valve Valve cranks up Linux gaming, makes it faster than Windows

[Motoko.]

Windows 8 + next Xbox = lockdown by Microsoft. Guaranteed. Play the game on any Windows system or Xbox, pay MS, download from MS, totally closed loop. It's the next phase in their profit generation scheme.

That's why they're porting it to Linux, they can see what's coming.

Why I and the rest of us like to think Valve roots on the consumer side against monopolies, they're also a corporation too. We mustn't forget they want to make money as the next company but at least from what I've seen thus far Steam hasn't acted unethical. It's obvious the Windows 8 Store cuts into their profits but Steam is taking a stance in which it makes their public image look good at the same time giving consumers an additional choice for gaming on a the Linux platform.

[Max Norris]

Does an engine really need reiterations every 5 years? Does a game really need cutting edge graphics to be good?

Personally, firm believer in gameplay over graphics. Shoot, the recent talk of a Baldur's Gate remake has me going through BG2 again.. it's a dinosaur, and still a lot better than many current RPG titles.. not that I wouldn't mind a shiny DX11 engine and a talented team of artists behind it though.

The Source engine may not be as cutting edge as Cryengine, but I personally think it looks pretty damn good for a DX9 gaming engine. I'm sure eventually Valve will upgrade it, possibly with the next HL2 episodic release.

Indeed, it's still pretty decent all things considered.. but Episode 3? Starting to think that's a myth. Hopefully they do it soon before people forget about the game entirely.

[Vice]

Valve focuses on artistic style more than realism. But with that said I think Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 look great and I loved playing both of them. There wasn't a single moment while playing them that I said to myself "gee this looks dated and old" I was continually impressed by how good things looked.

In-fact I remember looking at Louis's head and commenting to my friend in-game "His head is so round!" - Ok sure this was 2008 and that was 4 years ago but still I was impressed how round his head was because usually rounded things in games aren't so round. :p

It's not Battlefield 3 but it's also not the same engine we saw back in 2004 they've upgraded it with every single game they've released since Half Life 2. I still remember how much the performance improved when they added Multicore support it really was like night and day and that was just one small innovation compared to all the other stuff they've added. Heck Half Life 2 didn't even have HDR, now it's a standard feature of the engine and all new games. Anyone remember how amazing Lost Coast looked when they first released that? Now that's considered sewer water to some of you? come on guys get it together.

[Athernar]

The Source engine may not be as cutting edge as Cryengine, but I personally think it looks pretty damn good for a DX9 gaming engine. I'm sure eventually Valve will upgrade it, possibly with the next HL2 episodic release.

If you're talking about graphical features and not in regard to the graphics API, then Source gets upgraded fairly regularly; the engine was designed from the outset to be modular. Dota 2 added cloth simulation and ambient occlusion, CS:GO added cascaded shadow maps. There are a few other features in the engine you can enable right now if you know the right cvars, such as float HDR.

There are also traces of tesselation and DirectX 10 support littered around the dev console and in the binaries.

Why I and the rest of us like to think Valve roots on the consumer side against monopolies, they're also a corporation too. We mustn't forget they want to make money as the next company but at least from what I've seen thus far Steam hasn't acted unethical. It's obvious the Windows 8 Store cuts into their profits but Steam is taking a stance in which it makes their public image look good at the same time giving consumers an additional choice for gaming on a different platform.

It won't cut into their profits, not in any meaningful capacity. They've got a lot of ground to cover before they even come close to being able to compete with Steam's featureset, let alone overcome both the fact users are "invested" in Steam or the extremely negative view PC gamers have of Microsoft for both GfwL and their "actions" in regard to prioritising consoles over the last x years.

Valve focuses on artistic style more than realism. But with that said I think Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 look great and I loved playing both of them. There wasn't a single moment while playing them that I said to myself "gee this looks dated and old" I was continually impressed by how good things looked.

In-fact I remember looking at Louis's head and commenting to my friend in-game "His head is so round!" - Ok sure this was 2008 and that was 4 years ago but still I was impressed how round his head was because usually rounded things in games aren't so round. :p

It's not Battlefield 3 but it's also not the same engine we saw back in 2004 they've upgraded it with every single game they've released since Half Life 2. I still remember how much the performance improved when they added Multicore support it really was like night and day and that was just one small innovation compared to all the other stuff they've added. Heck Half Life 2 didn't even have HDR, now it's a standard feature of the engine and all new games. Anyone remember how amazing Lost Coast looked when they first released that? Now that's considered sewer water to some of you? come on guys get it together.

Totally agreed. Majority of outfits now simply pack in as many shaders that they can within budget and expect it to cover up the lack of a coherent artstyle.

Heck, I've seen screenshots of Crysis 2 which had disgustingly low texture resolution, while if you go take a close look at some of the testchamber walls in Portal 2, the texture resolution is quite impressive.

[ArialBlue]

First up,

Valve Source engine (that thing L4D2 runs on) is not optimized. Particle effects are horribly optimized for example - this is clearly seen in Team Sellout 2.

