Nvidia Doubles Linux Driver Performance, Slips Steam Release Date

leppi writes "Nvidia has announced a huge increase in Linux gaming performance for their GeForce R310 drivers after almost a year of development alongside Valve and other game developer partners. Nvidia's announcement also indicated the Steam beta for Linux should be out today. Quoting: 'Available for download at www.geforce.com, the new R310 drivers were also thoroughly tested with Steam for Linux, the extension of Valve's phenomenally popular Steam gaming platform that officially opened to gamers starting today. ... Comparing 304.51 driver performance of 142.7 fps versus 310.14 driver performance of 301.4 fps in beta build of Left for Dead 2. All tests run on the same system using Intel Core i7-3930K CPU @ 3.20GHz with 8 GB memory, GeForce GTX 680 and Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit.'" Update: 11/06 21:00 GMT by S : Valve has gone ahead and announced the Steam for Linux Beta. They've sent invites to a number of people who filled out the application, and they'll be inviting more as the test goes along. The beta test is available for installation on Ubuntu 12.04, with support for other distros to come: "We intend to support additional popular distros in the future; we’ll prioritize development for these based on user feedback."

Comments

Yet another YOTLD estimate

[tepples]

Hardcore video games have traditionally been one of the sticking points against getting PC users to adopt GNU/Linux. But with big companies (Valve and NVIDIA) committed to bringing hardcore video games to the GNU/Linux platform, what else is in the way of making 2013 the year of the Linux desktop?

Re:Yet another YOTLD estimate

[goldspider]

ALSA.

Re:Yet another YOTLD estimate

[wzinc]

It's funny. MS is always touting you need Windows for "real" work, but the only reason I even keep a Windows box is games. I believe there are a lot of /. people out there who are the same way.

Re:Yet another YOTLD estimate

[kimvette]

what else is in the way of making 2013 the year of the Linux desktop?

• The ongoing trend of saying "RTFM" to every question when TFM is either nonexistent, is written in geek terms a non-sysadmin will never comprehend, or the documentation simply sucks balls.
• Regligious fanboyism of distro-vs-distro
• RPM Hell (. . . and RPM is one of the better package managers!!)
• Lack of a cohesive marketing effort; different projects and distros spend too much time competing and distinguishing themselves from one another rather than cooperating and distinguishing ALL of Linux from Windows as a legitimate alternative
• F/OSS vs. binary blob holy war: why does it have to be so difficult (from a user's perspective) to get an NVIDIA card working properly? (or to get an ATI/AMD card to work at all ;))
• lack of working management tools for SAMBA (editing config files and managing samba users via CLI is still the best way) not to mention crappy SAMBA documentation and howtos that are just plain wrong

--

--
Lack of support from third-party vendors and hardware makers (or inferior support where support does exist). I am back tor running Windows almost exclusively on my primary PC (my laptop) for:

    - RAW support for my DSLR (DCRAW is horrible compared to Lightroom or even Canon's DPP raw processing)
    - Adobe CS and photoshop plugins
    - my embroidery machine and embroidery software
    - My iPhone (like it or not, it's a great product but it's tied to iTunes)
    - Games (less work to configure than futzing around with WINE or Crossover or Cedega**)
    - CD/DVD publisher (Bravo SE) at the office
    - Brother label printer
    - SilverLight (Ick. see: Netflix)

  ** now discontinued(?) - which brings up another point: products/projects being abandoned/discontinued seemingly at random

Re:Yet another YOTLD estimate

[MrEricSir]

I think you misspelled "Pulse."

Re:Yet another YOTLD estimate

[Tough Love]

I'm glad that GNU/Linux works for you. It also works for me on my 10" laptop. But I'm sort of referring to manufacturers of desktop and laptop PCs sold in U.S. brick-and-mortar chains, which pretty much always come with Windows unless they're made by Apple.

I picked up a very current Ivy Bridge PC from Fry's a few weeks ago and after a couple of weeks experiencing and being horrified with what Windows users have to put up with on a daily basis (countless virus nags, disk drive constantly churning, crazy menues, endless reboots etc etc) I booted Ubuntu live off a usb key, it worked perfectly, did the full install and that worked perfectly too. Then apt-get install kubuntu-desktop to put the icing on the cake. Now my OS isn't in my face, it just works. And plus, I've got the thousands of trustworthy, free packages a minute's install away. Blessed relief.

It's just amazing how far Windows has fallen behind Linux.

Re:Yet another YOTLD estimate

[Tough Love]

That was true in the Windows 7 era. PCs that come with Windows 8, on the other hand, ship with UEFI secure boot turned on, and users may need to figure out how to disable secure boot first.

Microsoft will no doubt get dragged into court over that. Count on the EU if no one else. In the mean time if I have to boot to the bios to switch it off I will, and Linux vendors have various workarounds. Another alternative is to buy Linux pre-installed. Endpcnoise has some fine machines with Ubuntu preinstalled. Their discount for choosing LInux instead of Windows is quite attractive. I call this dying gasp time for Microsoft. They haven't hit the really steep part of the cliff yet, but they will and they know it.

Re:Yet another YOTLD estimate

[deek]

I hear ya. I responded with Debian to the distro question, which I was hopeful was close enough to Ubuntu that they'd sneak me in.

