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

[theyarecomingforyou]

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.

Gabe Newell has stated that he wants to make it as easy as possible to port the 2,500 games on Steam. This isn't just about porting a couple of old games - this is about making Linux a serious competitor for gaming.

One of the main reasons I have zero interest in Linux is because I enjoy gaming and I have bought a lot of games over the years, mostly on Steam. Competition is a good thing for the industry, particularly with the way Microsoft is moving the Windows platform towards a closed infrastructure like Apple. If Valve can change that then I applaud that move, even if I probably won't move to Linux myself.

[Mr. Gibs]

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.

Yeah sure :rolleyes:

Linux has a long long way to go before Windows reign is over, regardless of whether or not OEMs start shipping it in large numbers. Go and ask your girlfriend (as long as she isn't a techie) to download and install linux and then get similar versions of the software she already has installed on her pc/mac. Let me know how that works.

OEMs have tried shipping Linux desktops (Dell for example) but they stopped or made it a small part of the page because consumers would buy them by mistake and return it when everything looked super different and none of their games / sofware worked.

[BajiRav]

And how do you know that exactly?

How do you know otherwise? Aren't you the one who goes around claiming that Windows Phone will never have market? That it is rejected by normal people? Guess how those repeated arguments of your apply to Linux! ;-)

[Coi]

See? This is the year of desktop Linux.

[Max Norris]

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.

There's the rub. Every time that a manufacturer has tried to market a Linux desktop, it's been a spectacular failure, never mind it's practically an unknown in the said consumer market. If any non-MS OS is going to someday outpace Windows it'll be the Apple products. Those said games (and many applications) are available for OSX too, along with a crapton (and then some) exposure, excellent support network, all that good stuff, and OSX still has a relatively small marketshare. Plus, do you think the average consumer cares about a "closed infrastructure", software patents and litigation or open source? Not really, they're just going to care if it's available at the local store, if it works with zero fuss and if they can run their software on it.

I'm not bashing Linux, makes zero difference to me what others use, just can't see it taking off in a large number. They not only need to convince the manufacturers that it's "this time for sure", but also need to convince the retailers as well, and that is going to be a hard sell right there.

[HawkMan]

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.

No, they'll do what happened last time. They 90% of the computers are returned to the store because they're not running windows.

Gabe Newell has stated that he wants to make it as easy as possible to port the 2,500 games on Steam. This isn't just about porting a couple of old games - this is about making Linux a serious competitor for gaming.

He can't make it easier for anyone except those who use the source engine, and even then it's limited what he can do

[Athernar]

He can't make it easier for anyone except those who use the source engine, and even then it's limited what he can do

So you're saying adding Linux support to the Steam client, contributing fixes to graphics drivers plus other relevant projects, and rallying improved support from other vendors doesn't qualify as making it easier?

:/

[redvamp128]

Technically using Linux doesn't make it faster, OpenGL does.

It is good Valve are pushing Steam to Linux but i don't see many developers porting their games over to Linux, unless it is easy and cost effective for them.

Yes I seem to remember running Open GL games under Windows 98 and were very fast... in fact i remember running Unreal Tournament under OpenGL and it ran faster than the Direct X with Windows 98.

[nub]

Can one even discern 270 FPS vs. 315FPS?!

Most displays only refresh at 60hz, there has been a trend lately of 120hz displays though.

humans only see at 30fps.

No. Movies can get away with such low frame rates because of the blurring.

[Solid Knight]

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.

Funny how that didn't happen for netbooks. Linux owned the market. Microsoft put out XP on a netbook and despite how horribly slow it was, it totally crushed Linux netbooks.

[ArialBlue]

Funny how that didn't happen for netbooks. Linux owned the market. Microsoft put out XP on a netbook and despite how horribly slow it was, it totally crushed Linux netbooks.

Netbook XP worked just fine AFAIK. Where was the slow at?

[thenetavenger]

I'd like to see what "thenetavenger" has to say about this. He always claims on the front pages that Direct3D is superior to OpenGL. I guess this goes to show he couldn't be more wrong.

Linux and OpenGL are more than capable at competing against Microsoft's Direct3D. In fact, from every test I've seen, Doom3 also runs faster using OpenGL too. Not only that, but developers can target a much broader set of platforms with OpenGL (Linux, OS X, Android, iOS, and more).

Simple...

