17 ms·

Valve Source Engine Running Faster on Linux than Windows

611 points by learc83 14y ago

voxx 14y ago
Why is this on the front page, I always thought that it was common knowledge that Linux software frequently outperforms Windows software.
hxf148 14y ago
I still would like to know what Valve and Blizzard have encountered with Win8 that makes it trouble. I have not had any problems with Steam and WoW. Maybe they do mean drivers though..
- __alexs 14y ago
  The VentureBeat interview [1] makes it look like gaben is referring to the changes in app ecosystem (eg. integrated Windows Store with 30% margins) rather than a specific technical problem. Although I suspect a major games studio coming to Linux might also enjoy the ability to poke around the source for the few graphics drivers which are open. 1. http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/25/valves-gabe-newell-talks/ http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/25/valves-gabe-newell-talks/
  - cageface 14y ago
    Seems likely. I think Apple only got away with the shift to the Mac App store because the market for third-party Mac software is minuscule compared to that of Windows and includes a lot of smaller devs for whom relinquishing control of sales and distribution is as much a blessing as a liability. On Windows big players like Valve are going to be less willing to play sharecropper.
    - scott_w 14y ago
      I believe that OS X doesn't prevent you installing your own "App Store", so you can get Steam on OS X.
      - freehunter 14y ago
        Windows 8 doesn't prevent you from installing Steam, either. I'm running it right now on the Release Preview. Windows RT does, but that's like comparing OSX to the iPad.
        Dylan16807 14y ago
        That's because Steam isn't a Windows 8 program. If you want to use Metro you have to go through the App Store.
        freehunter 14y ago
        Steam is a Windows 8 program. It's not a WinRT program. Steam works perfectly in Windows 8. The point I was making is that Steam doesn't work on Microsoft ARM tablets powered by Windows RT, but that shouldn't be a big surprise considering no desktop software works on ARM computers without being recompiled for that platform. It's no different than OSX vs iOS.
        Dylan16807 14y ago
        You're ignoring WinRT on x86. This is where people are upset about Microsoft's sudden monopolizing. I don't consider it a true 'Windows 8' app if it's tucked away in the legacy desktop.
        freehunter 14y ago
        You're technically correct, but you're really just splitting hairs. If it runs on Windows 8, it's a Windows 8 program. Windows 8 was designed to run both desktop and Metro applications. We're not talking XP Mode from Windows 7 here.
        Dylan16807 14y ago
        The desktop is even more segregated from metro than XP mode was (since you had the seamless option for XP mode). As far as I can tell the point of Windows 8 is Metro and everything related, so I don't feel like it's splitting hairs to focus on it. If you want to get in on that new Windows 8 touchable tiled wonderful candy unavoidable primary interface you have to play by microsoft's app store rules. Edit: haha I wonder if this article is true about microsoft abandoning 'metro' in favor of 'windows 8-style ui' Seems relevant.
  - marcusf 14y ago
    I would imagine all major gaming engine companies already have source code deals with the graphics card vendors, and vice versa. It's the kinda thing where everybody wants compatibility with each other and it wouldn't make sense not to share it.
  - 89a 14y ago
    Does the Steam store not have margins?
- neya 14y ago
  Yep, most probably. For ex: I have had audiophile-grade sound quality differences in Linux (Ubuntu 10.04) and Windows (Windows 7) due to the drivers [1]. [1]Dual boot on a Sony Vaio FZ-21S, with onboard ASIO chipset, headphones - Pioneer SE-A1000 (Equivalent to a Sennheisser HD - 595) with no equalizers.
  - shin_lao 14y ago
    The only way to make "audiophile-grade" comparisons is through blind tests in an appropriate room. I'd just like to point out that you'll have more variations in your sound by just turning the mini-jack connector than by modifying any driver, who do nothing more than copying a stream of digital audio into the buffer of the sound card to be sent to the DAC. The only area where I've seen changes caused by drivers is on latency, a latency that matters only in a creative context.
    - neya 14y ago
      Hmmm, maybe..I suspect it could be something to do with the ASIO drivers, because there is some "spatial-ness" enabled when I use Linux instead of Windows for such stuff. To verify this, I tried playing a FLAC ripped directly from an Audio CD I had @ 1140kbps approx. and I'm not sure how to put it, but I can confirm there was a "spatial-ness" and more instrument-level distinguish-ability while on Linux. Maybe its specific to just this laptop? Who knows...
      - cageface 14y ago
        These kinds of things can be surprisingly subjective. An audio driver in this case shouldn't be doing much more than shoveling bytes into a device buffer.
        vacri 14y ago
        An example of expectations shaping opinion in audio: I remember walking into a small upmarket shopping mall and thinking "wow, the sound system in here is amazing - it sounds just like there's an actual piano being played". I turned the corner, and there was a pianist on a baby grand...
- mrich 14y ago
  Maybe the new app store, which may drive down their profits from steam a little ;)
- cabirum 14y ago
  DPC Latency maybe? http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w8itproperf/thread/aa16c25a-9c72-4579-ba02-cea920296271 http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w8itproperf/th... Other than that, it's just valve making linux version of steam and tries to promote it.
- mtgx 14y ago
  Windows 8 is a change in direction for the Windows app ecosystem and for the user interface as well. Valve games make a lot less sense on a touch interface, and they worry that's where Microsoft is quickly heading - to a Metro-only future. A future where everything also has to come through the app store. No matter what kind of company you are, whether a software or hardware one, if you're doing "well" in the current/status quo Windows environment, then Windows 8 is a threat to you, because it will change a lot of things, and most likely for the worse for regular "PC-oriented" companies.
- foobarian 14y ago
  In their one test app they observed FPS values of 315 on Linux, and 303.4 on Windows. This seems small enough that it's a stretch to call it "trouble" on Windows--probably wouldn't even notice it.
  - vacri 14y ago
    Given that screens physically refresh at 60Hz these days, you definitely wouldn't notice it. High FPS numbers are useful as a guide to efficiency, not subjective experience.
    - zokier 14y ago
      120Hz if we are talking about gaming screens.
    - exDM69 14y ago
      > High FPS numbers are useful as a guide to efficiency, not subjective experience. Not really. FPS readings >= monitor refresh rate give skewed results that may not reflect the actual performance. Despite this, it's still used widely in performance benchmarks. FPS is the new MIPS.
  - mtgx 14y ago
    303 in OpenGL on Windows. 270 in DirectX.
- forgottenpaswrd 14y ago
  Oh, I don't know... Maybe it has something to do with the Microsoft App Store and MS being the gatekeeper that decides if an app runs or not there. Oh, and by the way getting 30% cut of the price of the software, all software a la Apple.
- biirdmaan 14y ago
  I don't think it has anything to do with the OS itself. At least not in a "oh well now making games for Windows is 50 times harder!" way. It's mostly a disagreement with MS's push for an Apple-like app store for a DESKTOP OS.
yobbobandana 14y ago
Here's the submission that linked to the actual blog post, not to the whole damn blog: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4326619 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4326619
- learc83 14y ago
  And that post didn't make it to the front page, because the title wasn't very descriptive. I wanted to read some real hacker news discussion, which we're now getting with a better title.
  - mtgx 14y ago
    Yes this is a "problem" on HN sometimes. The original posts don't get upvoted, but some summary/repost by another more known site does. Yesterday there was an article that was submitted from multiple sources, but it was only the Engadget one of all the sites got to the front page.
    - estel 14y ago
      I'm unsure how that's necessarily a problem with HN so much as it's a problem for headline writers. There are a lot of articles hitting /new every hour; it's the original headline writer's job to grab our attention and make us read them.
      - dllthomas 14y ago
        To be fair, mtgx said it was a problem "on" HN, not "with"...
  - yobbobandana 14y ago
    And a worse link.
