Submitted by From Valve’s Linux blog: “That the Linux version runs faster than the Windows version (270.6) seems a little counter-intuitive, given the greater amount of time we have spent on the Windows version. However, it does speak to the underlying efficiency of the kernel and OpenGL.” If it wasn’t obvious before, it should be now: Valve has started its marketing campaign for Linux. With the Windows platform in the process of closing itself off, Valve has to look to greener pastures. This is all to motive third parties to get their stuff ready for a possible Linux-powered ‘Steambox’ – not a console, but a set of generic PC specifications. Remember: the Xbox is the only machine tied to DirectX – OpenGL runs everywhere else, including Windows (the PS3 is an oddball, and has a sort-of Sony-specific FrankenOpenGL). OpenGL simply makes more sense for developers, and now Valve is working very closely with Nvidia, AMD, and Intel to optimise their Linux drivers. Do the math, people.
I am happy to see that OpenGL under Linux will get some more attention. I am an aviation enthusiast (both simmer and real pilot) and so far the OpenGL performance under Linux has been a problem to run X-Plane at full speed. So far the vendors (NVidia, AMD, Intel) have had not much interest to invest effort into tuning the OpenGL under Linux in their drivers. Valve is a serious force however to highlight the performance issues and hopefully the situation will get much much better. After that, other game producers will probably see a future in Linux as well and DirectX can be started to phase out.
Edited 2012-08-02 16:56 UTC
valve is a serious force as a distributor, but not in games
let’s be honnest: as good as valves games are, they are few and far between
True, but Valve isn’t the only developer making Linux compatible games.
Steam is a very healthy distribution platform, all the games using any of the idTech engines shouldn’t require a lot of work to get running on Linux, all the CoD games have heavy roots from idTech3 so if the developer wanted to port their product to Linux it’s not a great leap of the imagination.
Whatever you say the fact is that as soon as Valve expressed its interest in OSX, its users got better OpenGL drivers. Situation repeats itself when Valve start interesting in Linux.
And if Valve is powerless, than I wish them more of it
Its good for Linux users 
Well duh! They are too busy building Steam to be spending much time with new games, not to mention they are still making money off the old ones like crazy so naturally they are more focused on steam right now.
<p>That said…why is it shocking that Linux runs OpenGL better than Windows? It shouldn’t be, nor should it be shocking that directX runs a few frames slower since Windows 7 and 8 use hardware acceleration on the desktop and for the most part Linux doesn’t. Not a judgement, just the way it is. If your GPU is doing other things naturally its gonna be a little slower than if it only has a single task, just common sense. Hell who hasn’t been playing some hardcore games on Win 7 and after quitting find the “Desktop composition is running slowly, want to use Windows Basic theme?” dialog box?</p>
Finally lets not forget that Valve has ALWAYS been an OpenGL house, heck they were using OpenGL when everyone else was using Glide. Its only natural that their games would have every tweak and trick for max OpenGL performance since their devs have been using it for so long.
You’re aware that linux does have Desktop Environments that are hardware accelerated,like Ubuntu’s unity. Which is the exact same Desktop environment value used for this test.
bassbeast as billshooter has already pointed out, Linux has a hardware accelerated desktop, in fact it has had it before Windows, in fact well before windows Vista, which is when windows gained hardware acceleration.
It’s called compiz look it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiz, unity on 12.04 is hw accelerated and negatively impacts gaming performance.
Valve says:
“That the Linux version runs faster than the Windows version (270.6) seems a little counter-intuitive, given the greater amount of time we have spent on the Windows version. However, it does speak to the underlying efficiency of the kernel and OpenGL.”
Thom Says:
“If it wasn’t obvious before, it should be now: Valve has started its marketing campaign for Linux. With the Windows platform in the process of closing itself off, Valve has to look to greener pastures… ”
Thom your clear bias against Linux is showing once again, Valve is pointing out a fact they have seen, you spin it so it becomes marketing and negative.
Its not because Linux clearly is kicking windows butt in terms of performance, on a 32bit kernel not 64 bit kernel (a 64 bit kernel should bring along with it more performance gains)
The performance improvements they have made on Linux, in turn led them to better optimise the windows graphics performance and identify bottle necks ultimately boosting the windows performance, but no this is nothing about actual superiority of an open platform but all about marketing … and your full of bull.
Comparing compiz to hardware acceleration is like comparing a video game to CAD, two different beasts. All compiz does is flipping 3D crud, whereas with hardware acceleration your browser, media player, every icon and triangle and font is processed by the GPU.
You can pretend they are equal but they really aren’t, they aren’t even close. As was reported here Mozilla even gave up trying to bring their hardware acceleration to linux because the drivers just were too buggy, works fine in Windows. Doing a spinning cube is NOT rendering the fonts on this web site off the GPU, its just not the same tech.