OpenGL 4.x versus DirectX 9c

Does anyone here have a problem with a framework designed for unified shaders and newer GPUs running on a newer GPU compared to a Framework that has NO concept of unified shaders and tends to run slower on newer GPUs that are DX10, DX11 optimized?

Valve is trying to prove their own talking points about Linux and OpenGL.

Additionally, unless they release the code for independent testing, they are proving they can tweak graphic settings in their game to run faster when they need to prove their own point.

Think about any game you have played, and how settings from LOD Bias, Texture Quality, Mesh Detail, or even omitting a post processing effect can affect performance. In anyone's own gaming experience, just messing with game and NVidia settings can take FPS from 3 to 300.

When Valve has complete control over these, and could just flip the texture quality or mesh level down a bit.

This becomes far more suspect when they state they are doing ADDITIONAL 'optimizations' and NOT applying any optimizations to Windows 7, and then not describing what the Linux Kernel and OpenGL optimizations they added.

If you are trying to make a point and get users to think 'Linux is for gaming' or OpenGL is for 'gaming' when every other game graphic engine developer tells a different story.

This is something THEY tried back in the late 90s early 00s as well. The proclaimed OpenGL was the best, and a few years after everyone followed them blindly, found out they were WRONG by a 20% deficit in most OpenGL games compared to DirectX and that was in the DX9 days of comparing similar OpenGL frameworks.

There are a lot of optimizations in DX10 and DX11 that are for performance and reducing the 'overhead' they talk about specifically. So lets see them 'Optimize' the game for DX11, ground up, and then run the tests again, and be honest.

Here is a way to measure the credibility of this for yourself...

Look at this title and others on the XBox 360 versus the PS3. Is the XBox 360 version slower? Nope, in fact with a majority of games, the XBox version is faster, and includes higher quality graphics. (Not including the BluRay cutscenes which mean nothing.) PS3 uses OpenGL (variation) and is based on FreeBSD.

Why can't a FASTER CPU in the PS3 always BEAT the XBox 360? Especially when you look at the limited and 'shared' RAM/VRAM of the XBox? The Xenos helps, but the core NT kernel threading better and DirectX are also important reasons that erase any CPU benefit the PS3 has.

The XBox 360, uses a DirectX subset that is closer to DX11 than DX9c, which is why cross platform parity didn't happen between Windows and XBox gaming until Windows 7, as even DX10 didn't have all the XBox DX functionality.

Remember the new GPU reference designs NVidia and ATI/AMD are using are based on Xenos, the FIRST unified shader GPU with new onboard DMA technology, and RAM virturalization and BUS transfer technologies. The WDM/WDDM of Vista/Win7 was build on these set of technologies. Microsoft created the fastest and most versatle GPU architecture possible at the time, and it has become the standard for all modern GPUs and gaming constructs in the years since.

So going back, a DX9c game benchmark is worthless, and has been since 2005/2006.

If you look at older dedicated VS PS GPUs, they still can outperform newer unified shader GPUs when running OLD DX9c code. Note in the 3DMark DX9c era series tests, that their numbers on even a modern uber video card are often less than the last generation of dedicated VS/PS GPUs. (This is why a test coming from a game using DX9c is insane, seriously insane.)

Find a game for OpenGL and demonstrate it running faster on OS X or Linux or FreeBSD than it runs on Windows 7.

(There is a couple of examples but are flawed in how they spend time performing redundant operations on the NT kernel because the developers come from the *nix world of thinking.)

OpenGL has been racing to catch up to DX10 and DX11 for the past few years, and is finally getting close, but once again falls behind DirectX11.1, which is Microsoft first move back to Direct3D focus allowing code to use the common native features of the GPU without using DirectX.

OpenGL 4.2 is not horrible, and catches DirectX11 in a lot of ways, but performance is not one of them.

The other irony of this story is that the baseline GPU technologies used in OpenGL 4.x, NVidia Cg, NVidia CUDA 2.x, and other technologies like OpenCL acceleration are all dependent on Microsoft's GPU design model, going back to the XBox. Even silly things like the shader languages, and and how VRAM and new GPU DMA techniques all come from Microsoft.

Have no misconception, Microsoft hardware DID design the Xenos. ATI freely admitted this at the time, and in follow up interviews you can find online with the ATI project manager and the ATI CEO, talking about how they failed to realize Microsoft's technology was better than their VS/PS design and they didn't change course soon enough.

