUs already, I have to assume that you're talking about gaming peripherals. In a perfect world, what are your expectations? I assume it is something like, "Plug in 4 DPad controllers and everything is ready to go". How do the current implementations (kernel/HID/UDEV/SDL) differ from your expectations?

Re: Lack of standards between Distros: I'm not convinced that this matters, as I do not envision any current desktop/mobile distro being the technology that drives mass acceptance of gaming on linux. Even if I'm wrong, how does the kernel/DRM/mesa/X11/SDL stack differ between FC and Ubuntu?

Re: Backwards compatibility: I assure you that this is less important than making forward progress. We need to make the ecosystem more enticing to developers. Publishers could care less if all of their old releases ran on Linux, as there's no money in it for them. Publishers would care a bit more if they knew that anyone with a PC was now a click away from being a potential customer.

Re: Stability - and the Mint example: Again I believe that this is where our views diverge. The current crop of desktop distributions are complex multi-function beasts. Anyone running Gentoo that has attempted to reach feature-parity with Ubu/FC can attest to this. I'm more interested in 'Linux'. Kernel/DRM/MESA/X11/SDL/OPENAL coupled with an XBMC-esque interface. Simplify, standardize, and give attention to the components that really matter for gaming, and stop trying to shoe-horn another unusable tool on to a swiss-army-knife.


Look at what Sony did with Darwin on the PS3. Imagine if the Darwin kernel were replaced with the linux kernel. Imagine that the PS3 is an x86 PC instead of a CellBE. All Ubuntu would have to do is host a VM/Hypervisor with PCI-passthrough to the GPU and it's endgame.

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[Hamish Wilson]

The problem is just that there are no games released ( i say released because many games internally have completely working linux versions , just never released ), i have no idea what is the problem with releasing a game for linux when you have PS3 version ( Playstation 3 uses opengl ), you have just to write 300-400 lines of code to init SDL+ opengl, sound and get input working and it's done.

While I do agree that porting to Linux is actually not that much of a hassle, the PS3 does not use OpenGL.

Linux is completely useable as a gaming platform. and with native games it will work much better than windows because the scheduler and I/O management is a lot better. You can already see that a game under wine usually takes half of the time to load compared to it running under windows, the slowness of rendering it's not as many think because of wine , but because the game isn't optimized to be used indirectly with opengl driver, the fact that first native port of L4D2 was running at less than 20 fps says it all.

Yes.

What's needed is just cooperation of hw vendors with opensource drivers developers ( especially from ATI that despite the fact it provides "documentation" , their opensource drivers are more crappy than nouveau that is done with no doc at all ), and between opensource drivers developers and game developers

Now this is horseshit. Nouveau has done some impressive work, but it comes nowhere close to the free radeon driver when it comes to stability and the number of cards supported. And as someone who is actively using it for gaming, the free R600 Gallium 3D drivers have been doing me fine. Moore cooperation would be good, but I think you are giving AMD an unfair slight of hand.

[D0pamine]

Yeah you really have to define what's meant by "gaming platform". If you mean Android then of course the answer is yes. If you mean a console of sorts where a big name like Valve is driving it, then certainly.

But if you're talking about desktop Linux, then just stop, put down the crack pipe and face reality. There are *no* usable, good desktop environments even out there, so why would anyone move to desktop Linux, even if there are games? You would need to get a big name out there (Google?) to come up with a DE that isn't a huge steaming pile of shit before you can even make it an attractive proposition.

JMO of course.

mate is a good desktop as is lxde ( i dont care too much for xfce but thats just me )

[Linuxxx]

Well, problem is just that there are no games released ( i say released because many games internally have completely working linux versions , just never released ), i have no idea what is the problem with releasing a game for linux when you have PS3 version ( Playstation 3 uses opengl ), you have just to write 300-400 lines of code to init SDL+ opengl, sound and get input working and it's done.

Prepare to get crushed by elanthis...

[finalzone]

Sega Lindberg arcade board featuring Virtua Fighter 5 series.

[curaga]

The problem is just that there are no games released ( i say released because many games internally have completely working linux versions , just never released ), i have no idea what is the problem with releasing a game for linux when you have PS3 version ( Playstation 3 uses opengl ), you have just to write 300-400 lines of code to init SDL+ opengl, sound and get input working and it's done.

Lol, elanthis is going to have a heart attack reading this forum

[tizbac]

While I do agree that porting to Linux is actually not that much of a hassle, the PS3 does not use OpenGL.



Yes.



Now this is horseshit. Nouveau has done some impressive work, but it comes nowhere close to the free radeon driver when it comes to stability and the number of cards supported. And as someone who is actively using it for gaming, the free R600 Gallium 3D drivers have been doing me fine. Moore cooperation would be good, but I think you are giving AMD an unfair slight of hand.

Playstation 3 has opengl implementation , but some developers prefer accessing directly the GPU, anyway there's still the fact that most if not all game engines do have Opengl renderer.

In my personal experience nouveau works much better than ATI opensource drivers , don't be fooled by the statusmatrix , they report features as incomplete even if only a tiny bit is missing that you probably will never use, with ATI i had (1 year ago or so ) texturing problems ( serious ones , like misplaced textures ) , overheating and crashes, and that on multiple cards, mobile and not.

[D0pamine]

Playstation 3 has opengl implementation , but some developers prefer accessing directly the GPU, anyway there's still the fact that most if not all game engines do have Opengl renderer.

In my personal experience nouveau works much better than ATI opensource drivers , don't be fooled by the statusmatrix , they report features as incomplete even if only a tiny bit is missing that you probably will never use, with ATI i had (1 year ago or so ) texturing problems ( serious ones , like misplaced textures ) , overheating and crashes, and that on multiple cards, mobile and not.

don't be fooled by posts on forums either radeon > nouveau by a long way

/me bangs the desk and chants benchmark over and over

[russofris]

Lol, elanthis is going to have a heart attack reading this forum

Understand that the porting work involved is nowhere near as easy as Tiz indicates, nor is it as insurmountable as Ela makes it sound. Valve's recent work on L4D2 serves as an incomplete but applicable example. It's not really that important though.

While porting is a valuable exercise, we (the community) should probably be less focused on porting older games and more focused on creating/polishing the "linux for gaming" platform and SDKs to attract developers in order to ensure that future games get published for the platform.

Legacy console titles are likely better supported via emulation, as the completion of a good console emulator is far less demanding than porting the console's entire catalog.

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