Is It Time For an OpenGL Gaming Revolution? 496
MrSeb writes "In a twist that reinforces Valve's distaste for Windows 8, it turns out that the Source engine — the 3D engine that powers Half Life 2, Left 4 Dead, and Dota 2 — runs faster on Ubuntu 12.04 and OpenGL (315 fps) than Windows 7 and DirectX/Direct3D (270.6 fps); almost a 20% speed-up. These figures are remarkable, considering Valve has been refining the Source engine's performance under Windows for almost 10 years, while the Valve Linux team has only been working on the Linux port of Source for a few months. Valve attributes the speed-up to the 'underlying efficiency of the [Linux] kernel and OpenGL.' But here's the best bit: Using these new OpenGL optimizations to the Source engine, the OpenGL version of L4D2 on Windows is now faster than the DirectX version (303.4 fps vs. 270.6 fps). If OpenGL is faster, and it has a comparable feature set, and hardware support is excellent... why is Direct3D still the de facto API? With Windows losing its gaming crown and smartphones (OpenGL ES!) gaining in popularity, is it time for an OpenGL revolution?"
Direct3D can do better (Score:5, Informative)
Valve's blog post [valvesoftware.com], near the bottom, indicates that they plan on fixing the hang-up with Direct3D, now that they know that the hardware can do better than 270 fps.
Re: (Score:3)
I think people should ask themselves when the last time Valve seriously looked into updating the Source engine on Windows.
The last major support shift was for Mac OS X, when they pushed Steam onto that OS. Clearly, they are looking into supporting Linux now and they are tweaking code to get the most out of it.
When was the last time that the Steam engine even needed this kind of look on Windows? 2006 or 2007? As someone pointed out in a post further down: OpenGL is beating DirectX 9. Windows 8 is about to pu
Re: (Score:3)
the.... Steam engine? Steam isn't an engine.
Any major game company with vendor support... (Score:3)
Re:Direct3D can do better (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would they? Using old directx 9 code that makes 270 fps is more than good enough, there's no reason to work back to optimize it for directx 11/11.1 etc.
When you're talking about 270 FPS you're into seriously questionable scaling issues, not for reasonable performance ranges. Just because something is more efficient at 200 fps doesn't mean it's more or less efficient at 50. That's the same as saying my car can do 270 kph, and yours can do 315... well yay. But which one is more fuel efficient at 60fps? (And which card, which drivers etc. etc. etc. all of which is secondary when you're talking about performance numbers in those ranges.).
Re:Direct3D can do better (Score:5, Funny)
my car can do 270 kph, and yours can do 315... well yay. But which one is more fuel efficient at 60fps?
I'm not sure whether you're talking about cars or computers now, but the answer's the same either way; it's depends on the driver.
Re:Direct3D can do better (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Direct3D can do better (Score:5, Insightful)
For some reason, PC games often have nasty mouse lag when locked to vsynced 60fps. This is partly the frame or two taken for the input to be processed and affect the rendered output. And it's more significantly the GPU often rendering a few frames ahead of the CPU.
The only reason to go beyond 60fps, really, is to reduce these latencies. There should be other ways to solve them, to ensure that input is processed and the results displayed in 1-2/60ths of a second.
Re:Direct3D can do better (Score:4, Interesting)
This article is based on Left4Dead 2, which use DirectX9. It's not relevant anymore. It's from years ago. Microsoft improved DirectX A LOT since then.
It is very relevant to anyone using Windows XP and/or many older and especially integrated graphics cards. Which is a lot of people. Most modern games include a DX9 rendering mode (or only use DX9, period) for that exact reason.
Re:Direct3D can do better (Score:4, Informative)
Windows XP is only running on 13% of the machines using Steam which have participated in the Hardware Survey. This is honestly like saying that it's still relevant to develop for IE6 or Red Hat 7.2.
The good thing is that as soon as consoles move on to the next generation, we'll see a huge shift to DirectX 11.1.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Direct3D can do better (Score:4, Insightful)
By making you pay $116 for your computer continuing to do what it always has done? Run windows apps?
Seriously I love Windows 7. It's the best MS operating system so far. But I don't pretend that I couldn't switch back to Windows XP tomorrow and do exactly the same things as I do today.
Re:Direct3D can do better (Score:4, Informative)
Most linux desktops does that too, my desktop has been hardware accelarated around 6 years, not that it matters: I usually game fullscreen, and even when I do not, I rarely interact with BOTH the game and the desktop at the same time. And if it DID matter, it would be an improvements since the hardware accelerations would mean less resources are wasted by desktop, it it wasn't accelerated it would hurt other applications using the same hardware much more.
