Valve Has A Christmas Present For Linux Gamers

Written by Michael Larabel in Valve on 13 December 2012 at 09:14 AM EST. 29 Comments
VALVE
Valve will allow many more Linux gamers to participate in the Steam Linux client beta testing at the start of next week.

At the beginning of this month, Valve greatly expanded their closed Linux beta program to include many more gamers to help test their Steam Linux client and their Source Engine games running natively on Linux. So far those results have been quite positive and they have collected a lot of valuable feedback. (Note: For those who play Team Fortress 2, Valve recently released an update to the game that dramatically improves the performance when using AMD Radeon hardware with the Catalyst driver.)

Valve is becoming quite comfortable with the state of their Linux activities so beginning next week will be a more "open" beta program. If you're a Linux gamer who wasn't yet selected to be part of the beta program, you should be able to gain access in time for the holidays. Help them test out their Linux ports to ensure the Valve Linux-based game console will be a great success.

With the more open beta program, Valve has also now allowed me to publish Source Engine Linux game benchmarks. There's been a few problematic points so far, but expect those performance results soon for a variety of graphics cards and drivers.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week