The funny thing is, according to the beta announcement, "An overwhelming majority of beta applicants have reported they’re running the Ubuntu distro of Linux". I have to wonder how many of those people are actually running other distributions and said Ubuntu, and how many didn't even bother signing up, because it was widely known that Valve were targeting Ubuntu for the beta.

Re:Yet another YOTLD estimate

[symbolset]

Traditional desktops and laptops sold in US brick-and-mortar chains don't make the manufacturer hardly anything. The Windows OEM operating margin into retail is below 5%. The retailers for the most part make about 2%, hoping to sell accessories and software - and marketing incentives from OEMs for shelf space who don't have the margin to improve these incentives. Its actually hard to not make more return on investment than this. Since this year Microsoft is taking away their brick-and-mortar retail software business with their Windows 8 App Store, they're left with accessories - which is not enough money to make the whole thing worthwhile. With good 30%+ margins on software they could keep that boat afloat but no more. There is no profit for the OEM or the retailer, or in the entire manufacturing chain, in a $300 Windows laptop - especially for the department store retailer who could put an earner product in that spot with lower product returns, like basketballs or pillows. The bulk of the profit dollars for that device go to UPS for delivering it when ordered online, or the shipping company who moved the parts around. There are just not enough folk left dumb enough to pay $50 for a 2m HDMI cable (and $20 more for the extended warranty!) to make this work financially for a retailer who must pay rent or mortgage, staff payroll and electric, and tax, to maintain the debt burden taken to get where they are now.

Since these stores are also suffering from the migration away from physical media based distribution of games and movies, look for more of them to fail or simply close the PC department. Frankly it's long overdue. PC focused stores have been closing for a long time: ex, Future Shop. I remember once long ago standing in front of a CompUSA one cold Thanksgiving morning. As I stared in wonder at its lifeless beauty another customer wandered up and joined me. We were there for a little while admiring the rich storefront with the lights out and I said to him in an awestruck voice: "They close." His reply: "Wow." They have other problems too - the unpleasant customer experience of staff trained to optimize the corporate bottom line to the detriment of the consumer who pays for it all is one.

The death of the desktop will come quickly now not because Linux or Apple killed it but because Microsoft sucked all of the oxygen, all of the profit, out of its environment. Microsoft is killing their golden goose. Even without this in an era of instant streaming delivery of bits, or next-day delivery of almost anything physical every brick and mortar was going to have trouble.

This is not the YOTLD. It is the YOTLPT - the Year Of The Linux Palm Top. We have gone mobile and 1.5 million people a day choose to put Linux-based Android in their pocket and compute at their convenience, wherever they happen to be, because they're humans and where they want to be is more important again than the needs of their IT gear now that some IT gear can do its bit wherever the humans happen to be. Half a billion people so far and growing at a half-billion a year, doubling every year - take their Linux-based Android palmtop computer with them everywhere they go - to work, on vacation, to bed, to school...

I'll make a technology prediction: cubicle farms are dead. As humans take back ownership of their content consumption and creation environments enabled by these fully mobile devices there is going to be a vast tranformation in office space throughout the world. You want to short whatever company it is that makes those cloth-covered office space divider units and buy calls in anybody who makes couches and coffee tables.

But back to the topic: Steam games was the last thing keeping my oldest son from dual-booting Linux. Now that Valve has gone there he's going to join me on the Linux side in a trial. If it works out he'll use the Windows side less and less until eventually I wean him off the crippled system his mother insisted we get for him. Our younger kids like Linux and And

What a Slip!

[Baloroth]

Nvidia's announcement also indicated the Steam beta for Linux should be out today

I think Valve's announcement kinda indicated that too.

Hear that, Microsoft?

[Type44Q]

That's the sound a one big motherfucking railroad spike being driven into your soft, worm-eaten coffin.

Music to my ears, baby! :)

10 % better than Windows

[G3ckoG33k]

10 % better than Windows if the numbers at

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/geforce-gtx-670_4.html

can be used straight away (which they possibly can to some extent as Left for Dead 2 probably isn't CPU bound) for GTX 680

Windows - 276 fps

Linux - 301.4 fps

Quite an improvement anyhow!

Congratulations to all involved!!!

How?

[Chemisor]

Can any driver developers comment on how this was achieved? I know I haven't been programming OpenGL for very long, but all I see it doing is writing the data to the card and running the shaders on that data. Data transfers should already be going at full speed, so I don't see much possible improvement there. I also can't see how shader compiler improvements could result in doubled performance. Typically, compiler changes speed things up by a few percent and I don't believe that nVidia's compiler was that bad before. So what was sped up exactly? And frankly, aside from compiling the shaders and memcpying data to the card, I'm puzzled what the driver is doing anyway?

Optimus?

[Yvanhoe]

Have they changed their stance on their Optimus feature that they infamously said "would never be supported under linux"? For those unaware of it, laptops now ship with 2 GPUs : a small one, low performance and low conso, usually an Intel one, and a high-end one, that is started when GPU intensive tasks are started. Optimus is the undocumented feature that allows to switch between these two.

It is not supported in the linux nVidia driver, it was said by nvidia official they would never support it and they didn't even give the OSS developers the little hints they need to make a workaround.

Unless this silliness (that made Linus call them many names) is solved, I am unlikely to buy any laptop with a nVidia board.