Talk about moving goal posts,
What do you think Kwin, Compiz, Unity etc do ? They render the desktop using OpenGL which runs all through the gpu.
All compiz does is render the entire desktop using openGL, the same thing Kwin does, the same thing Gnome does, which is the same thing Windows does with Aero. They are exactly the same thing. Do some fact checking please.
Mozilla firefox is an application that runs on the desktop, much like games are an application that run on the desktop. That has nothing to do with gpu accelerated desktops, or your initial point about gpu acceleration on windows causing windows fps to be lower, because again drum roll please Linux also uses the GPU to accelerate the desktop via OpenGL.
FYI mozilla firefox and Chrome both support hardware acceleration on Linux:
http://padoca.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/linux-browsers-gpu-2d3d-supp…
thats from January 2011 .. You were saying ?
BTW sorry, I don’t mean to put you down in any way. I generally don’t like doing that, its just that you are running with some not so accurate information.
I generally don’t like commenting on sites I have better things to do it all ends up becoming a pissing contest in the end.
The fact is that Linux and Windows both have hardware accelerated desktops and in both cases it negatively impacts game performance and general application gpu accelerated performance, so you cant say this is why Windows was performing worse. This is absolutely not the case, we have no idea under what conditions they have been testing this, for all we know aero could have been turned off and 3d acceleration turned off in Ubuntu, or they were both kept on, we just don’t know. I would guess they had turned off hardware acceleration in both cases, but that is just my guess.
If you read what they have been doing the same performance improvements they managed to make to the Linux build they have been able to make those same improvements in windows and improve the windows Nvidia driver and OpenGL implementation. It just clearly shows what is possible when Hardware vendors and Games manufacturers work together to improve performance, as none of the layers are abstracted away api’s they can see directly what is going on through the whole stack and can then optimise appropriately its just a clear sign that if you know what your doing the open source approach will produce more rapid gains because you can watch the game execution through the whole stack. The only boundaries of course being the proprietary binary drivers from Nvidia and AMD, but of course they have sent engineers over to valve which are in turn sitting there and optimising their drivers. At the end of all of this everyone wins, its such a cool thing Valve are doing as it is obviously costing them a lot of money to do this, but every one benefits.
This is why I commented and why I was pissed off with the way Thom reported it, he changed something really positive into a seedy marketing ploy, without even taking a look at the bigger picture and the implications of this. How dare Valve imply Microsoft Windows to be in any way inferior to Linux, it is just a marketing ploy, it has to be… right ?
Thom wasn’t one of your favourite Games Left 4 dead 2 on the Xbox 360 ? This is great news right ?
Talking about it like that (overall, WRT all the hoopla about “accelerated desktops” in the last few years) already places the goal post in a bit weird place …what do you think GDI acceleration in GFX cards & video overlays did since early 90s? (so, yeah, Windows first, and X subsequently piggybacking on those capabilities of the hw made for Win; but not the first hw-accelerated consumer desktop, Amiga probably claiming this one)
Though FF under Linux has significantly poorer GPU support, and generally requires “higher” ones to perform comparably. Essentially, it’s sadly the OSS way which wastes energy & resources…
It’s only logical, there are reasons to be cautious about such news from Valve now… Come on, with the recent repositioning of Steam, Valve makes itself a direct competitor to MS – Valve is interested to making MS offering appear worse. For Valve, it’s now all about Steam store profits, they’re making a certain impression to not lose them to MS store.
(though, down the line, I think Valve might be also eyeing Android – also Linux after all; to play there a role similar to what Steam on Windows did for the last few years_
And those benchmarks do seem worthless as anything beyond marketing ploy. They don’t really “speak to the underlying efficiency of the kernel and OpenGL” – more likely, it speaks to how nobody in DX team bothers to optimise some bottlenecks in useless scenarios of ~300 fps… (and I would expect people working on Steam to realise that…)
Edited 2012-08-10 00:15 UTC
Where do you get valve has always been an opengl house from?
Gabe Newell is a former Microsoft employee and it has always been a directx house. iD software has been openGL not Valve, valve has always been directx and Microsoft Windows, only within the last couple of years have they been pushing to opengl based platforms, ie PS3, Mac OSX and now Linux.
Here is some proof :
http://firingsquad.com/hardware/half-life_2_performance/
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/DirectX_Versions
Yes, they made only a few games. But those games usually gives me more hours of play (and replay) that most of the companies that made 2 or more games per year.
Other great thing with Valve is that each game have a long life (for example they keep updating L4D) and great costumer support. You spend 50 u$s in a game and 2 years later i keep playing it like if it was the first day.
I stop buying CodeMasters games because they don’t fix bugs, the costumer supports isn’t good, and cheaters usually ruin their only games and they don’t do anything about it. Valve actively fight only cheaters.