  - obtu 14y ago
    It was on the front page, I saw it when it was at 40 points or so.
NPC82 14y ago
Steam working with hardware vendors on Linux drivers means everyone in the Linux community benefits. This is fantastic news.
- mlitwiniuk 14y ago
  Yeah. And one of anti-linux arguments for Windows fans is just getting killed - gemes do run on Linux. If this experiment will be a success for Valve, we only can wait for other game producers to follow their steps. And taking under consideration that not everybody is going to like Windows 8, this can be a beginning of revolution!
  - Nicole060 14y ago
    "Windows fans" is a bit strong of a word for many. Does the fact that one needs windows to run some of the software they like makes them a "windows fan" ? I used the three major desktop OSes on a regular basis. My laptop is a MBA running OS X, since that's what works best for me in a mobile computer. My desktop used to have a dual boot of linux for my main, daily computing needs, and Windows for games. I had to stop using linux since I switched to an ATI card that couldn't even tolerably work with Gnome 3. Free software proponents tend to be less level headed on the issue. I think there aren't a lot of true "windows fans", but on the other hand, there are a lot of "linux fans" who live for the politics of free software. Lots of people use both proprietary and free software. I do. We are the ones who don't care for your politics. Unlike lots of hardcore linux proponents who are actively hostile to closed source software. On purely technical terms, I like linux better than windows because of its ecosystem (terminal software, scripting, unix philosophy) but certainly not because I'm enamored with the politics of the FSF. OTOH I use windows not because I love it, but because I need it. That's being practical. People who put other groups into boxes, like "anti linux" "Windows fans" aren't practical, they're turning software into a religion. You're even speaking of a "revolution".. for god's sake.
    - Dylan16807 14y ago
      You're reading way too far into that comment. A "windows fan" is the kind of person that says windows is 'better' because 'it has games'. It's not an insinuation of being a crazy fanboy. It's not something that applies to anyone that uses windows for any reason. You're the only one here treating it as a serious and solemn issue.
timkeller 14y ago
2013 - the year of the Linux desktop! We always knew it would happen, eventually.
- Auguste 14y ago
  Rejoice! Now the 'But does it play X' game meme can finally die!
  - Derbasti 14y ago
    At least for values of X that are associated with Valve...
    - Karunamon 14y ago
      This is just the proverbial thin end of the wedge. Look what happened with Steam on Mac OS, first they got Steam and the Source games running, then more and more developers started releasing games on Steam for Mac (some of them even being cross compatible between systems). The current state of the Mac side of the Steam store is way behind the Windows one, but it's still quite formidable.
      - dhugiaskmak 14y ago
        Even with a boatload of patience and very, very low expectations calling the current state of Mac gaming "formidable" is extremely charitable. It's better than it was pre-Steam & pre-App Store, but that's not saying much. I'll get excited when big studios other than Valve and Blizzard are targeting the Mac as a first-party platform rather than relying on half-assed third-party Cider or Wine-based ports that barely work on even the latest hardware.
- rms 14y ago
  :D
- sigkill 14y ago
  I believe that Year of the Linux desktop will truly gain momentum when Microsoft Office or something as powerful as that, is released on Linux. Does the average user need the full power of Excel or Access? No. But the familiarity with the brand name and interface of Office (no one can dispute that this is probably the most widely used software, in enterprise and home environment) will not allow them to switch to another office package. Many home users are not aware of the fact that there can indeed exist multiple software to edit the same file-type. I'm reasonably certain that MS even know that releasing Office on Linux will ring their death knell. Although, I do feel it a bit unfair that it's available on the Mac OS.
xentronium 14y ago
Take these results with a grain of salt: > We are using a 32-bit version of Linux temporarily and will run on 64-bit Linux later.
- mtgx 14y ago
  Why? Aren't 64 bit versions supposed to be even faster?
  - singular 14y ago
    I wonder whether larger pointers could result in being able to cache less media. But that's a wild guess.
    - tene 14y ago
      If they use the X32 ABI, that won't be a problem.
      - singular 14y ago
        Ah yes of course. But if so, wouldn't they have issues interacting with the driver, since they have to be x64?
    - viraptor 14y ago
      At the same time you're executing fewer instructions, because 64b instruction set is a bit more powerful. There's a balance between many things here.
    - obtu 14y ago
      AMD64 would bring more cache pressure on the CPU, but also a lot more memory for caching the world, plus more registers, a better instruction set… For a game, I expect memory would make a large difference.
  - ars 14y ago
    Not necessarily, see: https://sites.google.com/site/x32abi/ https://sites.google.com/site/x32abi/
johnchristopher 14y ago
> We have been doing some fairly close analysis and it comes down to a few additional microseconds overhead per batch in Direct3D which does not affect OpenGL on Windows. Now that we know the hardware is capable of more performance, we will go back and figure out how to mitigate this effect under Direct3D. Why wouldn't they switch back to OpenGL on windows then ? Besides the absolute numbers I wonder how the hardware is behaving regarding resource intensive applications games are. From personnal experience every laptops and computers I have owned had had their fans spinning much louder when running ut2004 (and other games) on linux than on windows. Whether because it's getting hotter for less computational power or because of more aggressive default fan settings in distros.
- CJefferson 14y ago
  > Why wouldn't they switch back to OpenGL on windows then ? Because for many cards, the opengl drivers are awful. If you are only implementing one of DirectX and OpenGL on windows, there really is no contest. Of course, you could do both, but then you have another option to give users, and two very different codepaths to test.
  - dtf 14y ago
    The abundance of awful OpenGL drivers is one of the reasons given for the ANGLE project (http://code.google.com/p/angleproject/ http://code.google.com/p/angleproject/). I've often wondered what those cards are though? NVIDIA drivers at least always seemed to have solid OpenGL support.
    - Nicole060 14y ago
      AMD (ATI) GPU drivers are the worst when it comes to OpenGL. id software is one of the few big companies that makes OpenGL games and they always run much slower on ATI cards (Doom 3 during the first few years of its release) or run with nearly game breaking glitches (Rage, textures that pop up 3 seconds too late on the screen) John Carmack was seriously angry about ATI's drivers when the game "Rage" was released. http://kotaku.com/5847761/why-was-the-pc-launch-of-rage-such-a-cluster http://kotaku.com/5847761/why-was-the-pc-launch-of-rage-such... "The driver issues at launch have been a real cluster !@#$, [...] When launch day came around and the wrong driver got released, half of our PC customers got a product that basically didn't work. The fact that the working driver has incompatibilities with other titles doesn't help either. Issues with older / lower end /exotic setups are to be expected on a PC release, but we were not happy with the experience on what should be prime platforms." I unfortunately made the mistake to buy an AMD 5770 when I assembled my last desktop computer. This hateful GPU. If you even care one bit about either OpenGL or Linux, you are *ed with AMD. The open source drivers for linux are too slow for anything that matters and the closed source drivers made by ATi are too buggy to be used at all, they couldn't even run Gnome 3 without so many glitches, for so many months without improvements to the drivers, that I felt true despair. You want OpenGL or/and Linux, and you need performance ? Get a Nvidia. There's nothing but Nvidia that works well with either. If you don't need performance, then simply get something that has an integrated intel chip. I will never, ever think about buying anything from AMD again. Pure garbage. Their newer CPU line, the Bulldozer, is also garbage that runs slower than the older generation on many tasks.
exDM69 14y ago
