Valve Finds Open Source Drivers To Be Great 159
An anonymous reader writes "Intel's Open-Source Technology Center was given source-code access to Valve's Left 4 Dead 2 game in order to help them fix Linux bugs and to better optimize their graphics driver to this forthcoming Linux native game on the Source Engine. Intel has talked about their Valve Linux development experiences and now they managed to get Left 4 Dead 2 running on their open-source graphics driver. Valve also has grown fond of open-source hardware drivers: 'Valve Linux developers have also been happy looking at an open-source graphics driver. Valve Linux developers found it equally thrilling that now when hitting a bottleneck in their game or looking for areas for performance optimizations, they are simply able to look into Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver to understand how an operation is handled by the hardware, tossing some extra debugging statements into the Intel driver to see what's happening, and making other driver tweaks.'"
Good news (Score:5, Interesting)
This is good news, because a company like Valve might actually have the clout to get AMD and/or nVidia to release good open-source drivers. After all, if it wasn't for the games released by companies like Valve, a heck of a lot fewer PC owners would need/want discrete video cards. And neither AMD nor nVidia wants a popular game to run worse on their card than on their competitors.
Re:Valve finds Intel's driver to be great. (Score:5, Interesting)
A gaming box with *current* Intel hardware would suck. But that's primarily because the current Intel "GPUs" are integrated onto the CPU die, and are only "good enough" .
I wonder how well Intel's performance would scale up. If they took their basic design, and used 600-1600 render cores instead of 6-16. I mean, a top-of-the-line card from nVidia or AMD has *thousands* of cores spread between two dies, while Intel is cramming a dozen cores into whatever space is left on the CPU die. Let them put out a full-size card, put a few gigs of dedicated memory and cache on it, and see what happens. We won't know for sure until it's tried, but rendering tends to be a pretty scalable problem.
If Intel *does* do that, they would be a likely candidate for the hypothesized SteamBox console, since they seem to be working *very* closely with Valve.
Re:Only Valve can afford to experiment (Score:5, Interesting)
Valve as a company is built to experiment. They were experimenting before they had metric fucktons of money (a metric fuckton is 1.7 imperial fucktons). Turning TF2 into "My Pretty Mercenary" (accessorize! explodize!) was an experiment. Steam itself was an experiment. Their experiments have frequently paid off, and now they've got the ability to do even more radical experiments.
Re:Valve finds Intel's driver to be great. (Score:4, Interesting)
Chances are they'll just release a Steam box with Intel hardware instaed.
I don't see that happening. Instead, I see Valve partnering with one of the "real" GPU companies (AMD or NVidia) and co-operating with them in the same manner. In NVidia's case, I see them signing enough NDAs to get access to the closed-source driver code.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)