Source and Unity3D are soon to be Linux friendly.
Also, Valve has HalfLife franchise and quite a lot of their own content.
Actually, at least in the case of nVidia, OpenGL performance got a lot of attention.
Last time I took the time to compare OGL Windows vs. OGL Linux (Doom3 and Quake 4), Linux is was somewhat faster in both cases (not really surprising given the fact that both more-or-less use the same code base)
Never the less, your issue might be specific to X-plane.
Did you report it in nvnews forum? The nVidia developers tend to be very responsive.
– Gilboa
Edited 2012-08-02 19:11 UTC
It is not so much about nVidia but instead about the fact that X-Plane is develped by a very small number of developers and they cannot influence the hw vendors as much as bigger players can.
NVidia by the way provide much better OpenGL performance both in Windows and in Linux than AMD does. I am not currently ure if that looong lasting HD7970 issue has been fixed. Basically it was impossible to run X-Plane on that particular card with nothing more than medium settings. As soon as you introduced cars and clouds, the FPS would plummet.
Also note that X-Plane is perhaps the best computer benchmark as there is currently no consumer level computer available that can run X-Plane maxed out. Of course if you start to analyse why it is so, it boils down to quite silly decisions to calculate EVERYTHING that can be seen from 10 kilometers and thats a lot. Only lately Austin has started to think about optimization that maybe you do not have to calculate the houses 100km away that precisely as if you would stand next to it. Anyway X-Plane can bring any system to it knees and it is always a research to figure out is your setup CPU or GPU bound.
That doesn’t make any sense. Paraphrasing: when a codebase is very unoptimised, likely quite “patchy” and clearly with major architectural faults and errors, doing some insane things (overall, ignoring practices of sane engines, those on which drivers and hardware features focus on) …that makes it the best benchmark?!
Unfortunately what you’ve inadvertently pointed out is the very problem with the current ecosystem – the dependency on vendor specific OpenGL implementations rather than a generic across the board implementation that hooks into Mesa. In all due respects I would sooner the time and effort go into giving Mesa an overhaul in such a way that the likes of nVidia, AMD and Intel can create proprietary drivers that then hook into Mesa rather than requiring the driver vendors themselves to go out and implement the stack. A Mesa library that implements OpenGL all the way to 4.2 plus quality drivers that hook into that stack would be a huge win for Linux on the desktop overall – not just when it comes to games but when it also comes to things such as hardware accelerated compositing etc. The next big thing that needs a kick up the backside is the Wayland server to replace Xorg, all very nice having great drivers and a great OpenGL stack but it is a waste of time if the display technology is archaic.
Valve has been asking for user input – maybe email him about Mesa, maybe they will seriously look at it, who knows, but I agree it is the proper way to do it.
I am glad to hear OpenGL/Linux is faster that Windows/DirectX. However, a lot of Devs will only code for Windows. The question is (and maybe I missed it) is – is OpenGL/Windows faster than DirectX/Windows? A secondary question is how hard it is to code OpenGL for Windows Devs.
If DirectX is still faster than OpenGL on Windows, there won’t be a mass exodus. In addition, if OpenGL isn’t somewhat easy for Windows Devs using Visual Studio and Microsoft libraries, they will continue using what they have.
The bottom line, is once someone can convince Windows devs to use OpenGL, a good part of the battle is over.
Linux, Android, iOS, PS3, Wii, and MacOS don’t have Dirext3D/DirectX. All use OpenGL in some variant.
As more people buy non Windows products, the demand for OpenGL games rises.
If I were a game developer in today’s world and wanted to maximize my potential customer pool I would definitely be looking at OpenGL, but I would still have a D3D port for Xbox and Windows.
Middleware my good man; it’s not 1996 any more. Many AAA games are done using middleware platforms because they don’t want to invest the time/talent doing raw ports to the different platforms; the game has to be released across platforms at the same time. (crappy, laggy ports ho!)
Already the OpenGL/DX divide is for the most part non-existant other than for smaller titles and those developers who want/need custom/speed.
What Valve may help drive is a _focus_ on OpenGL as the primary source of effort instead of DirectX. Traditionally OpenGL games on Windows have always been second fiddle to DirectX and that trend may eventually swing the other direction due to the weight of iOS/Android/PS3 vs. PC/XBox/WinPhone; even with middleware (optimisation is everything for mobile systems)
Honestly, if it wasn’t for XBox, Microsoft would have already lost that grip.
This makes sense for a new developer who say, “I want to make games.” But for the vast majority of big games out there that would be ported to Linux, these are Windows games. Most of these games use DirectX.
I agree that as more and more developers come in and decide that they want to develop games for many platforms, then OpenGL makes sense. But for the current batch of big Windows games, these target Windows and XBox (with perhaps a crappy port to other consoles) and are written in DirectX.
