News Valve announces SteamOS

Valve has revealed SteamOS, a Linux-based operating system to help it conquer the living room.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2013/09/24/valve-announces-steamos/1

 

Seems like Bit Tech operates on its own version of 'Valve Time'.

It's only taken you 16hrs or so to report it....

 

but do state that it will available "soon".

Should be here in a few years then ... speaking of which, WHERE IS HALF LIFE 3

 

The Gabe has spoken. All hail The Gabe.

 

Steam works just fine on Windows 8, as does everything else I did on 7. No idea what people are talking about here.

 

Well this could be a move that sees Steam PC's, Phones, Tablets and TV's and offer one unified open source OS - Hope it's all going to be 64bit too.

With the exception of console ports - the disruptive entry into the OS market may cause a headache for developers though, especially the ones that only cater for directx systems?

Interesting to see how this progresses and how others react - Microsoft need to be nimble here, before they become the next big firm to follow Blackberry in the consumer market.

 

The reason people say its a closed system is because afaik it is, if you can download modern UI software from somewhere else other than Microsoft please feel free to enlighten people.

At present you can still run software not designed with the modern UI in mind if you don't mind being dropped back to the desktop. But i think everyone can see the direction Microsoft is heading with its app store.

 

So are they using DirectX? will there be special SteamOS drivers for DirectX/PhysX etc?

 

The main problem with Windows 8, much like all products of MS, is it's very anticompetitive. In this case, Steam. Maybe not deliberately, I'm not sure, but Windows 8 having it's own "app store" and gaming section drives attention away from steam and there's very little Valve can do about it.

You could argue Apple did the same thing, but the difference there is Apple had an app store long before steam was ported to Mac, and Apple's app store had very few good games up until around the same time Steam came along for mac.

 

No, they're using OpenGL in ported games. I think PhysX is supported under Linux.

 

I'm not sure if linux supports GPU physx (it does support CPU physx).

The strange thing is linux has CUDA support, and GPU PhysX is basically just a variant of CUDA for a specific purpose.

 

I'm not certain if PhysX is GPU accelerated either - but if not, it's surely going to be added before SteamOS comes out.

 

DirectX / Direct3D is Microsoft's proprietary API, so cant be used by other people without their permission.

Apparently NVidia are working on GPU Physx.

Valve has been working with NVidia on improving their drivers, so i think its a safe bet to say this may include the GPU Physx used on SOS.

 

I would rather they just concentrate on HL3 as they don't need their own OS to be honest. Couldn't think of a bigger waste of time and effort for no one to use it.

 

Maybe you aren't going to use it, but myself and others hope that this will be the ideal OS for an HTPC. Right now I have XBMC installed on a Win7 machine and launch Steam Big Picture mode when I want to game.

I would rather launch XBMC via SteamOS, or better yet, have SteamOS include my movie and music library itself so that I'm not launching another program at all.

 

In case any of you haven't realized already, this OS is eventually going to be intended for the Steam console. I'm guessing this OS is just a way of "beta-testing" to kink out the bugs before the console is actually released. That way, when the console is officially released, it won't be too buggy.

As for GPU physx for linux, supposing it doesn't already exist, I personally don't expect it will come any time soon. While nvidia has the best GPU drivers for linux, it wouldn't surprise me if Valve doesn't use them for their own console due to price and nvidia's tendencies to not "play nice with others". Right around the time Valve officially announced linux support for Steam, AMD has suddenly been pulling themselves together with open source drivers.

 

The world's first freely available gaming optimised OS... Sure it's linux but if Valve have optimised it then that's not a bad thing. I just wonder how many years before we see Battlefield on steam linux.... Linux has a poor track record for AAA title gaming so gabe has quite a task ahead turning it around.

 

AMD has put a lot of effort in very recently. I think it may be because they realise manufacturers will want to launch APU based small PCs with SteamOS. When Steam for Linux for entered beta, nvidia made quite a lot of driver changes. As things stand the AMD drivers aren't good enough -- that obviously would change before the Steambox is launched whether it has an AMD GPU or not.

 

Because there's been no real demand for it. Valve has just create a massive market.