Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
To emphasize this point, Unreal 4 (which is available in some capacity as source code, apparently) will compile on POWER, so someone did that and you can actually play unreal tournament natively there.
Apparently the performance there is from an old AMD graphics driver (and POWER8 not 9 cpu/board), so the frame-rate isn't terribly overwhelming but those drivers and chips/boards are all better now, and because POWER is used in ML you can get proprietary drivers for NVIDIA cards that are quite performant, just like you can with other mainstream linuxes.
There is more then just porting it involved. You also have to support it. Many studios probably have never dealth with linux before so its not surprising why they focus on windows.
This does raise a good question though: for those of us playing major titles on steam-linux, how is that happening? What is it about some games that causes them to remain windows only (or, bizarrely but specifically in the case of a few I can thin of, windows and mac but not linux)? Do some gaming companies sell steam some kind of limited access to the source for their game so that steam can compile linux binaries?
It's important to remember for this that the trends for PC OS uptake are reversed for servers, like those that companies are starting to focus on streaming from. Almost all servers are linux (in the same sense that 'almost all' pcs are windows). Many that provide windows specific services are virtualizing them cross-os, which isn't as good for performance but may not matter if the server is being used to virtualize something that doesn't have hefty performance requirements (I believe virtualization is particularly hard on graphics performance...). So that's a factor that potentially has implications for who's targeting which architectures for binary builds.
Steam doesn't compile or have anything to do with it. It is the decision of the Developer of the game.
Hence why this suggestion is useless. This is a suggestion forum for STEAM.
I think steams client being ported to Linux has every thing to do with why the game developers have begun making Linux compatible binaries. It created a market for them. We are elements in that market. So in some sense what this community says it wants is very important. Is there a bigger market for pc games than steam? If steam made a POWER port of their client that would be a big step toward creating the market for POWER ports of games.
I’m not trying to be objectionable I’m just saying it’s not useless to ask game designers to do something through the community and marketplace they rely on most. Individually we must follow their choices. Collectively they must track our aggregate whims.
Right? Those processors all have either quad or octa-channel ram. And PCIE 4.0 since 2017. The per core specs are pretty impressive. Phoronix has some BMs of raptor machines, if you google around. It appears that some bench applications have been tuned to x86 to a degree where they just do better there, but improving compiler support for the POWER ISA seems to be telling a compelling story in the more normal case.
Game designers do not read this forum and will never see this. This forum is for enhancements to the STEAM client.
Game devs just aren't going to do speculative ports to other architectures for a market which doesn't exist. Especially given that while x86 and ARM are super-common so most third-party libraries and middleware will already have support, they're not going to have out-of-the-box support for other ISAs, which makes porting games to other architectures even less likely.
My suggestion is to port the STEAM client to POWER.
It is not sufficient to ensure that a market for games ported to this isa will emerge, but it seems like the necessary first step.
And I doubt Valve is going to make a store on the idea a market might exist someday. There's costs with developing and maintaining a separate client, especially when there's virtually no market to support it...
But if it's going to happen, it'll happen organically in its own time.
with little endian and 4k page kernel, it probably would work fine if it was just compiled for it.
By the way all three of the proprietary console manufacturers previously used POWER architecture but now two use x64 and one uses ARM64.
I mean "just do this" is easy to say, but that's also a good way to gloss all the details. If it's so easy and trivial to just recompile code to some other platform one wonders why every program doesn't do that already? All developers are clueless about how easy it is? Across the entire industry?
So for example, lots of programs use a number of libraries, so not every line of code is written in house. And if that library doesn't exist on POWER9? So you have to use something else or write your own, and then modify the POWER9 code base to use that alternate code. Now it's not just a matter of just recompiling but all sort of other work too.
Or even if you write every line of code yourself, does any of your code use platform specific features? Is the compiler going to magically going to figure that out for POWER9? There's going to be a lot more work than changing the target platform to a different architecture and hitting compile.
You also end up having to test that POWER9 client separately because at some point even if "it's almost the same", that is just another way to say it's different. And you ought to test different programs accordingly.
The details snowball where it goes from being an easy throwaway sentence written by a user, to real, labor intensive work that's not worth doing in some cases.
Again, if it's trivial, why haven't people been compiling all their code to a dozen different platforms with a touch of a button? If it were that easy, developers would love doing it. Write one set of code and get several programs out of it, I'm giddy just thinking about how nice that would be.... if it were realistic.