Even for the current Windows dev who writes Windows and XBox games (using same development environment – XNA), if they decide to write (or rewrite) their current games for OpenGL, what do they do for XBox, which is most likely their premier platform.
I think as mobile games, tablet games, and the non-microsft platform in general grows, we may reach this tipping point. I don’t think we are there yet. It is possible that Windows 8 will help, but a lot depends of how successful Microsoft is with Windows Surface on tablets, convertibles, and whether or not they can resurrect the Windows Phone market.
Most games use existing code. And big name developer houses happily sell their code to other developers. All of these games
idTech 1,2,3,4, & 5 (Quake series, and Rage)
CryENGINE
Unreal Engine
Source (based of idTech)
IW Engine (Based off idTech3, used in all CoD games so far)
Unity Engine
etc……
I believe all those game engines have been ported to Linux except for IW Engine and Source, however it’s rooted in idTech3 so a lot of the work is probably done for them already, but I am not sure of how much they changed it.
If you looked up what games use those engines, you’d probably find a BIG list of games that are potentially Linux compatible, or would require a small amount of work to get it supported.
It will be the small and indy game developers that will do a lot of work porting their games to Linux.
Small and indy probably mostly simply won’t port – so they’ll have it easier, in a way.
And actually, much easier if they build on “very Microsoft” XNA (which got kinda popular in ~indy stuff) …the process of porting those might be even the simplest ( http://monogame.codeplex.com/ with existing examples in various app stores), most straightforward – to the point that I wouldn’t be surprised if many indy devs might stayed with the nice & comfy XNA.
Yes. After NVIDIA improved their drivers, OpenGL+Win started to be faster than DX+Win. (300 vs 270 vs 315 on Lin).
Now with being said, Valve team thinks that they can speed DX too. So they will contact MS or Nvidia (or both) so they can work some nice solution.
“A secondary question is how hard it is to code OpenGL for Windows Devs.”
They’re actually very similar abstractions because they’re designed to expose the same hardware functionality.
They’re so similar I’d be inclined to think a shim layer would be fairly effective, and search reveals that one already exists, even:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dxglwrap/
http://www.wcn.it/reactos.directx8.wrapper.opengl.jpg
It’s author hasn’t contributed anything since ’09, but it might prove the feasibility of that approach never the less.
“The question is (and maybe I missed it) is – is OpenGL/Windows faster than DirectX/Windows”
“If DirectX is still faster than OpenGL on Windows, there won’t be a mass exodus.”
According to the article:
Windows OpenGL: 303FPS
Windows DirectX: 270FPS
Linux OpenGL: 315FPS.
We shouldn’t extrapolate this directly to imply that linux would win a more complex benchmark. This benchmark might happen to be so fast that it exposes implementation bottlenecks on windows that wouldn’t ordinarily be reached with a more challenging problem. In other words, maybe the windows version peters out beyond 200FPS due to no interest in optimising that case.
Either way I think it obviously demonstrates that linux can handle games, it’s just a matter of convincing commercial publishers to show an interest. Microsoft may be providing the biggest incentive of all with Metro.
DirectX 9.0c is well known to have a overhead compared to OpenGL, this situation is reversed in Direct X 10 and 11
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?529385
lucas_maximus,
“DirectX 9.0c is well known to have a overhead compared to OpenGL, this situation is reversed in Direct X 10 and 11 ”
Would you mind citing a verifiable source for that claim?
Thanks
Read the link, it explains why.
It about pre-emptive multi-tasking is better in Windows Vista and 7 with the new Direct X versions than Windows XP and Direct X 9.0.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Direct3D#Direct3D_and_Window…
Also it states
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Direct3D#Direct3D_11
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Direct3D#Direct3D_10
Considering the Framerates were soo high (almost 300 FPS), the process was most likely CPU limited not GPU limited. (This is true also of Quake 3 which is now as much of a CPU benchmark than anything else, Quake 3 engine unless running at silly resolutions can’t really use more than 64mb of video ram).
Since a lot of these improvements appear to take load from the CPU, I would argue that it would be different if it was the same game using Direct X 11 vs OpenGL.
Edited 2012-08-02 19:31 UTC
lucas_maximus,
I appreciate the response. But I was hoping for actual benchmarks, not just a theoretical hypothesis.
I know they added more features in DX10 & 11, which if used will help offload the CPU, but a comparison between the SAME features of OpenGL and DirectX wouldn’t necessarily be affected by that. An apples to apples comparison between DX10 and OpenGL could still produce OpenGL as a winner. No solid evidence has been produced either way.
It’s unlikely to affect in game playability to any noticeable degree, it’s mostly about bragging rights.
But saying Linux is faster because of kernel and driver improvements when they compared code written against an API that is 8 years old to the latest API code is not a fair comparison.