Second,

The engine is horribly old and on every iteration becomes slower. For example running old version of Counter Strike Source will lead to much better frame rates then the current version. Part of the problem is Source engine developers, the other is the fact that GPU drivers hate old games and love the new shiny games.

Third,

Source 64-bit runs slower than 32-bit. I am going to repeat, 64-bit source engine runs slower.

Fourth,

The higher DX version you set in source version, the more shiny effect you are going to get. Phong for example. This is true for all games, that is why to get manageable FPS rates you need to switch to DX9 mode in all modern games. That is why running Valve engine in DX8 mode leads to better FPS rate. But hey, if you have a low end Ati HD 3xxx you might not be able to get 60FPS anyway.

Oh and Source is very CPU heavy as well.

Fifth,

Valve engine does not use DX11. So they are comparing a dead technology with OpenGL. Publicity stunt 101 folks!

Sixth,

Windows XP performs better on DX9 benchmarks. Windows 8 performs better on modern era benchmarks.

Seventh,

This has nothing to do with Linux. This has everything to do with MAC. MAC users shell out bit money - as obvious by the fact that they have a MAC. Linux users on the other hand are cheap and as much are an afterthought after adding MAC support.

[spaceelf]

Is that really a problem? Does an engine really need reiterations every 5 years? Does a game really need cutting edge graphics to be good?

I for one would prefer a highly scalable game engine with modest requirements. More players to play with. Not everyone operates on a two year GPU refresh cycle.

That said, I believe the problem with L4D2 isn't so much the engine itself, but that some of the textures are low quality.

Are we still on DirectX 7? It was good enough at the time. Why isn't it now?

DX10 has been available for six years now. DX11 for three.

[Motoko.]

It won't cut into their profits, not in any meaningful capacity. They've got a lot of ground to cover before they even come close to being able to compete with Steam's featureset, let alone overcome both the fact users are "invested" in Steam or the extremely negative view PC gamers have of Microsoft for both GfwL and their "actions" in regard to prioritising consoles over the last x years.

True to some degree but you'd forget easy how it'd be similar to a browser monopoly that comes pre bundled, average consumers wouldn't bother with installing another client like Steam since they have a store that integrates into the OS, that's part of what Steam doesn't like along with its complaints of Metro

[ichi]

Fifth,

Valve engine does not use DX11. So they are comparing a dead technology with OpenGL. Publicity stunt 101 folks!

Which version of OpenGL? Certainly not OpenGL4, right? I'd bet not even 3.

You are failing miserably at getting the point of Valve's blog post though: they went from 6 FPS to 315 FPS on Linux with the driver and OpenGL optimizations.

The Windows7 results are there for reference.

Seventh,

This has nothing to do with Linux. This has everything to do with MAC. MAC users shell out bit money - as obvious by the fact that they have a MAC. Linux users on the other hand are cheap and as much are an afterthought after adding MAC support.

So releasing Steam and Left 4 Dead 2 on Linux has nothing to do with Linux.

OK :D

[seta-san]

that's nice and all but linux still suffers from many things that make it uncompetitive in the game market

drivers aren't always available. especially on laptops

changes to X11 almost always causes problem

with at least three different sound solutions all of them good and horrible on their own way it creates more headaches.

different distros can sometimes be so wildly different that game developers maybe forced to program for just one distro or at least family of distros.

PACKAGING.

[Royalty]

Sweet, it's awesome for Linux user's.

[x-scratch]

i so would love to beta test this on any linux distro

[Noir Angel]

This has nothing to do with Linux. This has everything to do with MAC. MAC users shell out bit money - as obvious by the fact that they have a MAC.

I'd like to see what evidence you're using to justify that opinion considering that they have already ported the source engine, and most of their source games to OSX.

[ichi]

drivers aren't always available. especially on laptops

Which is why Valve pushing games on Linux and working with GPU vendors is a good thing.

changes to X11 almost always causes problem

Do they? What changes?

with at least three different sound solutions all of them good and horrible on their own way it creates more headaches.

Don't game devs just use OpenAL?

different distros can sometimes be so wildly different that game developers maybe forced to program for just one distro or at least family of distros.

Well, on one hand devs (in this case game devs) certainly won't be supporting obscure distros. Actually so far Valve has only announced support for Ubuntu.

And on the other hand they more often than not provide all the required libraries with the installer, so wether the distro lacks those libraries or ships with different versions becomes irrelevant.

PACKAGING.

Which so far pretty much no proprietary game dev studio has ever used so far. They just release one single binary installer that works across all distros.

It's up to the distro repository mantainers to build the packages later if they feel the need to do so, but you can use the universal binary installer and be done with it, same as you can use the binary driver installer from NVidia instead of waiting for Ubuntu's deb.

[Phixion]

Whatever happens, Linux will never hold the market share on desktop systems.

All I see is ancient technology/games being ported to Linux, who wants to play old games?

If Windows 8 goes to the crapper... I'll happily continue to run Windows 7.

[Noir Angel]

There's nothing ancient about the games they're porting, all of Valve's source games are still very popular, frequently used, and frequently updated, particularly Portal 2 and L4D2.

[seta-san]

Which is why Valve pushing games on Linux and working with GPU vendors is a good thing.