Re: (Score:3)
last I checked Linux doesn't do that.
I guess you missed out on the whole "why doesn't gnome shell work on my computer" thing
valve just doesnt' like windows8 for the app store (Score:5, Insightful)
because it makes steam obsolete.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:valve just doesnt' like windows8 for the app st (Score:5, Funny)
I'd also suspect that WinRT and Win8 Metro apps won't support OpenGL... (Can anyone confirm/deny?)
I'd also expect WinRT won't support graphics, mathematical functions or English. (Can anyone confirm/deny?)
Re:valve just doesnt' like windows8 for the app st (Score:5, Informative)
Here [microsoft.com] is a complete list of Win32 APIs that are supported for Metro apps. If you look under "Graphics", you'll notice that it has Direct2D and Direct3D, but not OpenGL.
Re: (Score:3)
opengl32.dll
Re:valve just doesnt' like windows8 for the app st (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:valve just doesnt' like windows8 for the app st (Score:4, Insightful)
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Windows app store optional? It sure is in the consumer preview. I didn't see Valve decrying Apple for making the Mac App Store. Steam works just fine on the Mac, and it will continue to work just fine in Windows.
Re:valve just doesnt' like windows8 for the app st (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, no it doesn't. Steam offers more than just a store. Aside from the obvious fact that everyone who owns games on it already will stick with it, it offers cloud support, chat and gaming with friends, etc. MS tried the same with GFWL: I know of not one single person, not even on the Internet, who liked it. Oh I'm sure there is someone out there, but it was nearly universally despised by gamers. I have little doubt the Windows 8 store will suffer the same fate, probably by actually using GFWL for the games part (MS for some reason refuses to let it die).
And second, of course, there are anti-trust issues. Massive ones. Much much much bigger than the ones that came with IE, since very very serious money is on the line with digital stores. And it isn't just Valve, either: EA (Origin), Gamestop (Impulse), and CD Projekt Red (Good Old Games) et alia will all be after Microsoft's head if they try to use their first-party advantage to undercut them.
Dupe. (Score:5, Informative)
Who let this one through?
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/08/02/1236203/valve-shares-performance-numbers-on-port-of-left4dead [slashdot.org]
Re:Dupe. (Score:5, Insightful)
Being the submitter of the article from this morning, I think it raises another topic of conversation. Whether or not that deserves another story, or a thread on the other submitted story, I'll leave to the crowd to decide.
20% difference is too large (Score:3)
I'm a bit skeptical about these numbers..
Linux games often run better, faster (Score:5, Insightful)
I've played a few Linux ports - America's Army Online, Diablo 2 (with Cedega), etc.
And they've all palyed faster under Linux, than windows on my own PC.
Also crashed a lot less, when played in Linux.
So I'm not surprised, and think they are reasonable numbers
Re: (Score:3)
We use to compare running Oracle on the exact same box, both optimized, on Windows and Linux. Linux was always faster, too.
Re:20% difference is too large (Score:5, Insightful)
A 0.5-millisecond difference in a 3.6-millisecond frame time is “hardly worth mentioning”? You know, people get paid a lot to find out how to gain those 0.5 milliseconds in a 33-millisecond frame time.
Re:20% difference is too large (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm one of the people who get paid a lot of money to find 0.5ms gains, and yes, in this case it's hardly worth mentioning. Differences in frame time when you're sub 4ms really are not significant and are likely to be due to any number of bottlnecks which are unlikely to be present at more realistic framerates (when people like me might be more likely to care).
There's no indication here about hardware, drivers, or any number of external factors here. This is purely Valve having another dig at Microsoft in the press, because Win8 threatens their business model. There's a lot of smart people working at Valve. I'd expect better of them.
Why is Direct3D still the de facto API? (Score:4, Interesting)
Besides that most, if not all, of my console games are OpenGL not DirectX.
Re:Why is Direct3D still the de facto API? (Score:4, Informative)
Besides that most, if not all, of my console games are OpenGL not DirectX.
Not if your console is a Wii or a PS3 since everyone uses the vendor supplied graphics API. On the PS3 this is PSGL which while smilar to OpenGL ES 1.0 is not OpenGL and is instead based on Cg created by NVIDIA. On the Wii this is another proprietary API that is similar to fixed function OpenGL but is again not OpenGL.
Re:Why is Direct3D still the de facto API? (Score:5, Interesting)
> On the PS3 this is PSGL
Technically the PS3 supports _2_ graphics API: CGM and PSGL. I don't know of any games that have actually shipped with PSGL. (Almost?) Everyone uses the lower level CGM for performance reasons, even though it is more work.