Especially when the newest API has specific improvements that may invalidate the FPS difference.
Do they state what version of OpenGL they’re using? For all we know they might be using 2.1 (for starters the intel drivers on linux don’t fully support 3.0 yet)
OpenGL is not an API, it is a spec unlike Direct X.
OpenGL is a specification of an API.
Yes that is true, but Direct X is the implementation of the Direct X API, an important distinction.
lucas_maximus,
“But saying Linux is faster because of kernel and driver improvements when they compared code written against an API that is 8 years old to the latest API code is not a fair comparison.”
The age of an API isn’t as important as the implementation. The latest DX9 update was mid 2010, so it’s about 2 years old.
Also, just because a program is using a DX9 API doesn’t rule out that it could be using the same code path as the DX10 API when running on a DX10 installation. My guess is that this is the case, but I don’t have implementation knowledge or benchmarking data to be sure.
We really can’t draw conclusions without more data.
Oh please, it’s a known fact that Direct-X 11 is faster than 9.
Just download World of Warcraft trial and try for yourself….
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/world-of-warcraft-cataclysm-dir…
With nVidia cards it’s 30% increased performance, lol.
Poor Valve with their out dated engine.
Edited 2012-08-03 18:36 UTC
The only problem DirectX has is that it is only for Windows. One of the things that make Blizzard WoW so popular is that it had a native Mac OS OpenGL version from day 1. So from those 10-12 million subscribers probably at least a million or maybe even two are Mac users.
Citation needed. Never met a person playing on Mac on my High populated server…
Wafflez posted: “Citation needed. Never met a person playing on Mac on my High populated server…”
I have an iMac 27″ with radeon 5750 1GB as an offspec computer in the bedroom (mainly used for watching movies, light gaming, and for wife use) and it plays wow at 2560×1440 on max settings with smooth frame rates. I have it vsynced at 60 to prevent the tearing you get when rendering faster than the screen refresh rates. Server is Earthen Ring US as horde (high population server).
It can be done!
Disclaimer: The iMac is not my main computer of use, I run a custom made pc.
Edited 2012-08-05 20:36 UTC
So what? It still hardly impacts the overall success of the game, isn’t much of a factor in making it popular…
Edited 2012-08-10 00:03 UTC
And finally the “Chicken or the Egg dilemma” was solved.
Industry didn’t developed Linux games cause of “poor device drivers”, and on the same way, ATI, Nvidia and Intel didn’t made better graphic drivers because there was no market for desktop games.
Blizzard guys already said that they have a Linux native WOW client, used just by employees, and if they noticed that Windows 8 market is getting worse for distributing software out of the “Windows market”, would not be do difficult to port games…
If valve make a Linux box to run games and make it easy to run games on desktop Linux. If this sells other games makers will port to Linux and the world will have changed.
Soon everyone will be porting their apps to Linux.
Valve’s engine uses Direct X 9.0c which is quite old and isn’t as fast as Direct X 10 & 11.
http://omgcheesecake.net/index.php?/topic/2776-one-more-time-valve-…
It really has very little to do with the device drivers and the linux kernel in this case, it is simply that Direct X 9.0 is not as efficient as OpenGL.
Also the source Engine is from 2004. It ancient especially against the Crytek 3 and BattleField 3 engines. I am sure Quake 3 runs faster on Linux, but that is CPU bound on anything better than a Radeon 9000pro (2002/3).
I would be more interested in a Direct X 10/11 game and OpenGL.
This is more about dis-information because Gabe is worried the Windows 8 store is going to take those that release games through steam elsewhere.
Edited 2012-08-02 18:41 UTC
I’m not sure linking to that forum is going to actually strengthen your case.
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?529399
How about a list of improvements listed via wikipedia that can be verified on Microsoft sites and the guy that invented the First Person Shooter.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/john-Carmack-DirectX-OpenGL-API-Do…
Actually reading your sources, it sounds like D3D isn’t that significantly better after all:
“[…] I wouldn’t care to go over all of that for a dubious win.”
Writing good engines (and games) is probably more important anyway.
But it doesn’t matter much. Windows may survive as a gaming platform, but it’ll be hard to win back the mobile space.
And Gabe moving to Linux because of the Windows store? Doesn’t sound like a particularly clever move to me. Going for OpenGL will open OSX, Windows and Linux platforms. Its simply the right way to go. D3D is nothing but another (very successful) attempt of monopolizing infrastructure.
Edited 2012-08-02 19:50 UTC
You are taking the quote out of context. He is making a business decision, they have put a lot dev time into tools that help them develop the games, not the speed itself.
As for Valve, Windows 8 store will basically take away the advantage of releasing through Steam … that is the point.
EDIT: the point I was making is that DirectX 9 doesn’t have some of the improvements that DirectX 11 and 10 have.