I have to say that this is nothing short of a miracle. The OpenGL API is really hairy to implement at all, let alone making it fast. There's 20 years of accumulated legacy and design mistakes that the driver vendors need to care about. D3D, on the other hand has been re-designed on every iteration and backwards compatibility has been broken in every major release. On the other hand, porting from D3D code, you don't touch the hairy parts of OpenGL at all because D3D is functionally quite close to the "clean parts" of GL. But there's still some software overhead to overcome. They might also be using a proprietary D3D-on-OpenGL layer, like the ones being used for some Mac ports of Windows games (edit: seems like they are not). I hope that Steam, and gamers that use Mac and Linux in general, will push for bigger changes in OpenGL, both specs and implementations. disclaimer: I write GPU drivers for living
- mtgx 14y ago
  Maybe it's time for OpenGL 5.0 to start from scratch, and support only the latest x86, ARM and MIPS chips. It might be the only way to catch-up with DirectX, no? Right now I'm excited about OpenGL ES 3.0 for mobiles, and what will bring to the mobile market.
  - exDM69 14y ago
    > Maybe it's time for OpenGL 5.0 to start from scratch Yes. Someone should do it. The major industry players seem to have the interest but lack the will to put in the resources it requires. > Right now I'm excited about OpenGL ES 3.0 for mobiles Prepare for disappointment.
    - troels 14y ago
      If you prepare for disappointment, you're can't really be disappointed, can you?
      - freehunter 14y ago
        You can always be more disappointed.
jcfrei 14y ago
I've noticed that quakelive runs noticeably faster on linux than on windows. strangely though this doesnt seem to be related to fps, but rather appears to stem from mouse latency (in other words the game just appears more responsive on linux) - has anyone made similar observations?
- Karunamon 14y ago
  Could be the mouse acceleration.. great for general use, rubbish for gaming. Windows makes you jump through many hoops (think registry hacks) in order to disable that function on almost any version of their OS. I don't know of any Linux distros (correct me if I'm wrong here) that do that by default.
  - gcp 14y ago
    Disabling mouse acceleration in Windows is a single checkbox exactly where you'd expect it: in the mouse control panel. Disabling it in Linux: depends on the desktop environment. KDE has it on by default, can be disabled in much the same way as on Windows. Same for the GNOME desktop in Ubuntu: enabled by default. Disabling mouse acceleration if your mouses' firmware does it: hopeless in Linux and in Windows. If you're lucky the mouse vendor has some Windows program that allows access to it. Note that in all cases, disabling is easier or possible on Windows than on Linux.
    - Karunamon 14y ago
      >Disabling mouse acceleration in Windows is a single checkbox exactly where you'd expect it: in the mouse control panel. No it isn't. If you uncheck the pointer precision box, there's still a level of acceleration happening behind the scenes, as late as Windows 7, that still requires registry changes to disable. http://donewmouseaccel.blogspot.com/2010/03/markc-windows-7-mouse-acceleration-fix.html http://donewmouseaccel.blogspot.com/2010/03/markc-windows-7-...
      - gcp 14y ago
        The post actually explains this is only needed for some old Windows games (predating Windows XP!) that mistakenly re-enable mouse acceleration themselves.
ktizo 14y ago
PC games players are speed junkies. If this all goes through, then I would not be surprised to see games players migrate to linux in droves.
- vacri 14y ago
  They're 'irritant avoiders', not 'speed junkies'. Once you get a framerate that's fluid, the drive to up speed even further is largely confined to a tight niche. Computers are generally fast enough now - I used to know a few overclockers back when it made a difference, now I don't know any.
  - zokier 14y ago
    >Computers are generally fast enough now No, not really. There is still lots of room for improvement, especially if you want high resolution (retina or large display), 3D, multi-monitor configuration, and/or high levels of anti-aliasing. And providing stable 60FPS on 1080p can be difficult if you have mid-end or couple of generations old hardware.
    - vacri 14y ago
      I thought "fast enough now" explicitly excluded hardware a couple of generations old.
      - zokier 14y ago
        That was reference to the fact that current mid-end is fairly equivalent to couple generations old high-end.
        vacri 14y ago
        If you read my comment again, I wasn't saying that overclockers no longer exist. They don't exist in the droves that they used to - computers are fast enough now for most gamers to have acceptably fluid FPS. Those gamers that demand 1080p@60Hz under load are a niche, not the standard for 'pc gamers'. And for those who demand it, shelling out a few extra dollars for hardware that exists (previously it didn't) is much easier than messing around with hardware voltages and crossing your fingers that your gpu is one of the lucky ones. And frankly, the idea that gamers will flock en masse to linux for a few FPS is utterly absurd.
nbevans 14y ago
They don't state whether the comparison between DX and OGL was running identical quality rendering or not. Given that OGL doesn't support many niceties that DX does; one can assume not. Which would make the entire comparison completely pointless. To the point of the blog post almost being a trollpost. Valve have a clearly defined agenda here, remember.
- ginko 14y ago
  OpenGL 4 and D3D 11 are pretty much feature equivalent.
  - kyberias 14y ago
    And the speed difference measured is also "pretty much" insignificant.
    - mtgx 14y ago
      20% is quite significant. If it was 50% better, then we'd already be saying that DirectX performance is cr*p compared to OpenGL. But 20% is definitely a decent boost, especially since you'd expect DirectX to fare better than OpenGL.
      - ginko 14y ago
        To be fair though, if you would take a game that seriously stresses the GPU you wouldn't see a 20% difference. You would probably see about the same constant difference of about 0.5 ms. For 60 FPS that's an increase to 61 FPS.
      - kyberias 14y ago
        I don't think it's fair to compare DirectX and optimized OpenGL. After they optimized OpenGL implementation on Windows they got: 315/303 = 1.04. That is 4%.
    - Nicole060 14y ago
      It doesn't look significant because the game is old and runs already pretty fast on modern hardware. If it was more gpu intensive game, a 20% difference could make a difference between a tolerably fluid framerate and a jerky framerate.
jeffool 14y ago
Maybe someone smarter than me can tell me why they don't reboot OpenGL? Or better, leave the current run as is for the CAD folk, then run a new API, "OGL-Game". Also, I got bored the other day... I can't help but wonder if Valve would push a desktop of their own devising? Anyone know of any interesting hires that may have gone under the radar?
- sp332 14y ago
  Maybe OpenGL ES? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4134426 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4134426
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
geon 14y ago
315 FPS? I was told that frame rates over what you can actually see tells you very little about the actual performance. So implementation A at 315 FPS being 10% faster than B might very well be 50 % slower than B at 60 FPS. What is interesting is if the frame rate can keep a steady 30/60/120 FPS. Anything above that is just not indicative of actual performance.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Surely if they are both doing 60fps then by definition the performance will be the same? I guess the time spent doing the actual rendering vs waiting to do the next frame might be different, not sure if there is a reason that the characteristics would be different at 300FPS and 60FPS though since surely the only difference is how often the render code is called? Bare in mind that Valve is running this test on a much higher end PC than most consumers are likely to have. People will want to be able to run these games on their $500 laptops , so the difference between 270 and 315 FPS might translate into a difference between 50FPS and 60FPS which would be noticeable.
  - lmm 14y ago
    If the code is "rendering" 300 FPS but only displaying 60, it could be doing anywhere from 1x to 5x as much work as if it were rendering at 60, depending on arbitrary driver internals. So it would be much more convincing if Valve had an example of "on this hardware, at these settings, it can sustain smooth 60fps under opengl and not under directx".
  - geon 14y ago
    > the difference between 270 and 315 FPS might translate into a difference between 50FPS and 60FPS ...or it might not. Which is the problem. You can't just interpolate like that. Or can you? I have only heresay to go on.
- kcbanner 14y ago