> On the Wii this is another proprietary API that is similar to fixed function OpenGL but is again not OpenGL.
Correct. The native API on the Wii is GX.
I implemented OpenGL on the Wii a years back and shipped a couple of games with it. (We also had a shipping OpenGL implementation on the PS2!) The design of the GX is very, very, similar to OpenGL.
The biggest PITA is that the Wii only has 1/2 pixel shaders. You have multi-texture support via TEVs and can do some pixel math but it is very tedious, say for shadow mapping.
On the plus side the biggest hack is you can get 32-bit palettized (8-bit) textures if you burn through 2 TEVs ;-)
Re:Why is Direct3D still the de facto API? (Score:4, Interesting)
most, if not all, of my console games are OpenGL not DirectX.
I don't have a 360 so unless Sony, or Nintendo whet all Sega Level of Crazy and Licensed Windows CE I don't think they would permit DirectX code on their systems.
It's about time (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think anyone ever reasonably stated that Linux wasn't efficient, or that OpenGL wasn't adequate compared to Direct3D. Or maybe they did, but it wasn't factual. A properly configured Linux system has been faster than Windows for some time, at least for the past few years. The main problem with Linux has always been the lack of polish and presentation to the general public. The pieces have always been there, it's just been very fragile. Maybe now that someone is stepping up to the plate, Linux can receive what it's needed all along: better marketing and polishing. IMHO, it hasn't been large technical issues keeping Linux back. The technology is sound, and has been for quite some time.
Re:It's about time (Score:4, Insightful)
Assuming that you have the drivers you need.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's part of the polish. Driver availability and stability all contributes to the OS experience. Yes, it's not trivial to write your own if it isn't provided by the manufacturer.
But the very act of having to go search online is just as annoying whether for a driver or for a piece of software that does what you want done.
It's all a part of the polish.
Re: (Score:3)
A prime example is Civ5. DX9/10can use about 6 cores of a 12core cpu. DX11 mode can make use of a bit over 11 cores and almost doubles the FPS. Entirely because a single core can only feed so many commands to the GPU. Once your hit that limit, you will not be able to increase your FPS without ether reducing the numbers of c
Re: (Score:3)
I don't think anyone ever reasonably stated that Linux wasn't efficient
Every time you turn around someone is saying that X11 is bloated and obsolete. This proves that incorrect. Notably, they were able to get better performance out of X11 than Windows without sacrificing network transparency. Someone should tell that to the Wayland guys.
OpenGL Support (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OpenGL Support (Score:5, Informative)
Sir, this is complete, utter bullshit.
DirectX gets almost nothing “much earlier”, because it has no extension mechanism. With DirectX you are stuck with the latest version. It has obvious advantages, but early features are certainly not amongst them. Think what you want about the ARB, it does release and releases often.
As for the documentation being terrible and vague, that's pretty uninformed, too. Every extension is fully documented and the vendors know precisely what needs to be implemented. There is no Direct3D equivalent of the 600-page OpenGL specification [opengl.org]. The DirectX documentation is a programmer’s guide, not a specification. Every single version of the GLSL standard comes with a full grammar of the language which lets you reimplement a parser or compiler. There is no such thing as a grammar for HLSL (the D3D equivalent). What Microsoft calls a “grammar” for HLSL can be found here [microsoft.com] and anyone not even in the field of graphics programming will immediately understand how much of a joke it is compared to this [opengl.org] (pages 166 to 174).
(Source: I work on Windows, Linux, PS3, Xbox and mobile game engines)
Re:OpenGL Support (Score:5, Insightful)
An extensive, detailed specification does not equal good documentation. It equals an extensive, detailed specification.
Re:OpenGL Support (Score:5, Insightful)
no, it does equal good documentation. What you seem to be wanting is a tutorial. Such things are adjunct to the documentation, and whilst they are very important, they are not the documentation itself.
DirectX has the advantage of other features (Score:4, Interesting)
DirectX has the advantage of other features built in. OpenGL is just graphics. DirectX also does audio and manages controller input.
Low, there are several Open source API's that offer these other features, and some that bundle them with OpenGL, but it isn't as standardized.
I use LWJGL [lwjgl.org] personally.
Re: (Score:3)
DirectX has the advantage of other features built in. OpenGL is just graphics. DirectX also does audio and manages controller input.
I thought that DirectSound and DirectInput were both deprecated a couple years ago. I know that as of Vista, DirectSound was emulated in software and no longer lets you take over the sound output completely (you need WASAPI for that).
