What do you think, will Darktable perform well on the new Valve Steam Machine? I just wonder if its optimization for games applies well to OpenCL.
Personally I’m using a crappy office laptop and planning to buy a small PC, and Valve has an opinion of giving a good value for the money. Just not sure how this value might translate to non-gaming applications.
Anyone willing to speculate?
you search for the opencl performance of a Radeon 7600M and you will get a good idea what the performance will be.
Good tip, but which one? There are few with very different banchmarks
it is not exactly a 7600M … it is a custom version. but in that ballpark.
OK, surely it would be a huge upgrade from my hardware, but would you say it allows for comfortable work with DT? I mean 7600M
from what’s known right now the steam machine should be able to run darktable quite comfortably, and the opencl performance should be about twice of that of a AMD RX 6400.
But that’s theory. Nobody knows for sure, and there’s always the software side. Maybe valve will have opencl drivers installed, may be not.
It’s really much too early to tell.
should be able to run darktable quite comfortably
Maybe valve will have opencl drivers installed, may be not.
Unless they customize the GPU so much that it would break the compatibility (in which case I’d be rather surprised), nothing stops you from installing it.
I’m more worried that they implement some tricks to make games look better but at the same time make it weaker in terms of raw power.
Of course SteamOS might not be the perfect choice for an editing machine, but the Steam Machine will definitely allow you to run your own OS, so that shouldn’t be an issue.
I hope the Steam Machine will become a lowest common denominator benchmark for all kinds of software, much like the Steam Deck has for games.
SteamOS is basically Arch Linux. not sure that wouldnt be a good choice for editing.
For the power of the device. It is as fast or faster than 70% of the machines in the steam hardware survey.
Yeah but it’s immutable, can the user alter the base image por add packages to it? I’ve not followed it that much, I thought it was flatpak only for user software
flatpak or so will probably work.
flatpak to install drivers? fwiw i’ve seen people write about using different distros for nvidia/intel gpus (steamos likes amd it seems). and installing stuff is recommended to be done via overlayfs? just a tad finicky, maybe. but i trust vulkan drivers will be installed 
you can be very very sure that the vulkan drivers are there 
dxvk FTW!
since it’ll use a very new version of mesa, rusticl might be an option.
You can alter things, you can even install packages and keep your home directory.
But it all feels a bit non-linuxy if you’re used to the full power of a desktop OS.
I haven’t recently, but I used to dual boot my Steam Deck with Fedora. I’ve run darktable in both that and SteamOS on it, but it was never more than a convenience machine when I was away from home.
I’ll try a few different things on it in SteamOS and report back. It’s not the same as a Steam Machine, but should be a good indication of the challenge involved.
My hunch is that Distrobox will be the easiest answer to get everything running with opencl.
Distrobox is part of SteamOS on the Steam Deck by default now, and I used it to install a Fedora 42 container, then darktable and rocm-opencl inside that using dnf like normal.
darktable shows opencl as available, and cltest works, but using opencl in darktable causes massive instability, numerous glitches, and extreme slowdowns. Running without it enabled allows darktable to run like normal.
The flatpak version runs just fine as well, but opencl isn’t an option.
Sorry I couldn’t come up with something more useful, but with this, all I can say is when the Steam Machine comes around, darktable will probably run just fine cpu only, but I don’t know how opencl will work out.
I don’t suppose anyone knows how to troubleshoot what I’m seeing? I wouldn’t even know where to start.