  It completely is indicative of actual performance. You could turn on vsync in either of these applications and it would lock down to 60 FPS. The point is here, that with the same game implementation you have some more performance headroom on Linux. You could potential improve the engine in some way and use up that headroom, which would bring the performance into line but with some sort of graphical quality improvement on Linux (OpenGL).
cs702 14y ago
For those who, like me, use desktop Linux full time, Valve's close collaboration with NVIDIA and AMD (i.e., ATI) to improve the performance of proprietary graphics drivers is a huge win. Quoting from the blog post: "We’ve been working with NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel to improve graphic driver performance on Linux. They have all been great to work with and have been very committed to having engineers on-site working with our engineers, carefully analyzing the data we see. We have had very rapid turnaround on any bugs we find and it has been invaluable to have people who understand the game, the renderer, the driver, and the hardware working alongside us when attacking these performance issues." Leaving aside the amazing fact that Valve is achieving higher FPS on Linux than on Windows, the great thing about efforts like this one is that we can all expect the Linux desktop to become even smoother, faster, more seamless. I love it!
- nathanb 14y ago
  Seems to me like a huger win would be if the open-source graphics drivers would get improved. I'm not even talking ideologically here. The OSS drivers are included along with the kernel in most distros. They're what you get by default when you boot a new Linux install. They get upgraded alongside other core packages by the distro's package manager and are generally quite up-to-date compared to the "official" drivers in the package repository (if they're even there at all). I use the OSS radeon driver at home and the OSS nouveau driver at work, and both are quite adequate for my purposes (which involve no real 3D). I think it would be a bigger improvement to the ecosystem to have these drivers get some love. (Or, alternately, for the proprietary drivers to go open-source and be included with the kernel).
  - cs702 14y ago
    nathanb: Yes, that would be ideal. The way I think about it is this: even though this effort falls far short of the ideal with NVIDIA and AMD, it's still a huge win for the platform.
  - w1ntermute 14y ago
    > Seems to me like a huger win would be if the open-source graphics drivers would get improved. Their work with Intel is on the open source drivers.
SkyMarshal 14y ago
I wish they'd add Wine as a 3rd 'OS' for comparison. Currently they're comparing Ubuntu 12.04 native vs Windows 7, would be really interesting to add the benchmarks for the Windows version running on the latest Wine on Ubuntu 12.04.
rogerbraun 14y ago
As a counterpoint to the "OpenGL needs to start from scratch" discussion, take a look at JWZs blog about porting XScreenSaver to iOS: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/06/i-have-ported-xscreensaver-to-the-iphone/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/06/i-have-ported-xscreensaver-t...
- ajross 14y ago
  Indeed. The death of the immediate draw APIs is something that only driver writers and serious optimization wonks think is a good idea. For everyone else, it simply makes ES2 an API that is basically impossible to learn. Without exception, everyone I know who does any 3D work at all learned first on 1.1 doing flat shaded fixed function stuff. And all those APIs are gone. The amount of code required in ES2 to put anything on the screen at all is staggering. But that said: the per-vertex APIs really are broken from an optimization sense, and serious apps absolutely must do their work on buffer objects. (Display lists have historically been a way to cheat this, at the expense of huge complexity in the driver. This is one of the bad APIs exDM69 is talking about, I suspect.)
  - kcbanner 14y ago
    There is really no use for immediate mode anymore; I'm of the opinion that if you lament the loss of immediate mode, you simply don't want to learn the newer, more efficient ways of doing the same thing. Ask yourself this, if immediate mode never existed, would you still say that the ES2.0 method is still "basically impossible to learn"? I assure you that it is very possible to learn.
    - jra101 14y ago
      Immediate mode is very useful for drawing a single triangle that fully covers the viewport, something that is quite common for any sort of image processing or post processing. In these cases your performance will entirely be limited by the complexity of your fragment shader or by raw fill rate and not by the method you used to submit the vertices to the GPU.
alexholehouse 14y ago
Maybe a stupid question and I've missed something, but why even bother telling us they're using 32GBs RAM for benchmarking if they're using 32-bit Ubuntu? Just to be totally transparent? Is Windows a 32-bit W7 too?
- rmk2 14y ago
  I'm not sure if this is the right answer or not, but the Linux kernel has supported PAE[1] for ages, which allows for more than 4GB of RAM in a 32-bit OS (though it remains unusable by a single process, if I understood that correctly). Maybe someone else with a better understanding of the 32bit/64bit differences can chime in. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
  - kbolino 14y ago
    PAE would definitely enable them to use all 32GBs of physical memory. Both Windows and Linux have PAE support, but non-server editions of Windows still limit the physical address space to 4GB (although this might seem to make PAE support pointless, there are other advantages of PAE, like the NX/XD bit used for DEP). You are also correct that the per-process limit of 4GB of virtual memory is not affected by PAE. In case the advantages of PAE once again seem pointless, remember that a system can execute multiple 32-bit programs each with its own independent address space, so you can have, in theory, eight programs each using its own 4GB on a 32GB system without running out of memory. In practice, the platform imposes a limit of <4GB for physical memory, with the remainder used for legacy support and hardware DMA. Also, the operating system imposes a limit of <4GB for virtual memory, with the remainder used by the kernel.
- Splines 14y ago
  I've only dabbled in Linux, but what's the advantage of using 32-bit Ubuntu? Why not the 64-bit version? Especially in the Linux world where you deal with binaries less-often compared to Windows. Is it because of the video card drivers?
  - 14y ago
Mavrik 14y ago
I might be the only sceptic here, but the fact that it seems that Valve has conflict of interest when it comes to Microsoft lately (see Gabe's comments) makes me doubt the authenticity of these results. I'd love to see real performance improvements when it comes to Linux, but right now I just see a company that (it seems) has something to gain by smearing Microsoft giving out results without any methodology or explanation. They never even said how they avoided the typical pitfall of "FPS" benchmarking - making sure the GPU and the engine is actually drawing the same things (that means making sure all the same shaders are executed, similar extensions are used so that image quality is identical). Until we get some confirmation in the wild I'll remain highly sceptical towards claims on the blog.
- SCdF 14y ago
  You're not the only one. Valve are not the first people to port Windows games to Linux, and while some people claim they're faster, the general benchmarked consensus I've seen over the years is that both platform are, within 10% or so, basically identical.
  - Periodic 14y ago
    Their results are basically within 15-20%. The major achievement is just having acceptable performance. After that there tends to be so many other factors that you can tweak that only two metrics make sense: FPS and image quality without any non-automatic tweaks, and then the maximum that can be obtained by extensive optimization. For most people, they just want the game to run such that the difference is not big enough to warrant switching OSes for gaming. For me, I just want it to be close enough that I can't be bothered to reboot. I've been getting some great performance through wine for some games for quite a while now. Under the same settings I've occasionally had slightly better or slightly worse performance depending on the game, patch-level and settings. For me the bar is whether it is playable and looks decent at all.
  - enneff 14y ago
    They said that some of their optimizations applied to both Linux and Windows, bringing the final scores to 315 and 303.4 fps respectively. That's well under 10%. Seems believable to me.
jeffool 14y ago
While I love the idea of free and open software, I have to admit an ignorance to it in application (well, at least Linux). Valve creates a Steam client, and gets the Source game engine running awesomely on "Linux". How do all the different desktops factor into this?