Re:DirectX has the advantage of other features (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
A giant sucking sound.
Direct X vs Open GL (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
To be more specific, Apple controls all of their OpenGL implementation, both hardware and software (like Microsoft did before switching to DirectX), so Valve can't just write bugs against nVidia - they need to write bugs against Apple. The thing that always bugged me about Apple's implementation is that they only update it with OS releases. I've never seen them patch an OpenGL bug in a released version (though to be honest, I am at least 5 years separated from OS X - if they've changed their tune, hooray fo
No, but... (Score:4, Funny)
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/08/02/1236203/valve-shares-performance-numbers-on-port-of-left4dead [slashdot.org]
Never about performance or features (Score:5, Insightful)
It was never about performance or features. The issue has always been about return on investment.
If I wrote an OpenGL engine in 2006, I could release my title on Mac, Windows and Linux. That sounds great, but how many additional sales do I get for Mac or Linux in 2006? Conversely, writing a DirectX engine in 2006 means I can release on Windows and XBox, where there is a massive return on investment.
Now that Mac has stormed to over 14% market share, and mobile development is huge, there is a return on investment in OpenGL. That is what matters. If wonder if it is too late for Sony to capitalize on this approach for their PS4? Surely they have development hardware in the hands of key developers. If the PS4 used a standard x86_64 processor and supported OpenGL, it would make game development that much easier. Maybe the really smart move is a low-power, quiet Nvidia ARM CPU paired with a beefy NVidia GPU.
Re: (Score:3)
My understanding is the state of Windows' OpenGL drivers is actually pretty poor outside of Nvidia. (Carmack has complained about this.) So in theory OpenGL gives you Windows support, in practice D3D may allow you to reach more machines.
Re:Never about performance or features (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm flipped back and forth between Nvidia and ATI cards over the years. The reality is that games (especially new releases) will have bugs that only happen with one and not the other.
If you own an ATI card, you likely have had an AS-specific issue and think that ATI drivers suck and assume Nvidia is better. Or vice-versa.
Re: (Score:3)
It might help the main platform if you're a bad coder, but you have to spend a bunch of time on the port in the first place, and then spend extra time maintaining the split codebase. As much as I like to see multi-platform support, I don't think the benefit has always been there.
how is the image quality? (Score:3)
Also when the frame rate is that high it typically isn't a good test. Create a map with enough detail that the frame rate gets dropped below 60 and compare them there for a real test.
While it would be cool if they could get OpenGL looking as good and working as efficiently as DirectX I wont' believe it until I see proof. This article sounds more like OpenGL propaganda than reality.
Valve Linux Devs prefer Open Drivers (Score:5, Interesting)
I followed a few links and found my way here:
http://www.paranormal-entertainment.com/idr/blog/posts/2012-07-19T18%3A54%3A37Z-The_zombies_cometh/ [paranormal...inment.com]
It's a blog about an experience intel driver developers had working with the Valve Linux team. What I found interesting is that the Valve developers prefer working with open drivers for an obvious reason - It's hard to find out what went wrong when you're dealing with a black box. What I gathered from the discussion is that this openness was a huge boost to development of both the game and the driver. This gives me hope that there may be a bright future for open source graphics drivers and even gaming on Linux.
From the blog:
Haswell will have 40 execution units in it’s best bin. It’s 2,5 faster even if they not gonna change anything in shaders, which is unlikely. Plus 64 MB of on-package memory to deal with bandwidth problem.
With that performance and official open-source driver Intel will be the best choice for gaming in Linux next year, at least in notebooks.
A pretty good GPU + an open driver + an open kernel coupled with a working relations ship between the 3 groups should result in a super graphics and games on Linux. I'm not a gamer, but I'll buy their games just to support this. Typing this on a Sandy Bridge machine pulling from xorg-edgers.
DX9 (Score:4, Informative)
If OpenGL is faster, and it has a comparable feature set, and hardware support is excellent... why is Direct3D still the de facto API?
Because Valve is using DX9, not DX11. Even the Gallium3D developers have stated DX11 is much cleaner, easier, and feature rich than OpenGL. There are many things DX11 can do 2x-3s faster than DX9 but breaks engine compatibility with DX9, which makes me wonder how a proper DX11 optimized engine would compare to OpenGL.
Rule of thumb is if a graphics engine works with DX9/OpenGL, then it is not making full use of DX11 because the optimal flow of data is different and would require an entirely differently designed engine.