These improvements make games less CPU intensive, and the high FPS rates are indicating that the Game was CPU bound and not GPU bound.
So the CPU having less work to do would most likely in this case increase the FPS count.
That is my theory anyway. It is consistent with the evidence I put forward.
Edited 2012-08-02 20:20 UTC
We don’t actually know if that is what will happen. It might but then again it might not.
By hedging his bets Gabe’s doing the smart thing.
Well that is my take on it, I accept it is speculation.
My main point of my posts though was that the performance benchmark wasn’t necessarily fair to Windows Vista and 7 regarding games, because the Direct X 9.0c api is about 8 years old and just doesn’t have features that take advantage of more modern hardware.
I think a Direct X 11 vs OpenGL test would be more interesting if at all possible.
Good point and you did provide some interesting points on that (rather than the moronic forum posts).
I think by focusing this on Linux OpenGL vs Windows DirectX we’re missing the more important point: good OpenGL performance for games on Linux.
The forum post I linked actually led me to my argument … the other posts are mostly for comedy.
The benchmark is not about fairness, it’s about the performance of the Linux port of an actual game.
But anyway I don’t see how the test is unfair: they are comparing a DirectX9 implementation with contemporary OpenGL.
I very much doubt they have updated their OpenGL implementation when they didn’t bother going with anything newer than DX9.
And no one is saying that you would get the same results with OpenGL4 vs DX11 anyway.
It’d be interesting to test the improvements made by GPU vendors using something like Unigine. There was a benchmark at TomsHardware where Ubuntu 11.10 scored below Windows7 on average (with a difference below 10 FPS) but it still beat DirectX11 in two of the three Unigine benchmarks when using AMD drivers.
Saying the Linux Kernel and Device drivers are faster than Windows is unfair when you are comparing Apples to Oranges.
The blog says exactly this:
I don’t see anything unfair there: they had spent a lot more time optimizing the Windows version yet they managed to get better results on Linux, so his conclusion is that both the kernel and OpenGL work great.
Later they managed to squeeze some more FPS on Windows with OpenGL, so it’s not like they are actually claiming that Linux performs a whole lot better than Windows, just that the Linux kernel and OpenGL provide a nice performance since they managed to achieve slightly better (but as a whole quite similar) performance with less effort.
I can’t be bothered any-more.
I already said it a thousand times, Direct X 10 and 11 are faster and utilise less CPU time. Direct X 9.0 is the bottle neck not the Windows kernel itself.
Also the source engine (with or without improvements) is like 8 years old. Compare something like Unreal Engine, I would be more interested.
No.
http://toastytech.com/guis/altomaze.jpg
http://toastytech.com/guis/alto2.html
As Zenja wrote in http://www.osnews.com/thread?467079:
Edited 2012-08-02 20:06 UTC
Okay then, Well popularized it then.
He has been the largest early influence on it.
Doom and Quake was massive in the early days.
As for the quote, most people regularly interchange Direct X and Direct 3D … it not really important in an interview with a tech journalist.
Edited 2012-08-02 20:12 UTC
<deleted>
Edited 2012-08-02 20:04 UTC
> I’m not sure linking to that forum is going to actually
> strengthen your case.
It’s one of his pages, actually:
“BTW come to the cheesecake forum and we welcome you with open ….Jaws :teehee:”
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?503329
“http:// omgcheesecake.net … JOIN US!”
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?503250
Edited 2012-08-02 19:47 UTC
Not one of mine actually, I am just a member … I have said this previously.
The only website I own is my person blog listed in my profile here.
We’ve been discussing this topic for a while.
Edited 2012-08-02 20:14 UTC
> Also the source Engine is from 2004. It ancient
No. The Source engine is developed in a continuous way:
https://www.develop-online.net/features/1191/Valve-on-Source-and-stu…
> dis-information because Gabe is worried the Windows 8 store
> is going to take those that release games through
> steam elsewhere.
To answer comments like those, Lucas_maximus uses just one word: “Speculation”.
Edited 2012-08-02 19:37 UTC
It is still using Direct X 9 on Windows, it isn’t a modern engine.
http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Source
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Engine_Features
Valve themselves only mention Direct X 9.
It like me claiming my website was in continuous development but still using .NET 1.1 or PHP 4 … doesn’t mean a lot.
That not really a problem, Valve have released quite a few cool things for the source engine that aren’t graphics related.
BTW, I spend quite a lot of money on Steam. I actually think Steam is pretty cool.
I am more called into question these set of statistics and whether it was really proving that Linux was faster.
Edited 2012-08-02 19:39 UTC
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but in the blog it suggests that they’ll try to optimize the source engine to run better on Windows/D3D so perhaps the issue has nothing to do with the fact the source engine isn’t optimized for DX10 or DX11.
