News Valve hits Left 4 Dead 2 performance high - on Linux

Somewhat on topic, before I come to the subject of Richard "Saviour of Software" Stallman, it's interesting to see the direction that Valve is moving in recently. They've been hiring hardware engineers for a while now and while they may be tight-lipped on what's happening, you can bet that those engineers aren't sitting round with their thumbs up their backsides; even if it's only skunkworks-style research projects, they must be doing something. Now we learn that they're putting a lot of effort into improving the performance of their games under Linux. I'm willing to bet money on Valve releasing some kind of console or dedicated gaming hardware.

As long as I can plug in a mouse and keyboard, and there's a proper OS behind it (even if it is stripped down and heavily customised), I could really get behind the idea of a Valve console. Didn't they announce a while back that future versions of the Steam client would support joystick/joypad navigation? I'm pretty sure that was mentioned around the time that the overhauled client UI was released...

Richard Stallman has his fat head up his arse. Some of the comments in that article are complete B-S; at this point no one is proposing that Steam is shipped with a Linux distro or that its DRM becomes part of the kernel. It'd be like any other closed-source piece of third-party software available for Linux: you install it separately using whatever proprietary license the vendor wants. If it is shipped with a distribution then it'll be a distribution released by Steam/Valve, using a mix of their own proprietary license(s) and open source licenses where appropriate. If you don't like those terms then go away and don't use it - it's as simple as that. And Richard Stallman can shove his head even further up his own tradesman's entrance for all I care. Perhaps he might disappear so far up his own backside that he causes some kind of quantum singularity and disappears altogether; we can but hope.

Gamers have almost zero options under Linux. You can run older games using emulation or Wine, but for most modern games you have no chance. Steam on Linux can only be a good thing and you would likely see a hell of a lot of people - myself included - moving away from Windows almost completely. This isn't a pro-Linux/anti-Windows thing, it's about consumer choice. Does anybody think that Steam on Mac OS X was a bad idea? Steam on Linux isn't that far removed from the idea of Steam on Mac.

 

More great news So tonnes of dev time was spent on running L4D on DirectX and W7, and then a tiny amount of dev time for Linux and OpenGL has beaten Windows performance. Gaming is one of the only areas where Windows (understandably) beats Linux - I hope Valve can level the playing field

 

Everyone can say whatever they want about this but bottom is line is.....

Hardly anyone uses Linux.

 

Tell that to the millions of users of Android phones...

 

Windows drivers get TLC anyway

So so true.

The windows drivers get that kind of treatment anyway, now when Nvidia actually put some work into there Linux drivers we can see the performance increase.

 

This sort of thing comes up almost every single time Linux is mentioned in a news article on here, and I really can't be bothered to argue or defend my viewpoint any more - especially after the royal trolling last time...

Not having a go at you specifically, but every time a competing/alternative platform is mentioned it's the same arguments all over again: C64 vs ZX Spectrum, Atari vs Amiga, PC vs Mac, Windows vs Linux etc... Frankly, I got bored of it 15 years ago.

 

So we find a typically less resource intensive OS deals slightly better performance.

The real question is how easy can steam make gaming on linux? Is it going to be as easy as launching a steam title through windows? And are we going to start seeing ports? Or does no one care?

The only reason I ever migrated to Windows from linux was the gaming element. Nowadays I use office and adobe software a lot so that would seriously hamper my gnu/linux ambitions.

 

The vast majority of supercomputers use Linux. So a HUGE amount of information each of us use each day is underpinned by Linux. Plus the majority of servers are powered by Linux, so plenty of the websites we use each day are unpinned by Linux, too.

Also Linux exceeds Windows in many things, usability and gaming being the main exceptions. If these can be improved, desktop usage will increase.

For something that's free, it's used an amazing amount.

 

And just to add to what others have said, an impressive point that Linus Torvalds made in his controversial talk is that Linux also manages to do it with a single kernel used by all applications, that is something that Apple and Microsoft can't claim.

 

Without meaning any disrespect, I'm not sure you fully understand what DirectX and OpenGL actually are. OpenGL certainly isn't the only graphics API available for Linux just like DirectX isn't the only graphics API available for Windows.

DirectX and OpenGL are simply libraries of code that exist to make it easier for software developers to talk to the graphics hardware in a person's computer. There are plenty of other graphics APIs out there (some far, far better than others), as well as input APIs, sound APIs and so on.

One of the reasons DirectX is popular with games developers for the Windows platform is because it's bigger than just 3D graphics (Direct3D). DirectDraw, DirectSound, DirectInput, DirectPlay and so on.

OpenGL doesn't provide for all of this (and nor should it, as an open GRAPHICS language). Other APIs exist for that.

It's worth noting that you don't NEED to use a graphics API at all. You could, if you felt like wasting your time, write your own graphics engine that talks directly to the Hardware Abstraction Layer, or even the graphics hardware directly if you absolutely wanted to (depending on what your host OS allows you to do!)

 

Also without meaning any disrespect, but I believe I may know more about DirectX (and possibly OpenGL) than you, considering I was a beta tester for DirectX at one point.

You might also have noticed that I specifically didn't mention DirectX, but Direct3D (or rather, D3D). And when I wrote that comment (about anything besides D3D on Windows) it was specifically made in the context of Left4Dead 2. I simply wasn't aware that the game gave you the choice of another rendering path besides D3D.

Now, that we've clarified our respective positions all is well in the world again...

 

Just as long as you don't expect any group hugs or anything...!

 

Nah... Way too touchy feely for my taste.

 

They are in close proximity in order to effect strategic and tactical advantage!

S*D

 

As much as Windows has been my OS of choice? since Windows '95, especially when it comes to gaming I think this is very good news indeed.

Linux has had its appeal for years but its lack of gaming compatibility has kept me away, even with options like Wine etc. Tho thought of being able to finally use an open source OS along with open source apps AND able to play games on the same platform without having to dual boot has been a long time coming indeed.

This also makes building new rigs a lot more viable and cost effective with the money saved being put to better use elsewhere.

 

Greetings!

 

Greetings!

PDF:
http://www.khronos.org/assets/uploa.../Valve-Left-4-Dead-2-Linux-SIGGRAPH_Aug12.pdf

 

All I can see is that the team did some crazy analysis to get every single FPS. Something they most likely did not do. Usually they just program, and see their results and judge if its enough. Usually they only do crazy analysis like this when you have a scene where your GPU performance just dips to 15fps in that area, and you have no idea why, and you try to quickly find the problem and remove or optimize the needed area.

If they ACTUALLY did all these step during game development, and optimize the game to the max, all by keeping the same level of visuals, then game development time could easily double or triple. This is just insane. And this is very bad.

Also they don't get to use tools like Visual Studio, or a shader debugger anymore, as you can't debug glsl (OpenGL shader language). They COULD use gDebugger (never been updated since 2010) but it's apparently not as great as DirectX stuff, although it's something, is only for AMD cards (cause they purchased them). So while they got above and beyond support THIS time from Nvidia, AMD and Intel. That is not normal support. And I expect Linux ports will drop in performance over time, or quality, due the lack of really bugging to find and fix problems.

 

Greetings!

 

Windows user tries to run games written for Windows under Linux and encounters problems because he's running Windows games under Linux, and Linux is not Windows.

That is not what Valve are trying to accomplish.