Valve ports L4D2 to Linux

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mongoose7
Posts: 1227
Joined: Wed Apr 06, 2011 12:13 pm

Valve ports L4D2 to Linux

Post by mongoose7 »

No one interested in the current kerfuffle over OpenGL vs DX?

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/08/v ... s-version/
hendu
Posts: 2600
Joined: Sat Dec 18, 2010 12:53 pm

Re: Valve ports L4D2 to Linux

Post by hendu »

mongoose7
Posts: 1227
Joined: Wed Apr 06, 2011 12:13 pm

Re: Valve ports L4D2 to Linux

Post by mongoose7 »

Yes, but that is giving a cheer to Valve for porting a game to Linux.

What I'm interested in is the performance of OpenGL on Linux. Many complain that graphics card manufacturers do not invest enough time in the Linux drivers. But this article reports that the performance on Linux in OpenGL is better than Windows and better that DirectX on Windows. I even heard a report that all they did was code a shim to convert DX to OGL. This is clearly nonsense, but it would be interesting to know what they did. Whether they simply optimised the game for Linux/OGL or whether they actually pulled a stunt. Even knowing that there is a way to achieve better performance from the current drivers would be interesting in itself.

But the posters here have held fire, not reacting to rumour but waiting for the facts. Chapeau!
hendu
Posts: 2600
Joined: Sat Dec 18, 2010 12:53 pm

Re: Valve ports L4D2 to Linux

Post by hendu »

This is clearly nonsense, but it would be interesting to know what they did.
There's no rumors, it's all from the horse's mouth. Open benchmarks and Valve's siggraph presentation + blog. We have the facts.

Driver equivalence - we have regular benchmarks on Phoronix. Both AMD and Nvidia use the same code for their drivers cross-OS, and barring regressions, both get very close the same performance on both Win and Lin. Depending on the app it usually swings a bit one way, usually less than 3% anyway.

Shim that converts dx to gl - true. Their profiling stated than with the Nvidia driver in single-threaded mode, their shim converter used 20% cpu and the nv driver 80%. With the nv driver in multithreaded mode, it was 50%-50%. They also stated that just by tweaking the shim they should be able to get a few more percents more perf in GL.
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