611 points by learc83 14y ago

voxx 14y ago

Why is this on the front page, I always thought that it was common knowledge that Linux software frequently outperforms Windows software.

hxf148 14y ago

I still would like to know what Valve and Blizzard have encountered with Win8 that makes it trouble. I have not had any problems with Steam and WoW. Maybe they do mean drivers though..

__alexs 14y ago
The VentureBeat interview [1] makes it look like gaben is referring to the changes in app ecosystem (eg. integrated Windows Store with 30% margins) rather than a specific technical problem. Although I suspect a major games studio coming to Linux might also enjoy the ability to poke around the source for the few graphics drivers which are open. 1. http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/25/valves-gabe-newell-talks/ http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/25/valves-gabe-newell-talks/
- cageface 14y ago
  Seems likely. I think Apple only got away with the shift to the Mac App store because the market for third-party Mac software is minuscule compared to that of Windows and includes a lot of smaller devs for whom relinquishing control of sales and distribution is as much a blessing as a liability. On Windows big players like Valve are going to be less willing to play sharecropper.
  - scott_w 14y ago
    I believe that OS X doesn't prevent you installing your own "App Store", so you can get Steam on OS X.
    - freehunter 14y ago
      Windows 8 doesn't prevent you from installing Steam, either. I'm running it right now on the Release Preview. Windows RT does, but that's like comparing OSX to the iPad.
      - Dylan16807 14y ago
        That's because Steam isn't a Windows 8 program. If you want to use Metro you have to go through the App Store.
        freehunter 14y ago
        Steam is a Windows 8 program. It's not a WinRT program. Steam works perfectly in Windows 8. The point I was making is that Steam doesn't work on Microsoft ARM tablets powered by Windows RT, but that shouldn't be a big surprise considering no desktop software works on ARM computers without being recompiled for that platform. It's no different than OSX vs iOS.
        Dylan16807 14y ago
        You're ignoring WinRT on x86. This is where people are upset about Microsoft's sudden monopolizing. I don't consider it a true 'Windows 8' app if it's tucked away in the legacy desktop.
        freehunter 14y ago
        You're technically correct, but you're really just splitting hairs. If it runs on Windows 8, it's a Windows 8 program. Windows 8 was designed to run both desktop and Metro applications. We're not talking XP Mode from Windows 7 here.
        Dylan16807 14y ago
        The desktop is even more segregated from metro than XP mode was (since you had the seamless option for XP mode). As far as I can tell the point of Windows 8 is Metro and everything related, so I don't feel like it's splitting hairs to focus on it. If you want to get in on that new Windows 8 touchable tiled wonderful candy unavoidable primary interface you have to play by microsoft's app store rules. Edit: haha I wonder if this article is true about microsoft abandoning 'metro' in favor of 'windows 8-style ui' Seems relevant.
- marcusf 14y ago
  I would imagine all major gaming engine companies already have source code deals with the graphics card vendors, and vice versa. It's the kinda thing where everybody wants compatibility with each other and it wouldn't make sense not to share it.
- 89a 14y ago
  Does the Steam store not have margins?
neya 14y ago
Yep, most probably. For ex: I have had audiophile-grade sound quality differences in Linux (Ubuntu 10.04) and Windows (Windows 7) due to the drivers [1]. [1]Dual boot on a Sony Vaio FZ-21S, with onboard ASIO chipset, headphones - Pioneer SE-A1000 (Equivalent to a Sennheisser HD - 595) with no equalizers.
- shin_lao 14y ago
  The only way to make "audiophile-grade" comparisons is through blind tests in an appropriate room. I'd just like to point out that you'll have more variations in your sound by just turning the mini-jack connector than by modifying any driver, who do nothing more than copying a stream of digital audio into the buffer of the sound card to be sent to the DAC. The only area where I've seen changes caused by drivers is on latency, a latency that matters only in a creative context.
  - neya 14y ago
    Hmmm, maybe..I suspect it could be something to do with the ASIO drivers, because there is some "spatial-ness" enabled when I use Linux instead of Windows for such stuff. To verify this, I tried playing a FLAC ripped directly from an Audio CD I had @ 1140kbps approx. and I'm not sure how to put it, but I can confirm there was a "spatial-ness" and more instrument-level distinguish-ability while on Linux. Maybe its specific to just this laptop? Who knows...
    - cageface 14y ago
      These kinds of things can be surprisingly subjective. An audio driver in this case shouldn't be doing much more than shoveling bytes into a device buffer.
      - vacri 14y ago
        An example of expectations shaping opinion in audio: I remember walking into a small upmarket shopping mall and thinking "wow, the sound system in here is amazing - it sounds just like there's an actual piano being played". I turned the corner, and there was a pianist on a baby grand...
mrich 14y ago
Maybe the new app store, which may drive down their profits from steam a little ;)
cabirum 14y ago
DPC Latency maybe? http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w8itproperf/thread/aa16c25a-9c72-4579-ba02-cea920296271 http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w8itproperf/th... Other than that, it's just valve making linux version of steam and tries to promote it.
mtgx 14y ago
Windows 8 is a change in direction for the Windows app ecosystem and for the user interface as well. Valve games make a lot less sense on a touch interface, and they worry that's where Microsoft is quickly heading - to a Metro-only future. A future where everything also has to come through the app store. No matter what kind of company you are, whether a software or hardware one, if you're doing "well" in the current/status quo Windows environment, then Windows 8 is a threat to you, because it will change a lot of things, and most likely for the worse for regular "PC-oriented" companies.
foobarian 14y ago
In their one test app they observed FPS values of 315 on Linux, and 303.4 on Windows. This seems small enough that it's a stretch to call it "trouble" on Windows--probably wouldn't even notice it.
- vacri 14y ago
  Given that screens physically refresh at 60Hz these days, you definitely wouldn't notice it. High FPS numbers are useful as a guide to efficiency, not subjective experience.
  - zokier 14y ago
    120Hz if we are talking about gaming screens.
  - exDM69 14y ago
    > High FPS numbers are useful as a guide to efficiency, not subjective experience. Not really. FPS readings >= monitor refresh rate give skewed results that may not reflect the actual performance. Despite this, it's still used widely in performance benchmarks. FPS is the new MIPS.
- mtgx 14y ago
  303 in OpenGL on Windows. 270 in DirectX.
forgottenpaswrd 14y ago
Oh, I don't know... Maybe it has something to do with the Microsoft App Store and MS being the gatekeeper that decides if an app runs or not there. Oh, and by the way getting 30% cut of the price of the software, all software a la Apple.
biirdmaan 14y ago
I don't think it has anything to do with the OS itself. At least not in a "oh well now making games for Windows is 50 times harder!" way. It's mostly a disagreement with MS's push for an Apple-like app store for a DESKTOP OS.

yobbobandana 14y ago

Here's the submission that linked to the actual blog post, not to the whole damn blog: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4326619 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4326619

learc83 14y ago
And that post didn't make it to the front page, because the title wasn't very descriptive. I wanted to read some real hacker news discussion, which we're now getting with a better title.
- mtgx 14y ago
  Yes this is a "problem" on HN sometimes. The original posts don't get upvoted, but some summary/repost by another more known site does. Yesterday there was an article that was submitted from multiple sources, but it was only the Engadget one of all the sites got to the front page.
  - estel 14y ago
    I'm unsure how that's necessarily a problem with HN so much as it's a problem for headline writers. There are a lot of articles hitting /new every hour; it's the original headline writer's job to grab our attention and make us read them.
    - dllthomas 14y ago
      To be fair, mtgx said it was a problem "on" HN, not "with"...
- yobbobandana 14y ago
  And a worse link.
- obtu 14y ago
  It was on the front page, I saw it when it was at 40 points or so.