Do they? What changes?

Don't game devs just use OpenAL?

Well, on one hand devs (in this case game devs) certainly won't be supporting obscure distros. Actually so far Valve has only announced support for Ubuntu.

And on the other hand they more often than not provide all the required libraries with the installer, so wether the distro lacks those libraries or ships with different versions becomes irrelevant.

Which so far pretty much no proprietary game dev studio has ever used so far. They just release one single binary installer that works across all distros.

It's up to the distro repository mantainers to build the packages later if they feel the need to do so, but you can use the universal binary installer and be done with it, same as you can use the binary driver installer from NVidia instead of waiting for Ubuntu's deb.

1. one can hope

2. X11 might not start at all

3. maybe. maybe not. does that distro use it?

4. == bloat

5. desktop linux just needs to go through a standardization process. i know it's against the whole philosophy of linux.. but it's in desperate need.

[ArialBlue]

I'd like to see what evidence you're using to justify that opinion considering that they have already ported the source engine, and most of their source games to OSX.

Not natively through a wrapper

[Athernar]

<snip>

That's both a terrible and ironic comparison, TF2 is held back because they can't backport all the optimisations from the far newer L4D2 engine branch without dropping DirectX 8 support.

On your third point, Source hasn't had 64-bit support in anything beyond HL2. Which was also removed when HL2 got ported to the Orangebox engine branch as part of Mac support.

True to some degree but you'd forget easy how it'd be similar to a browser monopoly that comes pre bundled, average consumers wouldn't bother with installing another client like Steam since they have a store that integrates into the OS, that's part of what Steam doesn't like along with its complaints of Metro

It's not similar at all because the level of investment a user has into their choice of browser is insignificant compared to that of a Steam account. Not only do you have the sheer value in terms of the money spent on the games in the Steam library, but you also have the community aspect too.

[Rigby]

Whatever happens, Linux Windows will never hold the market share on desktop systems.

/something someone probably said in 1985

[Mouettus]

If linux would support 1080p on my GTX260 + Sony TV, I'd be all over it!! Only 1080i is available and it makes text very hard to read.

[Solid Knight]

They'll never stop supporting Windows because the consumer isn't going to jump ship to Linux. Further, they sound like a bunch of butt-hurt developers all because they have to redo their UI (or more depending upon how they designed their software). Cry me a river. Conventions change.

[ichi]

1. one can hope

Well, at least they have been collaborating in these last months. If game devs succeed in bringing games to Linux, quality drivers will follow.

Do you thing you would be getting quality drivers for high end cards if pretty much every game was being release for Mac and not Windows?

2. X11 might not start at all

I take you are actually talking about drivers again.

3. maybe. maybe not. does that distro use it?

OpenAL is a single .so that's usually bundled with games.

It's not bundled with Windows either, yet games like Bioshock, UT3 or Stalker use it.

4. == bloat

Well, that's the way they do it on Windows.

5. desktop linux just needs to go through a standardization process. i know it's against the whole philosophy of linux.. but it's in desperate need.

There's a standard already: LSB.

Now go and tell every distro to follow it to the letter ;)

[Mackster]

I understand the pessimism, by why actively root against it?

You admit Metro is a controlled environment. That its also the new environment that we all know replaces the old in time. Yet you know, for sure, that the openness of Win32 will always exist. We simply don't know which way MS might turn a few years from now, especially since there are enough traitors in our midst that would be more than OK with that.

The Apple store is a testament to how apathetic and convenience driven your average consumer (and developer) is.

Spot on. It's not hard to see where things are going. Apple is creating a more closed ecosystem for every year. Microsoft is just following, it seems. It's definitely not going the other way... And I bet certain Linux distributions certainly have nothing better to do than to add their own app stores, and rules.

[Dashel]

You're assuming that they're going to treat the PC side of things just like they treat the Xbox console. I don't think so, and I prefer the Xbox over the PC depending on the game, and vice versa, why limit myself to one platform only? Why can't I be a Xbox AND a PC gamer exactly? If you call my opinion biased then yours is just as much. You see it as them trying to close it off and make it a console when I don't and I doubt it ever will be.

I'm part of the glorious PC gaming master race, I don't deny that. Of course I'm biased. ;)

I'm just saying that the very companies that have sustained PC gaming over the last decade are the very ones that don't fit in the XBox digital distribution model. With the branding changes and questionable future of Win32, I'll remain skeptical as an enthusiast. Gabe on that note is asking the right questions regarding how we view and treat digital goods moving forward.

[simplezz]

Whatever happens, Linux will never hold the market share on desktop systems.

And how do you know that exactly?

All I see is ancient technology/games being ported to Linux, who wants to play old games?

Unigine's Oil Rush. 0 A.D. Trine 2. And lots a lots of other games including those in the Humble Bundle.

If Windows 8 goes to the crapper... I'll happily continue to run Windows 7.

I prefer to use a modern and up to date OS myself.

They'll never stop supporting Windows because the consumer isn't going to jump ship to Linux.

Consumer's buy a new PC, they don't jump as you call it. Once OEM's start shipping PC's with GNU/Linux in large numbers, Window's reign is over.