The Steam on Linux experience

i usually only use the controller for big picture mode on my tv+surround when in windows, but i prefer to play serious sam 3 all times with the controller, even on my desk
i just wish'd they would fix the big picture mode, amd or valve whoever is responsible for the poor performance, and add surround sound to the source engine in linux.

i tested it with the same settings in windows and linux, and linux has way more poor performance, thanks to the amd drivers. 13.2beta7

 

im still on 13.1 drivers, is a controller not really slow for serious sam? i prefer the speed of the mouse. and don't really use big picture i did try it back in the beta but dont like the interface its too xbox 360 dash-like.

although think its worth keeping in mind, it is just out of beta, and it took steam a while to get fluid when it first popped up on windows it was woeful. i'll avoid the 13.2 betas after your comment there lol.

currently setting up a sabayon 11 install so may try it out on a fresh setup.

 

the funny thing is, i couldnt launch team fortress 2 with the standart 13.1 driver, thats why i installed the latest beta, and there it works,
eventhough i dont really like that game.

idont really think the controller is slow in serious sam, maybe it's because i was used to PS3/Console gaming for too long . i need to get back into mouse+keyboard gaming,
eventhough i have my "new" pc since 6 months but mostly used ubuntu on it so i didnt had much to play just recently a few games.

actually, i like the big picture mode on tv really. but currently on linux it's not really usable, because it slows the games performance down when a game is running via big picture.
the overlay is VERY slow, but so is the hole thing. it makes pc-gaming on tv really cool, nearly console like, but with the better visuals of a pc.
i think the should have spend a little more time in beta, some stuff is just not fully working/bugged. i rember the very first days of steam, different client installer for every game lol,
but the client itself not much, i still remember back then you could use your cd-key multiple times :X give it out to friends etc....

sabayon? isnt that the arch based "beginner" distro? i use ubuntu on everything(13.04-dev on desktop)! easy to install, easy to use .
ubuntu rules them all ........well atleast for me lol, dont like to tinker too much lately.

 

i like to try different distros as and when i like the look of something, sabayon is Gentoo based, tried it the last time a few years back when it was still using Gnome 2 , i did have an arch setup on my laptop for a while, i liked it,

just decided to try this on wednesday night, main system i use is kubuntu 12.10 with liquorix kernel 3.7.

im not a fan of unity or gnome 3 i did try them but just not for me, i was using a unity based ubuntu distro called OZ unity BlackOpel for a while too. with some tweaks unity is usable but still not confortable so i've went KDE and XFCE mostly now.

main gripe with steam on linux is... more games are needed.

 

NVIDIA might run better on Linux as it has a full development team (it's a community thing though, not officiall)

Also check which drivers you're running. The Open Source drivers might run better but are hardly power efficient

 

Yeah, Unity is horrible imo and GNOME 3 isn't much better. I think the G3 DE team are scrambling to fix what the founder supposedly fucked up (and is now promptly moving to using Apple hardware and OSX)

 

just logged into my original steam account from way back when i was first playing Half life and CS, lol not used it in years

SS:
steam running on Sabayon 11 KDE 64bit my old account: - but yeah it wont let me use big picture mode on the 13.1 drivers but im not going to update as i dont use it anyway

 

I guess you mixed something up here.

NVIDIA has offical drivers for linux (Example: http://www.nvidia.de/object/linux-display-amd64-310.40-driver-de.html ). These drivers are great and on par with the windows counterpart, they even seem to offer more control and deeper system integration. As those drivers are closed source, which is a bit against the linux roots, there is an open-source driver project called nouveau. nouveau however, is anywhere near completion and won't really work for anything but simple games or rendering the desktop with some effects.
Note though, that closed and open-source projects are independent.

I haven't had an ATI card in years - so now I might understood something wrong below:
ATI also has offical drivers (Catalyst / fglrx), but they are extremly poor quality (like most AMD / ATI Software except for maybe RenderMonkey which is still my fav. dev tool today). That driver seems to be partly open-source.
These drivers are somewhat better than the NVIDIA-counterpart nouveau, but they are still worse (a lot worse[!]) than the closed source NVIDIA drivers.

