| mutantsushi said: Indeed Mantle should work fine, although not really any better than Windows. It needs to be remembered that Valve is NOT standardizing on AMD here, in fact the first Steam Machines were announced with NVIDIA collaboration... Both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs will be going in Steam Boxes, so no SteamOS games can be written solely for one GPU vendor, they will need to be compatable with both, cutting into optimization budgets. NVIDIA's G-Sync certainly looks to offer nice benefits, and so I see both vendors having a continued presence in this 'platform'. SteamOS certainly will have lower overhead than Windows, although I'm not sure why it really would compared to at least PS4's OS, if things like Vent are to be available, as well as on-line manuals, browser-based match making forums and leaderboards, etc, SteamOS will need roughly the same heft as PS4 with PS4 in fact able to shed more extraneous OS cruft since SteamOS will otherwise be standards compatable Linux with OpenGL etc. |
Mantle isn't an Operating System, it's a low-level API, similar to what is found on the consoles, it will work on Windows or Linux, it's
Basically up to the community/developers to simply port it over.
Thus you still have drivers to interface with that API, nVidia and AMD have very similar feature sets in order to interface to it. (This is actually how it's done on consoles to, they also have drivers to interface with the Low-level and High-level API's)
That's despite how nVidia and AMD take different approaches to implement such features like Tessellation.
And because the API is open, any hardware company can support it, including a mobile phone running Android.
AMD and nVidia spend untold thousands of man-hours and billions of dollars developing their drivers for maximum performance, they actually have more lines of code than the Windows NT Kernel.
Thus from a developer perspective, regardless if you have an AMD card, nVidia card or even an Intel Decelerator, they're all the same.
They can simply assume all graphics processors will support the same functionality.
Of course, developing to the metal will still provide you with more performance, but even in console-land such things are a rarity, most games use 3rd party game engines like Gamebryo, Unreal, CryEngine, variations of Quake engine, Source Engine etc that interfaces with the low level or High-Level API, it's really only the exclusive big production games such as Halo 4 that are done to the metal.
Basically in the end, it will bring PC's to console-like levels of efficiency for the first time since the 3dfx days when Glide reigned supreme.
| mutantsushi said: If things like Vent are to be available, as well as on-line manuals, browser-based match making forums and leaderboards, etc |
Well. Steam has most of the functionality that the console OS's do right now and even one's they don't have like Forums, Workshop (User created content), sharing of digital games etc'.
Leaderboards and Match Making are fine as they are now IMHO.
Also, who can complain about cheaper games? Automagical updates for your entire game library? Larger selection of games? Games with Better graphics and higher framerates? And of course a massive community of 65 Million+ active users, that is growing massively every single year.
I wouldn't be surprised if by the end of this console generation that Steam had more active gamers than either console platform.
With that, there is a Steam sale. It's time to leave mothballs in my bank accounts.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
