Valve launched its Steam Machine, which certainly got the videogames sphere talking. One point of contention was, unsurprisingly, its price, with enthusiasts coming up with builds of a similar performance to price ratio. The company even outright said in its own FAQ that you can build your own PC with SteamOS 3.8 with your own hardware. Which all sounds great, until you learn that rigs with NVIDIA GeForce graphics can have compatibility issues with Linux distributions in general, of which SteamOS is. To that end, Valve says that it is working closely with NVIDIA to eventually support drivers for GPUs made by the latter.
The Verge cites Valve coder Pierre-Loup Griffais as saying that the company has been “rolling out improvements to [SteamOS] so it’s more compatible with desktop hardware”. Naturally, part of this is eventually supporting NVIDIA graphics, and to that end, the company behind the Half-Life series said it has ”a growing team” that’s “collaborating with NVIDIA very closely”. That being said, the report notes that it “might not come this year”, and the report does not mention a window of when it might happen instead.
The NVIDIA On Linux Rabbit Hole
For context as to why this is important at all, especially for us Windows users, Intel and AMD graphics drivers for Linux are basically open source via Mesa. NVIDIA though keeps things proprietary, much like every company does for Windows, and the consensus looks to be that these don’t work very well for gaming. With Valve working closely with the graphics company, it is looking to have things working smoothly on SteamOS, now that it has said that SteamOS 3.8 can be run on user-built rigs.
To be fair, SteamOS started being pretty limited to AMD hardware, and that makes sense as that’s what the Steam Deck uses. So while things are not exactly smooth-sailing for Intel hardware either, from what the Valve coder says, as well as the SteamOS 3.8 changelog, it’s coming further along than the green graphics brand.
