[gaming] ConsoleOS

[Jet_ski]

We know consoles are running games much better than Windows machines on comparable hardware. And since the upcoming consoles are all just PCs, why won’t anyone like Steam just make a gaming OS? Is there no money in that? Wouldn’t people shell out $200 for an OS that can run their games better than Windows and increase their gaming PC’s lifespan?

[Electronics Wizardy]

I mean steam os is a thing.

 

The thing is there is no easy way to make a os to get better performance, while maintaing the advanges of PC, where you can easily pick any hardware.

[IdlePX]

Steam have already tried it. Why would I have a gaming only OS on a PC that can game and do other stuff?

 

How much of an FPS difference did we see between using Steam OS and a normal Linux distro? It wasn't much,and at the time, didnt have the Windows library of games on it.

 

Even now though, Steam OS v Windows? That'd be a hard sell to a lot of people. 

That thing you spent hundreds of pounds on, let's reduce its functionality drastically for 5 FPS? Maybe?

[PlayStation 2]

Valve tried with SteamOS. What the issue is isn't exactly software, but hardware. When you have to develop for only a couple sets of very specific hardware, it's a lot easier to tailor the optimization to work for those sets of hardware. Expand that to an almost infinite amount of configurations and it becomes quite a bit harder to exploit the hardware like on a console.

[TetraSky]

Because consoles all have the same hardware, so devs can properly optimize their games for said hardware and take full advantage of it.

 

Very few PCs share the exact same specs in the grand scheme of things (other than pre-built) and even if the OS was the same, because of the hardware differences, devs wouldn't be able to optimize it for ALL the different combinations of hardware. The best they can do is optimize it so it works at all and leave it to Nvidia/AMD to optimize their drivers to work well with the games... It's lazy AF but hey, welcome to PC gaming. 

[Bombastinator]

The above answers are correct.  This is just another way of saying the same thing in case it didn’t make sense.  Probably not a better way, just a different one.
 

The issue is Compartmentalization.  or modular systems, or whichever term.  A white box PC is a bunch of different parts that talk to each other.  It is possible to think of a console as a single piece.  Things can be done with that.  Generally very unrepeatable things.  This is even done inside software with one bit of code being a module talking to another module.  Simplifies things immensely.  Breaking it up can make it go faster, but it makes other problems.  Sometimes giant ones.
 

WinNT4 tried this.  They made stuff run faster by breaking compartmentalizations.  The result was a horrific mess.  
Optimization can get wild.  An old story I heard once from the early days of computing.  It’s from memory so I’ll probably get some of it wrong.  
There was a guy who worked for a company trying to sell a (new at the time) kind of memory called “drum memory”. It worked like a hard drive but was a cylinder.  The salesmen wanted to sell it and told him to write a game for it that ran really fast.  He did.  He did it with optimization, and he did it hard.  He knew how that thing worked inside and out.  It was a card game.

 There were problems mostly having to do with salesmen not understanding how card games worked, but he wound up getting fired over it.  That bit was complex.  I didnt understand it very well when I was told it, and as a result don’t remember much.  Anyway, after he was gone they went to look at his code to “fix” it the way the salesmen wanted.  They couldn’t even read it.  He was optimizing.  One thing he did to save time is he knew exactly what speed the drum spun at so he could use memory addresses as time counters because he knew how long the head took to move.  It took them weeks to even figure out that that was what he was doing.  This program wouldn’t work at all on even another model of the same device.  It was optimized for THAT particular model of drive and that one only.

[Jet_ski]

3 hours ago, TetraSky said:

Very few PCs share the exact same specs in the grand scheme of things (other than pre-built) and even if the OS was the same, because of the hardware differences, devs wouldn't be able to optimize it for ALL the different combinations of hardware. The best they can do is optimize it so it works at all and leave it to Nvidia/AMD to optimize their drivers to work well with the games... It's lazy AF but hey, welcome to PC gaming.

That’s true if you start with backwards compatibility and if you want to support most hardware. But if you start with select hardware from the last couple of years then it’s a different story because the generational architectures are similar within each OEM.

