Valve: Linux Better Than Windows 8 for Gaming 768
dartttt writes "In a presentation at Ubuntu Developer Summit currently going on in Denmark, Drew Bliss from Valve said that Linux is more viable than Windows 8 for gaming. Windows 8 ships with its own app store and it is not an open platform anymore and Linux has everything they need: good OpenGL, pulseaudio, OpenAL and input support."
Re:If only more companies acted on their thoughts (Score:5, Informative)
The mere fact that Valve has a slot on the Ubuntu Developer Summit should have been a clue that they are actually working on supporting Linux. While rumours about this have existed for years we our now beyond the rumour stage. Valve does not try to hide it. In fact you can register for their beta-program right now.
Valve wants to be the Linux App Store (Score:4, Informative)
Steam is already an effective and popular app store on Windows. And they hope to become the proprietary app store on Linux. That's why Valve is so dead against Windows 8 - Microsoft could take away their status as the app store.
Re:no more donuts for Gabe... (Score:4, Informative)
There could be technical reasons too - porting their games to Linux showed a massive performance increase over the Windows version. And that's without having spent the months/years tuning the Linux version that had been done on the Windows one.
http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/08/02/1738229/is-it-time-for-an-opengl-gaming-revolution
Re:Due to the huge Linux market share? (Score:5, Informative)
I was there for the talk. He didn't really say that "Linux is better for gaming." Given the current user base, state of drivers and various flux in the stack, nobody in their right mind would say such a thing.
What he did say is that Ubuntu is an "open platform." Not really the same thing as "better," unless you're a writer at an Ubuntu fanboy site.
Re:Fear... (Score:3, Informative)
What I fear is that Valve will dive deep into Linux, and then suddenly realize that supporting software like steam and games on Linux may be a bit more challenging than they thought it would.
The myriad hardware types out there with myriad sets of less-than-optimal drivers might present myriad problems, even if Valve does master the video-card/opengl end of things. I know I get vastly different experiences with Ubuntu depending on if I install it on one desktop versus another versus my laptop. They all have their own sets of issues, and none of them are remotely perfect.
Linux has achieved feature-parity with Windows at last!
Longer, slightly less snarky explanation follows: if you seriously think this differentiates Linux from Windows in any way, you are completely mistaken. The situation with hardware and drivers on Windows is so dire that it is often necessary to install an older version of a driver just to play a game without it crapping. This has come up time and again even with nVidia hardware on Windows. They "fix" something so a new, important game works and your old game stops working. And you can't buy too new a card to solve the problem either, because if you do the old driver that works "properly" won't support it. I've had similar problems on Linux, so, like I said — feature-parity.
Re:If Valve says so many will listen (Score:5, Informative)
This is a market that is willing to spend hundreds of dollars and hours of tweaking to gain a few percent more performance.
Umm, no. Check out Steam's hardware survey sometime. The most common CPU speed is ~2.5ghz and the most common number of cores is 2. There is definitely an enthusiast gaming market, but Valve isnt really serving it. Valve is serving what is essentially everyone (at the moment.)
Re:If only more companies acted on their thoughts (Score:5, Informative)
Thank you for mentioning this without actually linking to the survey [valvesoftware.com]. I don't want a flood of Slashdotters lowering my chances of getting in the beta early.
Re:no more donuts for Gabe... (Score:5, Informative)
If a 3.8% advantage is "massive", what words do you reserve for things that have advantages/improvements on the order of 50%+?
That's 3.8% after Valve improved the OpenGL version using what they'd learned from Linux. It's 20% going from DirectX Windows to OpenGL Linux. That's pretty close to massive, considering the vast amounts of work and money MS has poured into developing DirectX and Windows in general.
Re:If only more companies acted on their thoughts (Score:4, Informative)
Uh, Linux hasn't been bad at sound for at least like 3 years now. I haven't even had any problems with high-end creative cards.
Even before that it was just some configuration was needed. Now its just plug and play.
Re:no more donuts for Gabe... (Score:4, Informative)
It was quite successfull till Microsoft bought Anders Hejlsberg from Borland to develop .Net. Delphi never recovered from that loss.
Re:If only more companies acted on their thoughts (Score:1, Informative)
Uh, yea there is. Stable driver abstraction, so drivers don't have to be rebuilt constantly. Remember how your Vista drivers worked in 7, and 7 drivers work in 8? Yea...
Not to mention the cludge that is X11, or the constant state of reinvention Linux sound seems to be in.
Re:no more donuts for Gabe... (Score:4, Informative)
As far as I can tell, non-metro apps (that is, regular old programs) will still be available by whatever means you prefer.
Re:no more donuts for Gabe... (Score:5, Informative)
If people would stop referring to "Linux" as if it could have "internal bickering" like it were a single, homogenous company we'd be better off.
The reason Microsoft dominates gaming on the PC is because they dominate PC operating systems as a whole and pushed their proprietary DirectX down everyone's throat.
That's why they're exclusively targeting an Ubuntu LTS release. Most popular Linux platform with the least amount of pain, and 4 years of stability.
Why does everyone keep harping on Windows8 gaming? (Score:4, Informative)
It is pretty much identical to Windows 7's gaming performance, with some minor exceptions (which will likely be fixed with driver updates or game patches over time). Don't just take my word for it either, check out the conclusion to this article from TomsHardware:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-8-gaming-performance,3331-13.html [tomshardware.com]
Re:no more donuts for Gabe... (Score:5, Informative)
Not really. Most games that are a decade old or less almost always show improvements over framerate using OGL/OAL vs DX, this included the experimental OGL APIs for these engines.
This is because D3D is CPU-bound whereas OGL is GPU-bound (and only barely CPU bound since the CPU sends all the stuff to the GPU.)
This has been demonstrated with various wrappers/native implementations from PC-primary games to emulators. Starting from Unreal Tournament GOTY '99 through most iDTech engines and the latest Unreal engines, and also Torque3D.
Plain and simple, direct to hardware (Open*L) is faster than CPU-to-hardware (DirectX)