32-bit vs 64-bit? (Score:5, Interesting)
On the referenced blog [valvesoftware.com], I asked whether they'd repeated the test for a 64-bit Linux distro to directly compare to the 64-bit Windows installation they used. Unfortunately, my comment there got deleted. Does anyone have any insight as to what effect switching to a 64-bit distro might have? On one hand, x86-64 has a reputation for being more compiler-friendly than x86-32, what with more explicitly-named registers and all the other goodness. On the other hand, it'd have to sling around longer pointers (and possibly waste more space on 8-byte-aligned data structures? Is that true?). What would the net result likely be?
Put another way, I wish they'd eliminated that rather large test environment variable before publishing their numbers.
Re:No.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Major software companies will put more effort in the tablet and more portable touch displays.
That's already starting to happen. Tablet sales are 24% of the market in 2012, but are increasing 100% year over year. If that continues for 18 more months, tablets will be outselling "traditional form factor" PCs, including laptops and desktops, within a few years. Of course, the installed base of traditional PCs is still larger so it will be several years after that before the tablet form factor has a larger install base, but the writing is on the wall.
Re:No.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Tablet sales really don't mean much because people are not replacing desktops with tablets. They are using tablets in addition to desktops. Now, tablets COULD affect laptop sales, as they are much similar to each other as to what they can do, in some respects anyway.
As for a linux port, so what? Xbox/PS games have been ported to PC and vice versus for years. Doesnt mean much that Valve is porting to Linux. All it means is they see a new area to make money, from sole linux users, which are a SMALL % of desktops.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly.
Valve has bean counters too, and it's quite apparent that the cost of porting their steam platform to Linux will give them some profit. Valve knows that the majority of desktop gamers are Windows based. That will not change ever. What _might_ change is the fact that the tablet gaming market will become even larger, but so far all evidence is that people who play tablet games aren't doing so in lieu of playing games on their desktop.
I would bet that people who game, aren't going to be swapping platfo
Re:No.. (Score:5, Funny)
People don't change the game they play, that much I have gathered. I have always been more concerned about the games I wont be able to play anymore than the games that are about to come out net week. So to me, windows has always been an unstable platform that barely looks after its own. In my mind, if someone finally bursts their bubble, at least they wont be able to fuck anything else up by forever changing the rules of the game in the name of selling new versions. Did we ever need direct X? Any reason why direct X couldnt be an open standard? Were they too self centred to just work on opengl? No, of course like any other company, microsoft is the best at anything ever, the only way...
I have never ever given a flying fuck about the difference between opengl and directx apart from one thing: one was open, and one was not. In the process of cynically trying to control the game market, microsoft have forgotten that it needs to also be preserved for posterity... but fuck all that, as long as we have angry birds, who cares about all that other shit... //end drunken rant. more beer needed.
Re:No.. (Score:5, Informative)
Did we ever need direct X? Any reason why direct X couldnt be an open standard? Were they too self centred to just work on opengl?
Don't forget the origin of DirectX [wikipedia.org]: Microsoft wanted to encourage game developers to embrace Windows 95 at a time when Win 3.11 had been seen as a business-application-only platform, with DOS preferred for games. DirectX was developed as a collection of APIs for games running in Windows 95 that handled input, graphics, music, sound, networking, etc. Only Direct3D [wikipedia.org], which initially shipped with DirectX 2.0, is directly competing with OpenGL.
I don't think there was a similar comprehensive API available for the PC market at the time DirectX was released. My copy of Need for Speed SE actually runs on either DOS 6.22 or Win95 w/ DirectX.
Re:No.. (Score:5, Insightful)
DOS was preferred for games because it allowed low-level hardware access. Windows 3.x required everyone to use dog-slow GDI for graphics, which was only good for stuff like solitaire and minesweeper.
With DOS mostly invisible in Windows 95, Microsoft knew they would be completing against their own legacy OS so they had to change it. They had to create a way to play games in Windows but still allow low-level hardware access. DirectX was born.
Re:No.. (Score:5, Informative)
Uh.... considering Glide was the first and only 3D api for quite a while and it was later followed by DirectX/OpenGL. That's quite wrong. Also, Microsoft went into a deal with SGI to create a 3d API based on OpenGL which Microsoft Cynically shitcanned/backstabbed SGI on.
Glide was based on a subset of OpenGL features specifically chosen by 3DFX for gaming. So I guess it may have been the first 3D API designed specifically for gaming (though I think Direct3D began around the same time, it just sucked), but it certainly wasn't the first 3D API.
Re: (Score:3)
Have you tried to install an xp era game on linux?
much easier to pirate the windows version and use wine.
