Gabe Newell Showing Valve On Linux To Partners

[Dukenukemx]

Yes, it is. Small comparison Catalyst vs Open source (my own timedemo):

That seems very CPU limited.

[MonkeyPaw]

That seems very CPU limited.

Source games are generally CPU heavy, especially the earlier games where the polycount is lower. Portal 2 is a better game to try if you really want to give the GPU a challenge.

[Kamikaze]

I never claimed this would happen, only that RH would be in the best position for this sort of thing. Aside from that, it really isn't that far from what they do. Obviously their main source of income is support for RHEL along with upselling of their virt stack and JBoss, but they've really already done the hard work needed for this sort of thing with RHEL.

I agree about the support & jboss, and I do think they have the best QA'd and stable distro, however I still think it's quite distant and unlikely from their core goals as a business. Though I'd love to be proven wrong and see that the "Red Hat Desktop" edition they have was actually a long term plan and push they were waiting to get around to

The big reason it wouldn't happen is the vast increase in user support they would have to accomodate, and that, along with the small fee I supposed, would prevent this from happening.
Lastly, as I said, you can ask Dave Airlie but I'm fairly certain they back-port the graphic stack as much as possible, and, really, that isn't the issue here since these would be running the blobs for max performance otherwise you'd have a hard time convincing window's gamers to switch.

I'm not really across the graphics stack of RHEL at all, but would love to ask David Airlie the question, because it would imply there's a benefit for Red Hat to do so.. I guess David Airlie being an employee of Red Hat implies there's a benefit, but I don't really see it in terms of what they do??

Only slightly relevant -- but I noticed the last support request I filed with RH recently was found to be due to a bug in the kernel that was actually fixed in 3.0, but hadn't been back-ported. Because of things like this I just figured the majority of libs and the kernel worked like that in RHEL... Basically that they'd only back-port security fixes, major bugs, perhaps major performance enhancements, or if you report them - smaller bugs that affect their customers. e.g. I wouldn't see them backporting fixes to the graphics stack unless their business clients are really using the open source stack.

[kwahoo]

That seems very CPU limited.

Windows numbers are even more ridiculus: ~130 fps @ 1920x1080 and ~110 fps @ 1280x720

[Kano]

dx conversations cost much speed. opengl games run with nearly fullspeed via wine.

[V!NCENT]

So we have...

- A video driver debacle
- A kernel that changes every three minutes
- A sound system that consistently produces audio skips
- Window managers and desktop environments that simply don't work

Now ask oneself... what could possibly go wrong?

A stupid debate around bullshit. Steam builds on top of stable standards and it's fine. Last time Quake 3 stopped working was never.

Besides... Valve has always been AMD and ATI fans. They're talking with AMD and nVidia will be nowhere near the Steambox, just like the Xbox360.

Source works fine on AMD hardware on both Windows, Wine and the Xbox360, none of which have any nVidia related crap anywhere near it.

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So to get ontopic: Valve is awesome as usual! (and late as usual)

[kazetsukai]

Source works fine on AMD hardware on both Windows, Wine and the Xbox360, none of which have any nVidia related crap anywhere near it.

That's probably because Source has been very ATI friendly since the beginning. When Source first came out, Valve's official recommendations were for the ATI 9600 or 9800 PRO. The competing bleeding edge engine at the time, Doom 3, recommended an NVIDIA 5900 or 6800.

Back then I had a 5950 Ultra, my friend had a 9800 PRO. My card was faster and beat the 9800 PRO by almost 10FPS in Doom 3, but ATI's hardware performed the same as mine in HL2. Valve took their time optimizing for ATI's architecture and continues to do so.

[Kristian Joensen]

A stupid debate around bullshit. Steam builds on top of stable standards and it's fine. Last time Quake 3 stopped working was never.

Besides... Valve has always been AMD and ATI fans. They're talking with AMD and nVidia will be nowhere near the Steambox, just like the Xbox360.

Source works fine on AMD hardware on both Windows, Wine and the Xbox360, none of which have any nVidia related crap anywhere near it.

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So to get ontopic: Valve is awesome as usual! (and late as usual)

Steambox? Why does everyone keep mentioning that? That was debunked already.

Edit:

Also as far as AMD vs Nvidia goes, I will never ever even remotely consider buying any system with a GPU from AMD after I experienced this. Hardware malfunction error BSOD != my idea of fun.

Edit2:

Yes, Valve is awesome.

[kwahoo]

That's probably because Source has been very ATI friendly since the beginning. When Source first came out, Valve's official recommendations were for the ATI 9600 or 9800 PRO. The competing bleeding edge engine at the time, Doom 3, recommended an NVIDIA 5900 or 6800.

Back then I had a 5950 Ultra, my friend had a 9800 PRO. My card was faster and beat the 9800 PRO by almost 10FPS in Doom 3, but ATI's hardware performed the same as mine in HL2. Valve took their time optimizing for ATI's architecture and continues to do so.

Carmack was asked (Bonusweb):

No doubt you heard about GeForce FX fiasco in Half-Life 2. In your opinion, are these results representative for future DX9 games (including Doom III) or is it just a special case of HL2 code preferring ATI features, as NVIDIA suggests?

And the answer was:

Unfortunately, it will probably be representative of most DX9 games. Doom has a custom back end that uses the lower precisions on the GF-FX, but when you run it with standard fragment programs just like ATI, it is a lot slower. The precision doesn't really matter to Doom, but that won't be a reasonable option in future games designed around DX9 level hardware as a minimum spec.

Edit: And Newell opinion http://techreport.com/articles.x/5636/1

[FutureSuture]

I agree with the gist of your post, but I think it's worth pointing out that due to the phenomenon of Valve Time, "this year" could easily mean "next year".

Valve Time indeed. I do hope it isn't true, but one has to be rational too.