NPC82 14y ago

Steam working with hardware vendors on Linux drivers means everyone in the Linux community benefits. This is fantastic news.

mlitwiniuk 14y ago
Yeah. And one of anti-linux arguments for Windows fans is just getting killed - gemes do run on Linux. If this experiment will be a success for Valve, we only can wait for other game producers to follow their steps. And taking under consideration that not everybody is going to like Windows 8, this can be a beginning of revolution!
- Nicole060 14y ago
  "Windows fans" is a bit strong of a word for many. Does the fact that one needs windows to run some of the software they like makes them a "windows fan" ? I used the three major desktop OSes on a regular basis. My laptop is a MBA running OS X, since that's what works best for me in a mobile computer. My desktop used to have a dual boot of linux for my main, daily computing needs, and Windows for games. I had to stop using linux since I switched to an ATI card that couldn't even tolerably work with Gnome 3. Free software proponents tend to be less level headed on the issue. I think there aren't a lot of true "windows fans", but on the other hand, there are a lot of "linux fans" who live for the politics of free software. Lots of people use both proprietary and free software. I do. We are the ones who don't care for your politics. Unlike lots of hardcore linux proponents who are actively hostile to closed source software. On purely technical terms, I like linux better than windows because of its ecosystem (terminal software, scripting, unix philosophy) but certainly not because I'm enamored with the politics of the FSF. OTOH I use windows not because I love it, but because I need it. That's being practical. People who put other groups into boxes, like "anti linux" "Windows fans" aren't practical, they're turning software into a religion. You're even speaking of a "revolution".. for god's sake.
  - Dylan16807 14y ago
    You're reading way too far into that comment. A "windows fan" is the kind of person that says windows is 'better' because 'it has games'. It's not an insinuation of being a crazy fanboy. It's not something that applies to anyone that uses windows for any reason. You're the only one here treating it as a serious and solemn issue.

timkeller 14y ago

2013 - the year of the Linux desktop! We always knew it would happen, eventually.

Auguste 14y ago
Rejoice! Now the 'But does it play X' game meme can finally die!
- Derbasti 14y ago
  At least for values of X that are associated with Valve...
  - Karunamon 14y ago
    This is just the proverbial thin end of the wedge. Look what happened with Steam on Mac OS, first they got Steam and the Source games running, then more and more developers started releasing games on Steam for Mac (some of them even being cross compatible between systems). The current state of the Mac side of the Steam store is way behind the Windows one, but it's still quite formidable.
    - dhugiaskmak 14y ago
      Even with a boatload of patience and very, very low expectations calling the current state of Mac gaming "formidable" is extremely charitable. It's better than it was pre-Steam & pre-App Store, but that's not saying much. I'll get excited when big studios other than Valve and Blizzard are targeting the Mac as a first-party platform rather than relying on half-assed third-party Cider or Wine-based ports that barely work on even the latest hardware.
rms 14y ago
:D
sigkill 14y ago
I believe that Year of the Linux desktop will truly gain momentum when Microsoft Office or something as powerful as that, is released on Linux. Does the average user need the full power of Excel or Access? No. But the familiarity with the brand name and interface of Office (no one can dispute that this is probably the most widely used software, in enterprise and home environment) will not allow them to switch to another office package. Many home users are not aware of the fact that there can indeed exist multiple software to edit the same file-type. I'm reasonably certain that MS even know that releasing Office on Linux will ring their death knell. Although, I do feel it a bit unfair that it's available on the Mac OS.

xentronium 14y ago

Take these results with a grain of salt: > We are using a 32-bit version of Linux temporarily and will run on 64-bit Linux later.

mtgx 14y ago
Why? Aren't 64 bit versions supposed to be even faster?
- singular 14y ago
  I wonder whether larger pointers could result in being able to cache less media. But that's a wild guess.
  - tene 14y ago
    If they use the X32 ABI, that won't be a problem.
    - singular 14y ago
      Ah yes of course. But if so, wouldn't they have issues interacting with the driver, since they have to be x64?
  - viraptor 14y ago
    At the same time you're executing fewer instructions, because 64b instruction set is a bit more powerful. There's a balance between many things here.
  - obtu 14y ago
    AMD64 would bring more cache pressure on the CPU, but also a lot more memory for caching the world, plus more registers, a better instruction set… For a game, I expect memory would make a large difference.
- ars 14y ago
  Not necessarily, see: https://sites.google.com/site/x32abi/ https://sites.google.com/site/x32abi/

johnchristopher 14y ago

> We have been doing some fairly close analysis and it comes down to a few additional microseconds overhead per batch in Direct3D which does not affect OpenGL on Windows. Now that we know the hardware is capable of more performance, we will go back and figure out how to mitigate this effect under Direct3D. Why wouldn't they switch back to OpenGL on windows then ? Besides the absolute numbers I wonder how the hardware is behaving regarding resource intensive applications games are. From personnal experience every laptops and computers I have owned had had their fans spinning much louder when running ut2004 (and other games) on linux than on windows. Whether because it's getting hotter for less computational power or because of more aggressive default fan settings in distros.

CJefferson 14y ago
> Why wouldn't they switch back to OpenGL on windows then ? Because for many cards, the opengl drivers are awful. If you are only implementing one of DirectX and OpenGL on windows, there really is no contest. Of course, you could do both, but then you have another option to give users, and two very different codepaths to test.
- dtf 14y ago
  The abundance of awful OpenGL drivers is one of the reasons given for the ANGLE project (http://code.google.com/p/angleproject/ http://code.google.com/p/angleproject/). I've often wondered what those cards are though? NVIDIA drivers at least always seemed to have solid OpenGL support.
  - Nicole060 14y ago
    AMD (ATI) GPU drivers are the worst when it comes to OpenGL. id software is one of the few big companies that makes OpenGL games and they always run much slower on ATI cards (Doom 3 during the first few years of its release) or run with nearly game breaking glitches (Rage, textures that pop up 3 seconds too late on the screen) John Carmack was seriously angry about ATI's drivers when the game "Rage" was released. http://kotaku.com/5847761/why-was-the-pc-launch-of-rage-such-a-cluster http://kotaku.com/5847761/why-was-the-pc-launch-of-rage-such... "The driver issues at launch have been a real cluster !@#$, [...] When launch day came around and the wrong driver got released, half of our PC customers got a product that basically didn't work. The fact that the working driver has incompatibilities with other titles doesn't help either. Issues with older / lower end /exotic setups are to be expected on a PC release, but we were not happy with the experience on what should be prime platforms." I unfortunately made the mistake to buy an AMD 5770 when I assembled my last desktop computer. This hateful GPU. If you even care one bit about either OpenGL or Linux, you are *ed with AMD. The open source drivers for linux are too slow for anything that matters and the closed source drivers made by ATi are too buggy to be used at all, they couldn't even run Gnome 3 without so many glitches, for so many months without improvements to the drivers, that I felt true despair. You want OpenGL or/and Linux, and you need performance ? Get a Nvidia. There's nothing but Nvidia that works well with either. If you don't need performance, then simply get something that has an integrated intel chip. I will never, ever think about buying anything from AMD again. Pure garbage. Their newer CPU line, the Bulldozer, is also garbage that runs slower than the older generation on many tasks.