Also it’s been said by Valve numerous times that the Source engine is a “living engine” meaning it’s always being updated. They just haven’t gone past DX9 support, and honestly for most games you don’t need to. Look at the CoD franchise, they’re still using a modified idTech3 engine and just recently announced they’re dropping it for a newer one.
I keep hoping the delay for HL2:E3 and/or HL3 is due to the fact that they are doing a major update the Source engine. Source 2 Engine?
I am saying that some optimizations are not possible with Direct X 9.0
http://www.osnews.com/thread?529399
Edited 2012-08-02 20:10 UTC
Indeed source is a gradual engine, the last update was for portal2 which contained quite a few updates for fluid and improved graphical fidelity.
Oh comon, it undermines Steam’s business model.
Edited 2012-08-02 20:16 UTC
You said that he was lying.
Lying is a strong word, I would prefer I was saying he was spinning it for the reason I have numerously gave on the thread.
Every company does this and it tbh perfectly normal and acceptable behaviour.
This is the same that saying that every company does not tell the truth. And that this is normal and acceptable behaviour.
A fish monger doesn’t say “come buy my smelly fish”.
To make things clear: so you keep saying that every company does not tell the truth, and that this is an acceptable behaviour?
There is a difference between lying and promoting your product pros and hiding the cons.
Anyway this conversation has gone on longer than it needs to, it’s another “I am taking the moral high ground and not going to accept reality” conversation.
So you are saying now that I don’t accept reality? No, this conversation was about accepting reality. About accepting that you said that Gabe was “dis-informing”, (without knowing if it was true, that’s “speculating”, “accusations without proofs”, etc.) and that you said that “Every company does this and it tbh perfectly normal and acceptable behaviour.”.
I hope that you realize that saying that it is acceptable that companies “dis-inform” us… means that you say that we can’t trust companies.
Yes of course I am.
Gabe obviously has an Agenda, he slams Win 8 and then says Valve says Linux is faster at rendering their games so the world and their dogs thinks that OpenGL is inheritely better.
Most companies do what is in their interest, you can only trust them when their interests are inline with yours.
Anything else is foolish.
Because despite anyone’s hypothetical agendas, it’s completely unreasonable that they might just be getting better performance with the Linux port of L4D2 than they do with the Windows version, right?
Everyone seems to be going butthurt about a FPS comparison of a work-in-progress port when the whole meat of the blog article is that thanks to the collaboration with GPU vendors they managed to go from 6 to 315 FPS on Linux, and that in doing so they learned some stuff that might help further improving the performance of the game on Windows.
Not when Windows 8 store completely undermines his own business model. No.
I see, so they are lying about the FPS they are getting when running L4D2 on Linux (with an awesome difference of 12 FPS that surely will make all the difference for gamers, right?) because they want people to stay away from an OS that will be implementing an app store and jump over to another OS that (wait for it) has been running an app store for quite longer.
Yes, that really makes sense.
Edited 2012-08-04 16:22 UTC
I am not saying that, I am just saying that the test is not entirely fair to Windows and Modern Direct X.
Linux advocates will be quoting that blog post for the next ten years.
The test is just a comparison between a final released product and an under development port. How is it not fair? I mean, it’s not a competition between Linux and Ẃindows, those are just the specific performance results for a specific product.
It seems completely fair to me that Valve wants to compare the work so far on the Linux port with the performance of their final product on other platform, since that should be the level of performance they would be targeting.
It just so happens that they managed to get better performance on Linux and their findings helped them to squeeze some extra FPS on the Windows version with OpenGL, and they also found a problem with DirectX that they’ll now try to mitigate.
They wrote a blog article about that and for some reason some people went all butthurt about the supposed unfairness of the results they got.
If Linux advocates wanted something to brag about they could just cherry pick Unigine were Ubuntu 11.10 beats DirectX 11 in two of the three available benchmarks.
Tbh, I wasn’t that butt hurt about it.
I just wanted to make sure before everyone said “Windows lol” … that I said, Direct X 9 is slow because of the following reasons.
Nth Man ended up being butthurt about the fact that I think there is a bit of agenda behind it.
But whatever, this is neo-slashdot. It all gets outta hand very quickly.
Maybe there is a bit of agenda, maybe not. I didn’t say otherwise.
> Nth Man ended up being butthurt about the fact that I think
> there is a bit of agenda behind it.
That is simply not true. Stop telling false things about me
and if you want to call someone “being butthurt”, call it yourself.
Not to repeat myself: this is what I was talking about:
http://www.osnews.com/thread?529660
Edited 2012-08-07 09:05 UTC
You’re arguing against a point that nobody is making (certainly not the original Valve article).
The “Linux faster than Windows” point only concerns the game running OpenGL (315fps vs 300fps). Once you compare OpenGL to DirectX, it’s apples to oranges because the devs didn’t spend as much time optimising both APIs. Comparing Linux/OGL to Windows/DX is silly. Case in point: Valve is hoping to use what they learned optimising OGL to optimise DX as well.
