IGN - The Alienware M11x was one of my favorite products of last year; it brought a new level of mobility to PC gaming with its 11-inch form factor, but provided enough power to keep it from feeling like a gimped substitute for your home rig. But despite the praise I had for the system, many were looking for something more – a machine that maintained a similar level of compact portability, but offered a little extra processing prowess – and Alienware answered with the M14x.
The Ubuntu flavor of Linux has received a major endorsement from Dell with its announcement that it will offer the OS as an option for its Alienware X51 gaming rig.
This is quite interesting. The more competition the better and it allows people to have more options when buying a pre-built system
yup,actually left 4 dead 2 on linux performed better than the windows version
linux gave 315 fps
windows gave 303.4 fps on the same conf.
source: http://blogs.valvesoftware....
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After this work, Left 4 Dead 2 is running at 315 FPS on Linux. That the Linux version runs faster than the Windows version (270.6) seems a little counter-intuitive, given the greater amount of time we have spent on the Windows version. However, it does speak to the underlying efficiency of the kernel and OpenGL. Interestingly, in the process of working with hardware vendors we also sped up the OpenGL implementation on Windows. Left 4 Dead 2 is now running at 303.4 FPS with that configuration.
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And what's more interesting is that SteamBox will be running Linux(Ubuntu) as well.
I guess the one of the reasons why Windows got so popular is because it was the Core OS to play games on.
I agree its good to give more options.Its not that its hard to install Ubuntu on any system you own/build/buy though.You are also incorrect about the steam box. Yes,valves "higher spec" version will be running on the Linux kernel, whilst other non valve manufactured boxes may contain windows or Linux .However, valves version wont come with Ubuntu, instead it will simply boot straight into steam big picture mode with no DE overhead.
What valve/steam/source engine does currently on GNU/linux,which includes more than ubuntu, is bring a non-deferring, locally-optimizing abstraction layer in their source engine that converts Direct3D calls into OpenGL. However, it's not the same way that Wine does Direct3D to OpenGL conversion. The Source Engine targets a D3D9-like API with extensions that translates GL calls dynamically. This also works for Shader Model 2.0b with Shader Model 3.0 support coming soon. Valve's implementation is nearly a 1:1 mapping between D3D and GL concepts.
What valve may bring to the table with the new steam box is likely a new source engine that's either OpenGL encouraging better native cross platform games.Or includes an updated D3D to Opengl translation layer that includes D3D10/11 support not just D3D9. Who knows but if its popular more games will either get ported or made for Linux. A win for the Linux gaming community
I hope Valve can help bring Linux to a level of being decent competition to Windows as a gaming platform. That veritable monopoly needs to end.
Valve will definitely help bring Linux to gaming but, what about all those games that are on windows? I doubt many of them will get ports so you will have to dual boot to play older titles.
Probably, but many games will transition over to Linux if its popular enough.
Microsoft has no core PC exclusives to hold consumers to Windows really. Just one or two. Everyone else is free to roam to any OS. Microsoft has already proven it can't build an online service for the PC platform so its not winning over many gamers.
Deadly fire... it's not that Microsoft can't make a nice working online platform on PC... it's the fact that they can't profit from it like they do on 360 so they didn't bother. As soon as linux becomes relevant to games then I'll switch completely.
DX11 is all microsoft has.
Our newest writer (Josh the gamer) has submitted a review for his Alienware M14X R2 for your reading pleasure.
"...It was there that we were allowed to preview and play with the latest in Alienware gaming hardware. In our report we will be discussing the newest laptop line from the crew featuring the newest Sandybridge Intel Processing architecture and the latest in gaming graphics processing technologies..." ~ Capsule Computers
U cant really build your own laptop. For w/e reason the manufacturers have all the parts on lockdown and all the most motherboards dont even let u upgrade the graphics cards.
Im likeing the M14x r2, Its got some real nice gaming horsepower for a laptop that you can actually carry around. An improvement in every are for the same price. Makes me regret getting an R1
