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Valve's SteamOS could change everything. Based on Linux, it aims to break away from Windows as the go-to place for PC gaming and establish itself as a major platform in its own right. Valve is launching this new operating system in tandem with a range of Steam Machines - PC hardware refactored into a living room-friendly format that could rival the traditional home console. Prototype units were dispatched to a lucky few last week, while SteamOS itself received a beta release last Friday, allowing anyone with a PC to roadtest the operating system on their own systems. So what is SteamOS? In a nutshell, this is a free operating system that functions just like the Big Picture mode in your traditional Steam setup. However, with Valve in control of all parameters, we see Microsoft's DirectX 11.1 ousted in favour of its own streamlined interface that uses the OpenGL 4.3 API to run games, apparently with significant frame-rate gains. By Valve's own test methods, an improvement of up to 16.4 per cent is reported for the Linux build of Left 4 Dead 2, as compared to performance on a Windows machine using the same hardware.
But that's not all. According to a (now deleted) blog post by FXAA developer Timothy Lottes, a focus on Linux platforms could also mean good things for gaming in general - specifically 100 per cent of system resources dedicated to the game, along with superior access to the feature set of the graphics card. On top of that, there are input latency advantages too: the current WDDM 1.3 driver architecture used as a back layer in Windows - to catch GPU hang-ups among other things - is known to add latency to the overall rendering pipeline. However, through SteamOS, games sidestep the need for this framework and instead work directly through OpenGL and Nvidia's drivers. This grants lower-latency access to any given hardware, which should in theory lead to faster response times.
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