Valve"s announcement that it is developing a Linux-based operating system called SteamOS generated a lot of press on Monday, but so far the company has offered little in the way of details. Today, NVIDIA revealed that it has been working with Valve on the development of the operating system, which is expected to be released "soon."
In a blog post, NVIDIA senior technical evangelist Mark Smith stated:
NVIDIA engineers embedded at Valve collaborated on improving driver performance for OpenGL; optimizing performance on NVIDIA GPUs; and helping to port Valve’s award-winning content library to SteamOS; and tuning SteamOS to lower latency, or lag, between the controller and onscreen action.
Smith added that both NVIDIA and Valve "strongly believe in the importance of open-platform innovation" and that they are committed in their offer of providing a "cutting-edge visual experience" for games while using SteamOS.
NVIDIA is the first third-party company that has confirmed it is working with Valve on SteamOS. Today, Valve announced that Steam Machines, with SteamOS installed, will be released by a number of companies in 2014. Today"s announcement likely means that some of those Steam Machines will have hardware components made by NVIDIA inside.
Source: NVIDIA | Image via Valve