Re: (Score:3)
My Transformer Infinity tablet can use a keyboard and trackpad/mouse, it also has a full HD display and HDMI out.
Right now it is technically feasible to play traditional games only a few years behind the state of the art on high end tablets without having to dumb the games down for a touch interface.
A few years down the line, steam for android/iOS could be not only practical, but very profitable.
Re: (Score:3)
Aren't there some games companies who published stats on how many players use Wine to run their games?
I doubt anyone would use wine if there were native versions available, and the number of people using wine is relatively easy to count.
What's much harder to quantify, is the number if people who dual boot and would choose a linux version if it were available, especially if it was faster.
Ah another idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
You must be working on wall street.
If you sell 2 tablets in 2009 and sell 4 tablets in 2010, that is what percentage of growth?
Meanwhile, if you sell 100 million desktops in 2009 and 110 million desktops in 2010, what percentage of growth is that?
It is the same with the so called BRIC economies. Massive growth? Yup, percentage wise. Easy when you come from nothing. I could double my speed on the mile if I actually did some excersise for once. Meanwhile olympic athletes are happy with a tenth of a second! They must SUCK!
Calculating what is really being used out there, that is hard. For instance, mobile gaming devices. We know they are being sold but I don't see them in public. Turns out that many use them at HOME and NOT on the go. Many a laptop never leaves its desk. Meanwhile how many tablets are gathering dust like the Wii which outsold in hardware but severely undersells in software? Nintendo ain't reporting losses for nothing.
People who claim because item X sold a lot is going to kill off item Y are the kind who just love headlines and stop to think. Like you.
Attach a keyboard and a tablet becomes a laptop? Really? So all of a sudden it gets a HD? USB Hub? Ethernet port? Multi-channel sound output? Expansion bays? Right click? Multi screen support?
I didn't understand how people could be reviewing Windows 8 in a positive way. And then I saw a video review on a "reputable" site and they reviewed it on a "desktop" with a resolution that would make a netbook weep. Yah... no wonder then that the slashdot sentiment differs a bit, how many here run at netbook resolutions?
Tablets can only replace a PC for those people who barely use a PC, in the same way a bicycle or public transport can only replace a car for those who barely use the functionality of a car. I should know, I don't have a car and don't miss it and when people ask, but how do you move house with your own car then, I say "I don't!". Really who the fuck wants the hassle, I pay a company who sends a big truck and strong men and they do it faster, safer and me not getting tired which is the most important bit.
If you use a PC without needing to easily cut and paste, have a right click menu for ease of access or for that matter, pin-point control... well... then a tablet can replace your PC. I have tried to make slashdot posts on a tablet and it is a pain in the ass for editing.
And ergonomic. I know the kind of people that can replace a desktop with a laptop. They are the ones who will develop back problems. You are NOT SUPPOSED to work in the position that a laptop forces you to work in. Head UPRIGHT, screen at eye height!
Sure, you can buy a dock and external monitors and you just made your laptop into an easily overheating overly expensive non-upgradable desktop. Wheee!
But hey, if you think tablets can replace PC's, fine. I give you my tablet for free. But if you EVER even touch a PC or laptop for the rest of your live, you put a tattoo on your forehead "I am to dumb to exist, please kill me". Deal?
Didn't think so.
People have been crying the death of the desktop for years if not decades. By the way, what happened to smartphones replacing the desktop? That seems to have dropped away, suddenly it is the tablet that is the new king... odd that... did you ever post that the smartphone would replace the PC?
Zero growth is normal in mature markets, it is inevitable that someday everyone will have the product and you can only sell replacements and PC's last a long a time now. High growth is normal in immature markets. Only a fool would make absolute predictions by comparing these two figures.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:No.. (Score:5, Funny)
Tablet sales are 24% of the market in 2012, but are increasing 100% year over year. If that continues for 18 more months, ...
... they will have 174% of the market?
Re:No.. (Score:4)
Re: (Score:3)
"Past performance is not an indication of future returns."
Or, another good one: "house prices double every 7-10 years".
New take on Betteridges's law. (Score:3)
Will it happen: No
We're long passed time to get onto OpenGL. In the late 90's there were a few of OpenGL game on Windows (Homeworld for one) but since then video card manufacturers have dropped the ball on OpenGL and developers have become complacent and lazy relying on DirectX. It's going to be pretty difficult to stop mainstream devs from suckling at the teat of DirectX and to get ATI/Nvidia to pick up their game.