exDM69 14y ago

I have to say that this is nothing short of a miracle. The OpenGL API is really hairy to implement at all, let alone making it fast. There's 20 years of accumulated legacy and design mistakes that the driver vendors need to care about. D3D, on the other hand has been re-designed on every iteration and backwards compatibility has been broken in every major release. On the other hand, porting from D3D code, you don't touch the hairy parts of OpenGL at all because D3D is functionally quite close to the "clean parts" of GL. But there's still some software overhead to overcome. They might also be using a proprietary D3D-on-OpenGL layer, like the ones being used for some Mac ports of Windows games (edit: seems like they are not). I hope that Steam, and gamers that use Mac and Linux in general, will push for bigger changes in OpenGL, both specs and implementations. disclaimer: I write GPU drivers for living

mtgx 14y ago
Maybe it's time for OpenGL 5.0 to start from scratch, and support only the latest x86, ARM and MIPS chips. It might be the only way to catch-up with DirectX, no? Right now I'm excited about OpenGL ES 3.0 for mobiles, and what will bring to the mobile market.
- exDM69 14y ago
  > Maybe it's time for OpenGL 5.0 to start from scratch Yes. Someone should do it. The major industry players seem to have the interest but lack the will to put in the resources it requires. > Right now I'm excited about OpenGL ES 3.0 for mobiles Prepare for disappointment.
  - troels 14y ago
    If you prepare for disappointment, you're can't really be disappointed, can you?
    - freehunter 14y ago
      You can always be more disappointed.

jcfrei 14y ago

I've noticed that quakelive runs noticeably faster on linux than on windows. strangely though this doesnt seem to be related to fps, but rather appears to stem from mouse latency (in other words the game just appears more responsive on linux) - has anyone made similar observations?

Karunamon 14y ago
Could be the mouse acceleration.. great for general use, rubbish for gaming. Windows makes you jump through many hoops (think registry hacks) in order to disable that function on almost any version of their OS. I don't know of any Linux distros (correct me if I'm wrong here) that do that by default.
- gcp 14y ago
  Disabling mouse acceleration in Windows is a single checkbox exactly where you'd expect it: in the mouse control panel. Disabling it in Linux: depends on the desktop environment. KDE has it on by default, can be disabled in much the same way as on Windows. Same for the GNOME desktop in Ubuntu: enabled by default. Disabling mouse acceleration if your mouses' firmware does it: hopeless in Linux and in Windows. If you're lucky the mouse vendor has some Windows program that allows access to it. Note that in all cases, disabling is easier or possible on Windows than on Linux.
  - Karunamon 14y ago
    >Disabling mouse acceleration in Windows is a single checkbox exactly where you'd expect it: in the mouse control panel. No it isn't. If you uncheck the pointer precision box, there's still a level of acceleration happening behind the scenes, as late as Windows 7, that still requires registry changes to disable. http://donewmouseaccel.blogspot.com/2010/03/markc-windows-7-mouse-acceleration-fix.html http://donewmouseaccel.blogspot.com/2010/03/markc-windows-7-...
    - gcp 14y ago
      The post actually explains this is only needed for some old Windows games (predating Windows XP!) that mistakenly re-enable mouse acceleration themselves.

ktizo 14y ago

PC games players are speed junkies. If this all goes through, then I would not be surprised to see games players migrate to linux in droves.

vacri 14y ago
They're 'irritant avoiders', not 'speed junkies'. Once you get a framerate that's fluid, the drive to up speed even further is largely confined to a tight niche. Computers are generally fast enough now - I used to know a few overclockers back when it made a difference, now I don't know any.
- zokier 14y ago
  >Computers are generally fast enough now No, not really. There is still lots of room for improvement, especially if you want high resolution (retina or large display), 3D, multi-monitor configuration, and/or high levels of anti-aliasing. And providing stable 60FPS on 1080p can be difficult if you have mid-end or couple of generations old hardware.
  - vacri 14y ago
    I thought "fast enough now" explicitly excluded hardware a couple of generations old.
    - zokier 14y ago
      That was reference to the fact that current mid-end is fairly equivalent to couple generations old high-end.
      - vacri 14y ago
        If you read my comment again, I wasn't saying that overclockers no longer exist. They don't exist in the droves that they used to - computers are fast enough now for most gamers to have acceptably fluid FPS. Those gamers that demand 1080p@60Hz under load are a niche, not the standard for 'pc gamers'. And for those who demand it, shelling out a few extra dollars for hardware that exists (previously it didn't) is much easier than messing around with hardware voltages and crossing your fingers that your gpu is one of the lucky ones. And frankly, the idea that gamers will flock en masse to linux for a few FPS is utterly absurd.

nbevans 14y ago

They don't state whether the comparison between DX and OGL was running identical quality rendering or not. Given that OGL doesn't support many niceties that DX does; one can assume not. Which would make the entire comparison completely pointless. To the point of the blog post almost being a trollpost. Valve have a clearly defined agenda here, remember.

ginko 14y ago
OpenGL 4 and D3D 11 are pretty much feature equivalent.
- kyberias 14y ago
  And the speed difference measured is also "pretty much" insignificant.
  - mtgx 14y ago
    20% is quite significant. If it was 50% better, then we'd already be saying that DirectX performance is cr*p compared to OpenGL. But 20% is definitely a decent boost, especially since you'd expect DirectX to fare better than OpenGL.
    - ginko 14y ago
      To be fair though, if you would take a game that seriously stresses the GPU you wouldn't see a 20% difference. You would probably see about the same constant difference of about 0.5 ms. For 60 FPS that's an increase to 61 FPS.
    - kyberias 14y ago
      I don't think it's fair to compare DirectX and optimized OpenGL. After they optimized OpenGL implementation on Windows they got: 315/303 = 1.04. That is 4%.
  - Nicole060 14y ago
    It doesn't look significant because the game is old and runs already pretty fast on modern hardware. If it was more gpu intensive game, a 20% difference could make a difference between a tolerably fluid framerate and a jerky framerate.

jeffool 14y ago

Maybe someone smarter than me can tell me why they don't reboot OpenGL? Or better, leave the current run as is for the CAD folk, then run a new API, "OGL-Game". Also, I got bored the other day... I can't help but wonder if Valve would push a desktop of their own devising? Anyone know of any interesting hires that may have gone under the radar?

sp332 14y ago
Maybe OpenGL ES? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4134426 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4134426
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

geon 14y ago

315 FPS? I was told that frame rates over what you can actually see tells you very little about the actual performance. So implementation A at 315 FPS being 10% faster than B might very well be 50 % slower than B at 60 FPS. What is interesting is if the frame rate can keep a steady 30/60/120 FPS. Anything above that is just not indicative of actual performance.

jiggy2011 14y ago
Surely if they are both doing 60fps then by definition the performance will be the same? I guess the time spent doing the actual rendering vs waiting to do the next frame might be different, not sure if there is a reason that the characteristics would be different at 300FPS and 60FPS though since surely the only difference is how often the render code is called? Bare in mind that Valve is running this test on a much higher end PC than most consumers are likely to have. People will want to be able to run these games on their $500 laptops , so the difference between 270 and 315 FPS might translate into a difference between 50FPS and 60FPS which would be noticeable.
- lmm 14y ago
  If the code is "rendering" 300 FPS but only displaying 60, it could be doing anywhere from 1x to 5x as much work as if it were rendering at 60, depending on arbitrary driver internals. So it would be much more convincing if Valve had an example of "on this hardware, at these settings, it can sustain smooth 60fps under opengl and not under directx".
- geon 14y ago
  > the difference between 270 and 315 FPS might translate into a difference between 50FPS and 60FPS ...or it might not. Which is the problem. You can't just interpolate like that. Or can you? I have only heresay to go on.
kcbanner 14y ago
It completely is indicative of actual performance. You could turn on vsync in either of these applications and it would lock down to 60 FPS. The point is here, that with the same game implementation you have some more performance headroom on Linux. You could potential improve the engine in some way and use up that headroom, which would bring the performance into line but with some sort of graphical quality improvement on Linux (OpenGL).