With all that, test Valve, push them and ask for code. They are screwing with people to drum up support for Linux and their 'emerging' business model. I do not like that they are misleading gamers into thinking that Linux or OpenGL are faster, nor it is going to serve the industry if developers avoid DirectX and get locked into slower graphics.

There are crossplatform reasons for OpenGL, but as Valve themselves demonstrate, it is not hard to target DirectX and shift to OpenGL for backporting to other platforms. Create enterprise, and scale back for each platform.

When WP8 is running DirectX graphics that Android and iOS would dream to have, in a simple developer summit preview, OpenGL is not the answer. This is true of WP7 that is STILL able to get 5x the GPU performance out of the same Adreno Snapdragon GPUs than Android could EVER get with OpenGL ES.

So that is my response and rant all in one... Have fun!

[rhianntp]

win 8 will be the most epic failure ever... Thank you valve for taking a stand against a pos..regardless of who produced it...if I can game on linux reasonably its goodbye windows for me :-)

[ArialBlue]

win 8 will be the most epic failure ever... Thank you valve for taking a stand against a pos..regardless of who produced it...if I can game on linux reasonably its goodbye windows for me :-)

trolling attempt score: 0/5

[HawkMan]

No. Movies can get away with such low frame rates because of the blurring.

No actually the eye only sees around 30 unique images a second. However, it sees everything in that 1/30th of a second(though it's not like that, unlike a camera it's continuos. But it amounts to the same). At any rate the issue is of course that a game rendered a 30 fps. Each frame is that perfect frozen nano second in time, with no natural flow to the next frame. That makes it appear "jerky", whereas a 60fps pictur will let the eye smooth out the motions, 120 would be better, but it's unlikely our brain would really be able to make out any difference between that and 60.

So yes, we see only around 30, but that doesn't make 30 enough in games. As for movies. Going to 50/60 fps in movies also has an advantage if not for a smoother picture, for a sharper picture. Thou it will also appear smoother since even with motion blur, film frames won't fall glide perfectly into each other since a new our sequence is started for each frame and there is no overlap, in fact there is a theoretical gap.

Of course for certain games you also need 60fps purely for reactionary calculations in the game as well. Mostly racing.

[Motoko.]

trolling attempt score: 0/5

off-topic: I don't really like Windows 8 all that much but I think it will be far from a failure.

[Iridium]

This is such exciting news!!! Windows fanbois think of it like this, based on Distrowatch.com, Linux Mint is the most downloaded Linux lately. This is great because Mint Focuses on building a productive useable desktop environment. If Linux gains big developers, especially in gaming, then MS will stop just looking at iOS and start taking note that maybe people do still want a focus on a useable desktop and not some random bunch of rectangles in a mish mash.

Something I keep failing to see in these forums is the understanding that Android is feeding back into the mainstream Linux kernel again. Valve is not stupid, they clearly see that Linux is a go platform. Why do people love large dominating companies like MS and Apple so much?!?!?! I really dont get this blind tribal/religious mentality.

[nytiger73]

When Linux can run something like Battlefield 3 or Crysis 2, and run it well, I'll be impressed. But with Valve porting their engine to Linux (while still a nice looking and somewhat advanced engine) it's nothing like that aforementioned 2 games. I just don't see Linux taking off in the home space. It's far to complicated for the average user to grasp.

This is just my opinion.

[Dot Matrix]

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.

Never going to happen. Why? Because Linux remains too fragmented, too under developed, and too under supported by mainstream developers to even take off, let alone be sold on consumer systems.

[KevinN206]

Isn't DirectX more than just D3D? There's also DirectCompute, XAudio2, and XACT3.

How does the entire OpenGL + audio + parallel GPU compare to DirectX?

[thenetavenger]

Isn't DirectX more than just D3D? There's also DirectCompute, XAudio2, and XACT3.

How does the entire OpenGL + audio + parallel GPU compare to DirectX?

Let alone they are comparing DirectX 9c with a much newer version of OpenGL.

Imagine OpenGL from 2003/2004 compared to DirectX11.1, it wouldn't even be close in performance.

Just the difference in how the shaders are handled are enough to call BS on Valve.

The other big problem is this is their engine and just flipping a few performance differences like dropping texture level or mesh detail a 'bit' would be enough to shove the FPS in either direction to give them the desired outcome.

Valve should be called to task for this stunt, and anyone that gives them any notice or believes this, and makes gaming or development decisions based on this, get what they deserve.