 

3 hours ago, IdlePX said:

Even now though, Steam OS v Windows? That'd be a hard sell to a lot of people. 

That thing you spent hundreds of pounds on, let's reduce its functionality drastically for 5 FPS? Maybe?

The idea is to run two operating systems on the same machine. Not to gut the functionality.

 

2 hours ago, comander said:

Let's break this down:

This is true, though console game developers only have to worry about a very small set of hardware combinations (all of which are closely related). Every decision can basically be custom tailored to address a very limited set of hardware options and wring the most out of it. At the same time there's tight hardware-firmware-software integration. Developers also have historically had lower level access to console hardware which allowed them to get the most out of what they had as well. 

https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/

They did. This doesn't solve the issues that are run into - drivers/firmware aren't perfect and you can't really get all the things to work well together because it's a mess of a problem to address. 

With that said, newer/better APIs like Vulkan and DX12 ARE helping. 

At the end of the day, having a new OS out there doesn't address the other parts of the stack.

No. 

I see what you’re saying with the access to hardware firmware.

 

4 hours ago, IdlePX said:

Steam have already tried it. Why would I have a gaming only OS on a PC that can game and do other stuff?

 

How much of an FPS difference did we see between using Steam OS and a normal Linux distro? It wasn't much,and at the time, didnt have the Windows library of games on it.

 

Even now though, Steam OS v Windows? That'd be a hard sell to a lot of people. 

That thing you spent hundreds of pounds on, let's reduce its functionality drastically for 5 FPS? Maybe?

SteamOS is rather a Linux distro with an API to run Windows games. It’s not really an OS designed and optimized for gaming. For instance if you are familiar scientific computing, you know that a poor choice of algorithm can cause a computation to take hours to run whereas with the right algorithm takes seconds. Also you’d have two operating systems on your machine and not replace Windows. 

 

Here’s one example. Windows needs about  4GB of RAM just to function. If you could stop all the unnecessary “services” from loading onto the RAM, you could reduce that to 0.5GB. On an 8GB system that’s a lot to waste! Sure hardware prices are falling but we’re wasting a lot of resources.

[IdlePX]

5 hours ago, Jet_ski said:

Here’s one example. Windows needs about  4GB of RAM just to function. If you could stop all the unnecessary “services” from loading onto the RAM, you could reduce that to 0.5GB. On an 8GB system that’s a lot to waste! Sure hardware prices are falling but we’re wasting a lot of resources.

Following in the vein of what @comander said, back in the 2000's the Linux community was all over optimising the bejeesus out of everything. Folks were obsessed with squeezing every single MB out of an operating system. Debates raged about what desktop was lightest, XFCE, Enlightenment, or LXDE. Optimise enough, and you could get Xubuntu, the XFCE Ubuntu running in 128mb of RAM. Dropping from Ubuntu with Gnome desktop using 512mb of RAM to Xubuntus 128mb of RAM made a huge difference when we only had 1gb to play with, at best.

 

Nowadays, most folks are getting computers with 16gb of RAM, and soon that's going to double to 32gb of RAM as 32gb PCs become more common. At some point between us all having 1gb of RAM and 16gb of RAM, everyone stopped caring. It made little to no difference if you ran Witcher 3 on Ubuntu with full Unity desktop taking 3gb of RAM vs Elementary OS using 1gb of RAM. It's the difference between me having 13gb to run the game or 15gb. 

 

Now this isn't all to say a super optimised PC OS couldn't improve things. Seeing what the Nintendo Switch can do with 4gb of ram, an arm processor and Nvidias Tegra, packed into a tiny package boggles my mind. But when we've all got overpowered PCs that can already stomp over most games we play, would it really be worth investing in a new platform for PC gaming? You can't build it on Windows, obviously. So it's a situation like Steam OS/Linux, or something different. If it's different, then you need to build an OS from scratch to support all the components out there. All those drivers. Then get the games creators on board to release games on your platform. Then you've got to sell it to PC owners, who mostly already own a copy of Windows or Linux. 

 

That's a hell of a lot of R&D, a hell of a hard sell, and is addressing a problem that mostly stopped being a problem 10 years ago.