As for DX9 being an old API, consider the fact that OpenGL on Linux is an old version of the API too (not as up to date as OGL on windows), so one could argue that DX9’s age isn’t an issue here.
But of course, regardless of performance, the problem with DirectX is that it is a non-starter where portability is concerned. If it wasn’t for the DX-only XBox, no sane developper would do the extra work of maintaining two similar APIs. They’d just use OpenGL, which is available on more platforms.
Direct X 9.0c is an ageing implementation of an API on a Operating system that is going to be unsupported in 2 years time.
Vendors supply their own version of the OpenGL stack on an OS. So the driver code and probably their implementations has been optimized since 2004 (which is what it stated in the article), so no surprise it is faster.
As for portability yes Direct X is only going to work on 3 different platforms, but quite a lot of games have both an OpenGL mode and a Direct X mode. Indicating that it isn’t that hard to write a wrapper around both APIs.
There is more than just OpenGL and DirectX out there.
As I mentioned on another thread, usually each gaming system has a different graphics API.
When everything is done by the same studio, usually an abstraction layer is created that exposes the required set of features across gaming systems.
Additionally some publishers prefer to focus on a main platform, while outsourcing ports to separate gaming systems. In this case each outsourcing studio gets to rewrite the graphics engine for the system being requested.
In practice when such choices really matter (for example, indy devs without much resources, making the small games of the like that got fairly popular recently on Xbox Live or mobile phones), going DirectX in a way (actually, even “more MS” – XNA) might be the smoothest & least-work way towards multi-platform… http://monogame.codeplex.com/ (with existing examples in iOS and Android stores, Linux)
And there you were doing so well making a good point without resorting to baseless negative comments, but alas…
My biggest concern is that Valve might use L4D2 as some sort of market analyzing tool to see if there is any market at all for Linux games. If they notice it doesn’t sell as much as they hoped, and man I hope this is not the case but probably is, they might consequently stop porting the rest of their titles. It has happened before with Loki even though that was a long time ago and the user base was a lot smaller.
I will probably buy a copy just because they are willing to put effort into the platform I use everyday. I’m not even sure my computer is good enough to run it but I don’t care.
I bought the Humble pack for Linux because of this exact reason and even paid quite more than I would have needed to. It’s my way of showing support.
The thing is most Steam users I believe own L4D2, so they already own it.
If you own it you can play it on any computer (Mac, Windows, Linux) that you has the Steam client installed and you are logged into. I could imagine since most of their customer do not run Linux that usage will be very small at first. However I could imagine it will grow.
There were also rumors about Steam distributing other applications besides games, so perhaps their plan is eventually launch their own distribution or something (based on Ubuntu).
Just install steam, each steam installation on Linux they will know about, the greater the audience with Linux steam clients, the greater the market they can hit with games.
I think they will be counting steam users using Linux over steam users buying L4D2, which I will be buying as well.
have you got unigines oil rush by any chance ? thats a pretty decent game as well.
Well, if video drivers are decent… no surprises there
I’m pleasantly surprised that we’re already seeing positive inroads made by Valve on the Linux front. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but I didn’t expect things to move as quickly as they are. I’m glad Valve is really sinking their teeth into this project. I look forward to future developments.
I much prefer articles highlighting Valves positive contributions to Linux instead of a story about Gabe bashing Windows 8.
Now if only this could help the open source driver situation.
Why do open source fans keep propagating the myth that OpenGL runs everywhere besides Windows?
In the games industry, there isn’t a single console that offers proper OpenGL, and no one uses it in console games.
The PS3 PSGL is a joke only used for internal demos. Most games make use middleware built on top of RSX directly and software rendering distributed across the cell processors.
Besides the XBox, Dreamcast also had a DirectX API, which very few developers made use of.
All other consoles have graphics API that only resemble OpenGL in concept, nothing more.
Game developers are not API/OS/Language religious, they use whatever takes more performance out of the hardware where they want to target their games.
I guess Valve means that L4D2 runs faster on Ubuntu than it does Windows(XP? Vista? 7?).
The marketing campaign has started!
Am I the only one who’s sceptic?
Mac OS X gaming didn’t catch on (ye at first there were ports, still no new AAA games on Steam for Macs…) yet people expect Linux to catch on?
There is a lot more potential from the point view that Valve can ‘muck in’ and fix up problems directly rather than pleading to Apple to fix OpenGL issues that have been carrying over with each release of Mac OS X. The best example of that would be Chrome and kernel panic caused by either a driver or OpenGL bug – such issues Valve could address either directly by talking to AMD or NVidia or fixing it up themselves in Mesa when it comes to Intel video cards.