PS: Steam still hasn't improved for me one bit on linux since last time I commented

 

i'm running 13.2beta7 as i stated earlier somewhere. it' just that amd's linux driver sucks major ass, and nvidias is MUCH better.
but amd's gpus are much cheaper :/....

amd's driver is not open source but they seem to publish some hardware specs from time to time for the open source driver team.
i believe they had a few people working on the open source driver, but they had to fire them(or only a few) some months ago due to financial stuff. so i dont think they have the financial power to invest more money in the linux driver to make huge steps in terms of performance, which is sad, as their gpus are really cheap compared to nvidia. but still, i think my next gpu will be a nvidia because that amd driver just pisses me off.

 

I think 90% of my problems comes from ATI cards, which I have in both my laptop (IGP) and desktop. I had a much better run with my previous nVidia card but then again when I moved out to ATI nVidia was doing like shit, and the many problems Fermi had only reinforced that decision.

Man I was wrong, I'm getting BSODs thanks to AMD! in fucking win7 the most stable windows of all! and all thanks to their POS graphic drivers. All the errors in the crash log are graphics-related.

Anyway, right now I'm waiting to haswell before changing my laptop since for semi-pro computing and gaming on linux I have friends who are doing fine with the HD4000 mostly thanks to all the support they get from intel, and the GT3 variant is at least 2x as powerful. Besides battery life is a major concern and even the crappiest ultrabooks are getting 6 hours +/-

I might get a new nvidia GPU for my desktop since the rig itself is relatively new.

About steam a friend says valve is probably directing more resources to the steambox itself since its easier to work with even a limited poor of hw combinations than supporting all the hw combinations there is out there.

That Piston steambox is in pre-order BTW, but at $999 its not what I was expecting, not at all.

 

that sucks with your BSODs i've never had any which were GFX card related and i've been using ATI cards since the Radeon 9000(which replaced my week old nvidia 5200 that sucked major ass)

maybe its a power issue or you've just been unlucky and got faulty cards but i agree although amd have made improvments on their linux drivers, they are not up to par with windows drivers yet.

im not sure if i'll move to nvidia as i've not had great experience with them.

will wait and see how things are when i build my next gaming rig.

 

I had nothing but trouble in windows and linux with all the ATI cards I've ever owned, now i've got nvidia cards across the board (GT 520 mx - laptop - GTX 680 - Desktop) nether of them have skipped a beat or caused any trouble. But that's just my personal experience.

 

my brother is running a gtx 660ti on windows and linux and its running pretty good, it even has a 5.1 surround config to choose in the sound panel in linux(for hdmi), which amd somehow cant do...........which is kinda stupid as i like playing on my tv with my surround system.
right now i'm thinking about a gtx 660-oc.

 

my AMD HD5830 on linux outputs sound :-| and is selectable via the sound options / pannel, although i use the motherboards sound for my 5.1 system as i dont use the HDMI

 

yeah but you cant change it to 5.1/7.1, only on windows. the nvidia driver lets you change it to atleast 5.1 on linux.
the only way you get 5.1/7.1 on linux via amd is, if you bitstream movies via dolby/dts.

 

hmm never bothered checking as i've no HDMI inputs going to 5.1 output

 

i'm not even sure if any games support 5.1 surround on linux actually, lol, i could never try it out because of the stupid amd drivers.

edit: as far as i know, valve dosent want to add 5.1 support to their linux games right now, according to their github. hl2 in surround was fun.

 

Serious Sam 3 does, i know that, but im not sure about valves first party games

just fired up steam and now has Day of Defeat: Source and HL 2 Deathmatch listed as BETA so looks like they're still actively porting games

 

well yes there are still many games coming, so they're still working on the source engine it seems.

would be just nice if they would add more speaker configurations to the linux version later down the road like on windows. dont know about the mac-os-x version of the source engine games, if they have 5.1/7.1 speaker configurations in game settings menu ?.

 

For what it's worth, I've had good performance in all valve games so far. Killing Floor seems to be the one that needs more optimizing. Running a 7950, and the biggest issue is fullscreen flash video being choppy.

I seem to spend more time running steam through wine to play Ys II though.