cs702 14y ago

For those who, like me, use desktop Linux full time, Valve's close collaboration with NVIDIA and AMD (i.e., ATI) to improve the performance of proprietary graphics drivers is a huge win. Quoting from the blog post: "We’ve been working with NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel to improve graphic driver performance on Linux. They have all been great to work with and have been very committed to having engineers on-site working with our engineers, carefully analyzing the data we see. We have had very rapid turnaround on any bugs we find and it has been invaluable to have people who understand the game, the renderer, the driver, and the hardware working alongside us when attacking these performance issues." Leaving aside the amazing fact that Valve is achieving higher FPS on Linux than on Windows, the great thing about efforts like this one is that we can all expect the Linux desktop to become even smoother, faster, more seamless. I love it!

nathanb 14y ago
Seems to me like a huger win would be if the open-source graphics drivers would get improved. I'm not even talking ideologically here. The OSS drivers are included along with the kernel in most distros. They're what you get by default when you boot a new Linux install. They get upgraded alongside other core packages by the distro's package manager and are generally quite up-to-date compared to the "official" drivers in the package repository (if they're even there at all). I use the OSS radeon driver at home and the OSS nouveau driver at work, and both are quite adequate for my purposes (which involve no real 3D). I think it would be a bigger improvement to the ecosystem to have these drivers get some love. (Or, alternately, for the proprietary drivers to go open-source and be included with the kernel).
- cs702 14y ago
  nathanb: Yes, that would be ideal. The way I think about it is this: even though this effort falls far short of the ideal with NVIDIA and AMD, it's still a huge win for the platform.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  > Seems to me like a huger win would be if the open-source graphics drivers would get improved. Their work with Intel is on the open source drivers.

SkyMarshal 14y ago

I wish they'd add Wine as a 3rd 'OS' for comparison. Currently they're comparing Ubuntu 12.04 native vs Windows 7, would be really interesting to add the benchmarks for the Windows version running on the latest Wine on Ubuntu 12.04.

rogerbraun 14y ago

As a counterpoint to the "OpenGL needs to start from scratch" discussion, take a look at JWZs blog about porting XScreenSaver to iOS: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/06/i-have-ported-xscreensaver-to-the-iphone/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/06/i-have-ported-xscreensaver-t...

ajross 14y ago
Indeed. The death of the immediate draw APIs is something that only driver writers and serious optimization wonks think is a good idea. For everyone else, it simply makes ES2 an API that is basically impossible to learn. Without exception, everyone I know who does any 3D work at all learned first on 1.1 doing flat shaded fixed function stuff. And all those APIs are gone. The amount of code required in ES2 to put anything on the screen at all is staggering. But that said: the per-vertex APIs really are broken from an optimization sense, and serious apps absolutely must do their work on buffer objects. (Display lists have historically been a way to cheat this, at the expense of huge complexity in the driver. This is one of the bad APIs exDM69 is talking about, I suspect.)
- kcbanner 14y ago
  There is really no use for immediate mode anymore; I'm of the opinion that if you lament the loss of immediate mode, you simply don't want to learn the newer, more efficient ways of doing the same thing. Ask yourself this, if immediate mode never existed, would you still say that the ES2.0 method is still "basically impossible to learn"? I assure you that it is very possible to learn.
  - jra101 14y ago
    Immediate mode is very useful for drawing a single triangle that fully covers the viewport, something that is quite common for any sort of image processing or post processing. In these cases your performance will entirely be limited by the complexity of your fragment shader or by raw fill rate and not by the method you used to submit the vertices to the GPU.

alexholehouse 14y ago

Maybe a stupid question and I've missed something, but why even bother telling us they're using 32GBs RAM for benchmarking if they're using 32-bit Ubuntu? Just to be totally transparent? Is Windows a 32-bit W7 too?

rmk2 14y ago
I'm not sure if this is the right answer or not, but the Linux kernel has supported PAE[1] for ages, which allows for more than 4GB of RAM in a 32-bit OS (though it remains unusable by a single process, if I understood that correctly). Maybe someone else with a better understanding of the 32bit/64bit differences can chime in. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
- kbolino 14y ago
  PAE would definitely enable them to use all 32GBs of physical memory. Both Windows and Linux have PAE support, but non-server editions of Windows still limit the physical address space to 4GB (although this might seem to make PAE support pointless, there are other advantages of PAE, like the NX/XD bit used for DEP). You are also correct that the per-process limit of 4GB of virtual memory is not affected by PAE. In case the advantages of PAE once again seem pointless, remember that a system can execute multiple 32-bit programs each with its own independent address space, so you can have, in theory, eight programs each using its own 4GB on a 32GB system without running out of memory. In practice, the platform imposes a limit of <4GB for physical memory, with the remainder used for legacy support and hardware DMA. Also, the operating system imposes a limit of <4GB for virtual memory, with the remainder used by the kernel.
Splines 14y ago
I've only dabbled in Linux, but what's the advantage of using 32-bit Ubuntu? Why not the 64-bit version? Especially in the Linux world where you deal with binaries less-often compared to Windows. Is it because of the video card drivers?
- 14y ago

Mavrik 14y ago

I might be the only sceptic here, but the fact that it seems that Valve has conflict of interest when it comes to Microsoft lately (see Gabe's comments) makes me doubt the authenticity of these results. I'd love to see real performance improvements when it comes to Linux, but right now I just see a company that (it seems) has something to gain by smearing Microsoft giving out results without any methodology or explanation. They never even said how they avoided the typical pitfall of "FPS" benchmarking - making sure the GPU and the engine is actually drawing the same things (that means making sure all the same shaders are executed, similar extensions are used so that image quality is identical). Until we get some confirmation in the wild I'll remain highly sceptical towards claims on the blog.

SCdF 14y ago
You're not the only one. Valve are not the first people to port Windows games to Linux, and while some people claim they're faster, the general benchmarked consensus I've seen over the years is that both platform are, within 10% or so, basically identical.
- Periodic 14y ago
  Their results are basically within 15-20%. The major achievement is just having acceptable performance. After that there tends to be so many other factors that you can tweak that only two metrics make sense: FPS and image quality without any non-automatic tweaks, and then the maximum that can be obtained by extensive optimization. For most people, they just want the game to run such that the difference is not big enough to warrant switching OSes for gaming. For me, I just want it to be close enough that I can't be bothered to reboot. I've been getting some great performance through wine for some games for quite a while now. Under the same settings I've occasionally had slightly better or slightly worse performance depending on the game, patch-level and settings. For me the bar is whether it is playable and looks decent at all.
- enneff 14y ago
  They said that some of their optimizations applied to both Linux and Windows, bringing the final scores to 315 and 303.4 fps respectively. That's well under 10%. Seems believable to me.

jeffool 14y ago

While I love the idea of free and open software, I have to admit an ignorance to it in application (well, at least Linux). Valve creates a Steam client, and gets the Source game engine running awesomely on "Linux". How do all the different desktops factor into this?