[Subhadip]

thenetavenger is spot on here. Not a fair comparison at all and seems suspiciously part of Valve's new pro-Linux propaganda designed at expanding Steam's profits amidst competition from Windows 8 Store and integrated Xbox Live. I would like to see modern DirectX 11 engines like CryEngine 3 or Frostbite 2 ported to OpenGL and see how they perform. The results will be vastly different for sure. For that matter, I would like to see Source Engine maxed out - showing a game engine running at 300 fps only indicates that you are vastly under-utilizing the capabilities of your hardware, possibly aimed at playing to Linux/OpenGL's strengths. Besides, there are no image quality comparisons at all, without which the whole framerate debate is meaningless.

[simplezz]

I'm sorry but DirectX 10/11 runs even slower than 9. CIV V, and Crysis 2 come to mind.

I would like to see modern DirectX 11 engines like CryEngine 3 ported to OpenGL and see how they perform

I don't imagine CryEngine 3's rendering will be DirectX 11 considering that consoles and XP are still using 9c, and that's where they target their games at. The PC is just an afterthought for them.

The results will be vastly different for sure.

The FPS would be lower and the engine more demanding on system resources with DirectX 11.

For that matter, I would like to see Source Engine maxed out - showing a game engine running at 300 fps only indicates that you are vastly under-utilizing the capabilities of your hardware, possibly aimed at playing to Linux/OpenGL's strengths. Besides, there are no image quality comparisons at all, without which the whole framerate debate is meaningless.

You and thenetavenger just can't accept that L4D2 runs better under OpenGL and GNU/Linux than Windows and Direct3D can you? I keep hearing all these excuses like "They're lying " or "They're using an old version of Direct3D". Well guess what, Direct3D 9 runs faster than 10/11, and 99% of PC games are targeted at 9c because of so many users on XP and consoles. That's the reality of it.

[ichi]

Simple...

OpenGL 4.x versus DirectX 9c

Source engine running on Linux with OpenGL 4.x? Don't delude yourself, I'd be surprised if they were even using OpenGL 3.

Let alone they are comparing DirectX 9c with a much newer version of OpenGL.

Do you have a source for the exact OpenGL version they are using or are you just making it up?

[Max Norris]

I'm sorry but DirectX 10/11 runs even slower than 9. CIV V, and Crysis 2 come to mind.

The FPS would be lower and the engine more demanding on system resources with DirectX 11.

I'm sorry but that's kind of a given considering it's pushing the GPU to do a lot more visually than DX9 games do. Uses a lot more memory and requires a lot more computational power to pull it off.. yea its going to require more horsepower to run. Newer stuff (games, apps, whatever) typically always need more horsepower to run, this is nothing new or specific to gaming, or even DirectX. I'm sure throwing a crapton of work at OpenGL 4 is going to make it a tad slower than OpenGL 1 too dont you think? Just as easily can "prove" than DirectX 9 is slower because some old game from years back that doesn't take advantage of any DX9 features runs faster. No, it's just doing less.

I don't imagine CryEngine 3's rendering will be DirectX 11 considering that consoles and XP are still using 9c, and that's where they target their games at. The PC is just an afterthought for them.

Ah, no, sorry again, fully supports DirectX 11. Look for yourself. Even shows visually how it makes it looks a lot better than DX9. They're embracing DX11 head on.

http://mycryengine.c...dex.php?conid=8

The FPS would be lower and the engine more demanding on system resources with DirectX 11.

Again, see above, that's a given.. more math makes more work. (You do know that most DX11 games have an option to turn those visuals off for those with underpowered GPU's yea?)

You and thenetavenger just can't accept that L4D2 runs better under OpenGL and GNU/Linux than Windows and Direct3D can you? I keep hearing all these excuses like "They're lying " or "They're using an old version of Direct3D". Well guess what, Direct3D 9 runs faster than 10/11, and 99% of PC games are targeted at 9c because of so many users on XP and consoles. That's the reality of it.

Congrats on one benchmark being faster. I can show some recent published benchmarks that's completely the opposite where Linux falls short in performance. One benchmark does not mean that everything is going to be faster. And again, stop with this DX9 nonsense. DX9 is "faster" because it's doing less. If your system is struggling to run the latest and greatest then perhaps your system needs an upgrade. You want super-fast and lower resource intensity? Go champion DirectX 3 or OpenGL 1.1. I hear they're super fast nowadays.