Re:No.. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a pretty loaded statement. If you use a tool for a specific tasks, and forgo newer tools that come out in favour of revisions of the tool that you have been using because it remains the best tool for the job, then you haven't "gone out of your way to avoid every computing trend," rather, you've continued to use the best tool for the job. There are no devices more suitable for the kind of stuff these people do than desktop computers with discrete video cards.
Re: (Score:3)
"I need this $300 video card for .... Photoshop. That's the ticket" ;)
I'm not intending to be judgmental, only pointing out that desktops aren't the default choice anymore. It's a pretty narrow audience that plays Valve-type PC games, and has little to do with Angry Birds or whatever. (I'd also bet the Valve audience is also a good deal more 'techie' than the general public, which means they're more likely to try Linux.)
Re: (Score:3)
I'm having trouble understanding your reply. The people who play games don't buy $300 video cards to run Photoshop. They buy them to run very demanding 3D applications. You can't run those applications on other platforms, so it isn't a matter of going out of one's way to avoid alternatives.
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If you're arguing that people buy systems specifically to play high-end PC games, then we are in total agreement.
Re:No.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Sometimes I wonder, since most public sales rankings don't include digital downloads (what a redundant term), and right now the aging current generation of consoles can't hold a candle to PCs for size of selection or quality of graphics. I have pretty old, moderately priced, video card, and my hardware is hardly new or exciting (AMD Phenom II x4 965 Black, ATI/AMD 5770, 6GB of DDR2), and pretty much every game I play looks better than it would on a console, with better FPS, textures, shading, FOV, etc... If I was a console gamer (I have a forgotten, forlorn, Wii) I'd probably be thinking of trying PC gaming. Especially since the barrier to entry is pretty low right now (you have a moderate computer from the last 2-3 years? Have $100-200 to throw at a video card? Poof, new console that you can also use for more than a paperweight when your not gaming).
Sadly the sales figures won't tell us if this is happening, since they only count retail. I have a feeling that the majority of PC games are now bought through digital distributors like Steam, GOG, or Desura.
I wonder what would happen to sales figures if they suddenly added Steam's statistics to them...
Also, Valve isn't anything special, they aren't terribly "techie". I don't see what would make them so either, you download a client, you hand them your credit card, and games automagically appear on your computer, with no (ideally) setup, mucking with registries, or anything else of a technical nature. Using Steam is about as simple as using a console, sans the time to download the game. Click a button, you're playing. Nothing remotely technical. If you were talking about GOG, then sure... you might have a point... but not Steam.
Re: (Score:3)
Well, no, if consumers sales are being dominated by laptops, then people can't just throw in a video card ... that's 1999 style thinking. A self-selected group of "high end gamers" buys hardware designed for the "enthusiast' market.
However, there's tons of PC gaming going on in the laptop world, things like Spore or WoW and so on, and I'm sure Steam gets a piece of that. Even L4D might be old enough that its playable on basic Intel kit. That's the market that's more likely to be 'disrupted' by tablets
Re: (Score:3)
You really want to try playing any of the games mentioned in TFA on a touchscreen? Touchscreens are a horribly limited input device compared to keyboard+mouse, and this is why big games will stay on some combination of desktop and console. Dedicated (read: simplified controls) FPS/RPG/MMO games will rise for touch devices, but few of them will be ported elsewhere because of totally different input paradigms. As an example, I cite the dumbing down of Oblivion and Skyrim controls because of their XBox port
Re:No.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Tablets are a fad that will go the way of the netbook, and faster.
I strongly disagree:
I am just waiting for the Transformer Infinity's price to come down a bit, then I will order one, with the keyboard dock. Not as a replacement for but as a complement to my desktop and laptop. I will use it for taking notes during lectures, as a portable media player on standby duties, and - if I can get over my aversion to not having a physical book in front of my eyes - maybe for reading during commute. I will still write my thesis papers on my desktop, I will still code on my desktop, I will still game predominantly on my desktop - that is what it is designed for, after all. But that does not devalue the additional options a tablet offers me.
Re:No.. (Score:5, Insightful)
A netbook is a laptop whose display is too small and of too low a resolution to do anything but the simplest tasks on, whose keyboard is too compact and cramped to comfortably type more than a few paragraphs on and whose hardware is so lacking in performance that few applications run sufficiently fast on it. Gaming is pretty much impossible due to the low graphics performance. There are only two advantages over a full-blown laptop: portability (smaller size, lighter weight) and battery time.
netbooks are great for playing nethack.
Coincidence? I think not.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:No.. (Score:5, Funny)
the 800 gorilla.
Wow, that's a lot of gorillum.
