They’ve focused on ”improving driver performance” with OpenGL and tweaking GPUs. Nvidia has also helped ”port” Steam’s Library, and deliver ”lower latency” for SteamOS.
The graphics company is most excited over the fact SteamOS is being given away freely to everyone, so there’s no financial barrier to getting into it and tinkering around.
”SteamOS is built around the already familiar Steam and is a version of Linux. But it’s enhanced for gaming — and for gaming on the big screen in particular. Combined with the fact they’re giving it away to users, and hardware providers, for free, SteamOS has the potential to usher in a new era for gaming in the living room,” blogged Nvidia.
”This means that anyone can build hardware and software for use in the living room, on an operating system designed to be lightweight, extensible and optimized for gaming. Suffice to say, we here at NVIDIA are very excited!”
It’s here they also reveal a close working relationship with Valve: ”Engineers from Valve and NVIDIA have spent a lot of time collaborating on a common goal for SteamOS: to deliver an open-platform gaming experience with superior performance and uncompromising visuals directly on the big screen,” they said.
”NVIDIA engineers embedded at Valve collaborated on improving driver performance for OpenGL; optimizing performance on NVIDIA GPUs; and helping to port Valve’s award-winning content library to SteamOS; and tuning SteamOS to lower latency, or lag, between the controller and onscreen action.”
Getting that latency as low as possible is crucial to the success of SteamOS and the Steam Machines as the in-house streaming is what will really ‘sell’ the idea to PC gamers, particularly as so few titles are Linux native. Valve announced a hardware beta test for a select few who complete an Eligibility Quest on Steam.
