Yeah, slightly tangential I know, as you were limiting the discussion to 'PC gaming' But I guess I was calling you out on that, as, once you start looking at the mobile market you realise that Linux is one of the largest, most important gaming platforms in the world (as long of EA don't spoilt it with their BS micropayment nickel and diming) and, if you include all open source *nix variants it's even bigger!
Far from the 'niche' OS for nerd that you seem to be trying to portray it as!
(can't believe I'm defending Linux on a gaming forum - this is new heights / depths of geekdom, right here!)

You probably shouldn't be, he's a troll. And doubtless a liar about his Linux experience. And let's not forget that whopper he told us about DirectX 9 and 10 earlier. Why MS would be working to improve a version of DirectX that isn't even supported under the current versions of Windows is beyond me.

Really, the best thing to do is just ignore him. I'm not sure if he's just a troll or if he's a paid shill like Florian.

Yeah I agree that is probably one of the other major reasons. That is part of MS giving unclear signals of its intentions, e.g. do they really intend to sell and publish also AAA PC games on Windows Store, ie. directly compete with Steam (and Origin and UPlay), or is it reserved only for games that can be run also on Windows RT tablets and smartphones (ie. less interesting to dedicated desktop PC gamers).

I feel the third reason for SteamOS is SteamBox, ie. Valve also wants to keep an option to leave PC gaming behind if the need arises, and go on with their own "gaming box" that they can control. I recall SteamOS is optimized for gaming and doesn't really advertise itself as e.g. an office OS running LibreOffice or whatnot (even if it is probably possible to use it for that purpose too). I am unsure if Valve even intends to market SteamOS as a full replacement for Windows on all PCs, including non-gaming use (also corporate use), or do they ultimately regard it as a stepping stone towards SteamBox.

That wouldn't surprise me. I think there's a number of good reasons for them to want to do that and ultimately, I can avoid buying things on Steam just as easily if they offer Linux support as I do now; but having them on Linux means that there are improvements made to things like Mesa that are helpful to everybody.

You're not the only one. I got sucked in earlier. I put in a request in the talk about the forum experience thread requesting an ignore user feature. It would make it a lot easier for me to stop feeding the trolls. And just ignore users for shorter periods when I'm having issues with somebody else.

I know some folks around here assume that I troll, but the fact is that I'm usually right, I just often times phrase it in a way that's probably more grumpy than necessary.

Yeah, it IS odd with MS being one of the major console manufacturers - Sony are happily anti-PC, sitting on their Psygnosis back catalogue and selling off their laptop division, Nintendo are off doing their own thing as usual but MS has got be seen to be giving SOME gaming support to the platform they make OSes for as well their console
I guess they'd be happy to see desktop PC gaming die in favour of Xbox One where they get a piece of every game sale, while taking a slice of the mobile gaming pie via windows phones and tablets (IF they took off) and still selling desktop OSes to businesses
GFWL being cancelled was certainly a curve ball and makes me wonder what their next move is...

I am lying about Microsoft and Nvidia on working on further improving DirectX 9 and DIrectX 10?

Here you go.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim got a 25% increase in performance with the 337.50 bet driver from Nvidia.

Here's another. It's from a Nvidia representative. His name is Cyris.

If anyone is interested, tomorrow we will see three new drivers. GRID 335.35, Geforce 337.50 and Linux
337.12
(dated 7th April)

New in
GRID 335.35
driver.


These drivers have been tested to work with Amazon G2 instances running NVIDIA GRID
Adds support for GRID SDK 2.3.7. For access to the GRID SDK please visit https://developer.nvidia.com/grid-app-game-streaming.


API Support:


Support for CUDA 5.5
Support for OpenGL 4.3
Support for the Open Computing Language (OpenCL) 1.1
Support for DirectX 9, 10, and 11
Support for GRID SDK 2.3.7 For access to the GRID SDK please visit https://developer.nvidia.com/grid-app-game-streaming.


New in
Linux 337.10
driver.

Added support for the following GPUs:

GeForce 830M
GeForce 840M
GeForce 845M
GeForce GTX 850M
GeForce GTX 860M
GeForce GTX 870M
GeForce GTX 880M
GeForce GT 705
GeForce GT 720

I had Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1 running side by side on the same PC, and I didn't really see any speed increase in booting times after I disabled fast boot in Windows 8 (I had to do that because it caused some problems to me, like making it much harder to get to BIOS settings, and slowly but surely corrupting the Windows 7 partition).

In some other ways Windows 8 desktop seemed somewhat more responsive and faster than Windows 7 desktop, but that may be simply because Windows 8 desktop appears to be overall a stripped down version of Windows 7 desktop (no Aero features I gather etc.).

For gaming performance (which some claim is also faster in Windows 8), I didn't see any difference either. Gaming benchmark programs gave me fully identical numbers in both Windows 7 and 8 (same PC, running same graphics driver versions on both OSes).

That says no such thing. This is nVidias answer to onLive and it does absolutely nothing to improve things for DirectX users. Nor do I see any evidence that MS is involved with this.

Like I said you're a troll.

You call me a troll? Obviously you are a troll.

It's not just for onLive.

DirectX 9 and DIrectX 10 are getting draw call improvements whether you believe me or not. End of discussion. I am just going to stop arguing right here right now.

Thank you for demonstrating the drawback of the rep system. :-) He asked a perfectly civil question; whether he's plus or minus shouldn't come into play. But anyway, I don't know if anyone else responded to this already (don't have time to read every response), it was largely due to a sham of a "giveaway" where the goal was to get -100.

You are making the same mistake many others make. Steam survey does not represent potential of Linux sales. That's not what developers are looking for when they evaluate whether to release Linux games or not. Because Steam survey doesn't show percentage of sales but shows percentage of Steam clients which are run on different OSes. Since Steam has the majority of games for Windows only this number is not useful for estimating how many actual sales can potentially come from Linux users for a hypothetical planned game. Just think a bit and do the math. I already said above. Useful example of statistics are HB numbers. Steam ones aren't useful for estimating the potential. They are only useful for Steam itself. Plus Steam is avoided by many Linux users because of DRM. So it's not a representative source for estimation of potential Linux sales. Some DRM-free cross platform game showing percentage of sales per OS is more to the point.

This is sheer nonsense. The didn't manage to obliterate anything in the past and won't be able to. While MS aren't interested in innovation - they'll lose, or they'll be forced to change their attitude and drop lock-in tactics. Times has changed and their dinosaur approach of the past only makes them fall more and more behind the competition.

That's what I told you exactly. Wait and see. If you can't analyze trends - analyze results.

Most people don't care what the game uses as long as they can play it on their system.

Of course Steam doesn't make up the whole entire bulk.

Steam is a huge part of PC gaming though.

I know most Linux gamers shy away from Digital Rights Management (DRM) which Steam is. Well at least what I read from Liamdawe who owns gamingonlinux.com.

Microsoft is not falling behind. End of discussion. Not every PC gamer wants a open source customizable Operating System (OS) you know. However I do want all the PC versions of video games on Windows open source.

MS is clearly falling behind. They feel threatened by advance of OpenGL gaming to the point of opening their gaming toolkits a while ago. Not the whole DirectX, I think it was something related to XNA. But MS open sourcing stuff? That happens only when they change their mindset from feeling that they are an undisputable monopolist who doesn't need to bother to improve anything to concern of becoming irrelevant in the future because of competition.