Hardware Expectations For Valve's Steam Box

[schmidtbag]

There aren't many options.

#1 Intel/Nvidia combo. This is probably the best solution for a Linux setup, but is also very expensive. If the Steam box is to be successful it must be cheap.

#2 All Intel setup. Intel has good support for Linux, and they have a CPU+GPU combo, it's just that their GPU isn't as good as Nvidia's. It would make the setup cheap enough, but not powerful enough.

#3 All AMD setup. The CPU performance is going to be fine, but driver support for AMD graphics have always been behind. Though lately Open source drivers haven't been bad, but don't compare to Nvidia's drivers.

I'm sure if Valve picks AMD then they'll go for a series that's well supported. It seems to me the HD5000 series encounters the least problems and performs the best of all AMD GPUs on the radeon, radeonSI, and catalyst drivers. I personally own a HD5750 and I never encounter the problems people gripe about with the catalyst drivers. The only thing that doesn't seem to work great is vsync, but X in general has bad vsync problems.

[Vim_User]

So you didn't notice anything? Ok, let's put it this way:

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/03/...in-tomb-raider

I just got the game and are happy to have inferior AMD hardware :P

So you just hopped from a discussion about Linux drivers to your hardware working on Windows? Wow, great job. Guess what, Tomb Raider works just fine on Windows for me too, but my point was neither aimed at Windows nor at hardware.

[alexThunder]

So you just hopped from a discussion about Linux drivers to your hardware working on Windows? Wow, great job. Guess what, Tomb Raider works just fine on Windows for me too, but my point was neither aimed at Windows nor at hardware.

Wow, great job. You just ignored most of my post(s).

[GreatEmerald]

What about the rest of the hardware? Like the sound chip (I guess Intel Azalia...), or the Ethernet chip, or the power supply?

[Vim_User]

Wow, great job. You just ignored most of my post(s).

Just because they are pointless. I never had one problem with Nvidia drivers under Linux, with AMD I have, so what? It is in the Linux community a well known fact that the Nvidia drivers simply have a better quality, so your arguing doesn't bring anything.
I hope that Valve will do as always and rather go for quality, so that they choose Nvidia because of better drivers. Just look at the still not solved bugs in the AMD drivers, reported a long time ago and even in the beta phase of drivers (seems nobody told AMD developers that beta phases are meant to fix bugs). This is something that can't be tolerated on a console, so actually in my eyes AMD is a no-go for a Linux based console, unless they change their behavior in that matter.

[alexThunder]

Just because they are pointless. I never had one problem with Nvidia drivers under Linux, with AMD I have, so what? It is in the Linux community a well known fact that the Nvidia drivers simply have a better quality, so your arguing doesn't bring anything.

Do you generally ignore everything not fitting to your point of view? We just had that and now you start again from the beginning. I can only suggest you dare to read and least try to understand what other people are saying. I know, it's hard, but you might still be able to.

I hope that Valve will do as always and rather go for quality, so that they choose Nvidia because of better drivers. Just look at the still not solved bugs in the AMD drivers, reported a long time ago and even in the beta phase of drivers (seems nobody told AMD developers that beta phases are meant to fix bugs). This is something that can't be tolerated on a console, so actually in my eyes AMD is a no-go for a Linux based console, unless they change their behavior in that matter.

Yeah sure. You know, simply not having a public bugtracker doesn't make your software bug-free.

However, just keep on posting how you want the world to be and then continue wondering, how companies can be so silly not to do what you think is right. Maybe one day you'll find out that you're not as smart as you expected ;P

[nightmarex]

Intel APUs rock the world with opensource driver!
If I were Valve, I would definetily go Intel, no exceptions!

Have you seen the price of intel graphics? Chromebook pixel is insanely priced for it's graphical prowess. AMD eats Intel with integrated graphics.

*Side note Intel WTF are you going to release a discrete card so Linux users have an out?

Honestly, kinda hoping for an AMD APU setup, for two reason:

1) APU's use unified memroy, and it could be GDDR5 (fast!) like PS4 both for graphics and physics, etc. The potential of 6+ Gb for textures is a very real possibility with that setup, and gives developers a lot of freedom. There's also a lot of fine-tuned optimizations games can make use of there, like direct register passing from the CPUs to the GPU, and vise-versa (great for OpenCL-style GPU calculations).

2) I've been using Catalyst on Linux for over a year now, and while Nvidia generally seems to be better supported and doesn't have as many quirks, my 7850 runs things about as fast as my Windows boot. In full-screen (undirected) mode, there's virtually not difference between Catalyst on Windows and Linux (all the quirks are Mutter or Compiz specific it seems). Moreover, having AMD on SteamBox would give them a much needed commercial incentive to maintain better drivers for Linux in general.

It also needs to be said that SteamBox should attempt to be competitive with PS4 and Xbox Next in terms of hardware and price. Both PS4 & Xbox Next are rumored to include extra (ARM based) "systems chip" for on-the-fly video encoding/decoding and running the internal OS. I think SteamBox will most likely not have those bits to keep the price competitive (since Sony and Microsoft will surely subsidize their products).

*sigh Kavari is still MIA but sure can't wait!

[Kristian Joensen]

I think he was refering to the state of AMD's Linux drivers, AMD's hardware is without doubt amongst the best, but yeah their drivers on Linux aren't great. On Windows they in my experience work just as well as nVidia's drivers.

That is an experience I don't share, that is for sure!

[sofar]

If it only was about the driver (quality), I'm with you, but I'm afraid they won't be able to compete with PS4 and the next XBox then. Intel GPUs still ain't too powerful and they still didn't reach OpenGL 4.x.

Somewhat less relevant than ITS A LINUX GAMING BOX. If it sports full open source drivers, a lot of people will in the end reap the benefits of it. If it has closed source drivers, forget about actually being able to tinker with it.

[sofar]

*Side note Intel WTF are you going to release a discrete card so Linux users have an out?

Probably will never happen. It's much more efficient to keep the GPU close, and, why would you? Do you want to buy an AMD system and put in an Intel GPU? 8^)

Also, as Linux user, with an IVB you can play almost all the steam titles at reasonable (1600x900+) resolutions... With Haswell this should perform even better. Are you excited yet?