Re:No.. (Score:5, Funny)
How do we nominate a Slashdot post for a Pulitzer?
Re: (Score:3)
Never underestimate the stupidity of the pointy headed boss. I just had to migrate a law firm from a office messaging suite they have used for over 10 years (mainly because of the billing integration) to outlook 2010 and exchange because one of their partners worked with another lawyer from another company and had outlook. Seriously, they gauged their abilities on what they think makes other companies productive.
After buying all the add ins and so on to replicate the functionality they previously had, I was
Re:No.. (Score:5, Insightful)
My mouse moves in a space that is less than a square foot and it allows me to have absolute precision.
My displays at work cover close to three square feet and has horrible precision if I was to use it as a touch compatible surface.
Mouse wins.
Go wave your arms in front of you for 8 hours and then tell me touch input is the future.
Also, having a keyboard is non-replaceable as an input device when actually doing anything more than looking at information.
Re: (Score:3)
My tablet has a keyboard dock with trackpad, I can even use a usb mouse. It can also last for over a week without charging with light usage, or up to 24 hours of hd video. And its not an Apple iPoop either.
Re:No.. (Score:4, Insightful)
So your tablet is usable (for input) when you turn it into a laptop. That's not really much of a defence of the tablet form-factor.
Re: (Score:3)
You want to use shaders and all the latest OpenGL features but you can't because 90% of your user base is still using some old ass version of OpenGL.
Isn't that the point of the Mesa3D/Gallium3D stack - to use hardware where it's available and fall back to software (or skip features) where it's not?
Re:OpenGL ES 2.0? (Score:5, Informative)
It's too feature limited. It's not even up to par with Direct3D 9.0c/9_3, let alone D3D10+. No MRTs, no compute shaders, no geometry features (tessellation, instancing, etc), no standard texture compression format, etc.
Re: (Score:3)
"As for why OpenGL is faster than DirectX/Direct3D, the simple answer is that OpenGL seems to have a smoother, more efficient pipeline. At 303.4 fps, OpenGL is rendering a frame every 3.29 milliseconds; at 270.6 fps, DirectX is rendering a frame in 3.69 milliseconds. That 0.4 millisecond difference is down to how fast the DirectX pipeline can process and draw 3D data."
I think the summary was just
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
> below the threshold that the eye can see which is 30fps?
Gamers most certainly can tell the difference between 30 Hz and 60 Hz. On the PC, gamers want to run at 1080p at the highest quality while still guaranteeing the framerate will stay above 60 Hz with 16 - 32 players.
To do 3D *properly* you want to run at 120 Hz MINIMUM, to guarantee each eye gets 60 Hz.
This nonsense of "high frames don't do anything" is based on ignorance.
Re: (Score:3)
The real world does not have a frame rate
Careful. [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)
They get confused by the fact that old phosphor TV screens only required ~ 30FPS to produce fluid motion. They forget these old screens had both a fade-in and fade-out time that effectively smoothed out the interval between frames.
Re:The Source DX engine is old (Score:5, Informative)
If L4D2 was using the latest DX11.1 implementation and the latest technique, I'm not so sure it would be faster on OpenGL.
That's really not true. Google for performance of DX11 vs DX9: in many cases, DX11 is actually slower (20% slower or so seems to be the trend). Crysis 2, Dragon Age 2, Lost Planet 2: all slower in DX11. A lot of this is the fact that they are simply tacking on DX11 features, since they have to support DX9 for legacy hardware and OSes (which Source definitely would), but DX11 is not necessarily faster simply because it is newer. Indeed, it is often slower because of that: graphics card support for it is no-where near as good as it is for DX9.0c.
Re: (Score:3)
The full story is excellently described here [stackexchange.com].
Ideally you would write for OpenGL on all markets but..... well, read it yourself. The future on the other hand is uncertain, maybe we'll see more OpenGL now.
Re: (Score:3)
Apparently you haven't followed the changes in OpenGL 3 and 4, which made major changes to how it works like eliminating the fixed function pipeline. Probably the best change was ditching the shader model used in 2.0 for one that works a lot more like HLSL and Cg (which is massively more flexible, but more work to use).
When I used DirectX, it seemed largely the same as OpenGL until DX9, which was a huge improvement over OpenGL. Now I'm not so sure again, but I only really have time to dabble in both.
Re: (Score:3)
You must mean, "Where do I put a CD on a stripped down bargain computer/booksize computer/tablet?"
Seriously, optical drives aren't going away any time soon. People still spend ungodly amounts of money on DVDs and Blu-Ray discs, and more and more people are watching them on their computers.