Valve's L4D2 Is Faster On Linux Than Windows

[boot]

But surely that is comparing Apples and Oranges there isin't it? You can compare Direct3D to OpenGL, but for the rest it is SDL that provides a similar or even arguably better feature set to DirectX (at the very least on Linux but also on other systems as well).

There's a good presentation from Icculus on this subject. You can watch it here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3wDn...layer_embedded

[Hamish Wilson]

Great read Hamish Wilson, thanks. Somehow it felt strange reading about all that good linux graphics support

I grew up reading old Linux Journals from between 1997 and 2002, so I know of lots of great articles from the time. Lots of nice gaming articles from before Loki went bust.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/googlesearch?s=loki

[Hamish Wilson]

On a different subject: anyone else use the r200 drivers with UT? That combo was fast.

I started using Linux on a Radeon 7500 and then later upgraded to a Radeon 9200 and had a lot of fun playing classic natives games such as Quake 3, Shogo, SOF, UT, and UT2004, not to mention OpenArena and Nexuiz and the like. I could just never understand why Doom 3 would never work - I was so pleased when it became possible to launch it using the free drivers back in 2010 though.

Sorry for the nostalgia trip everyone.

[GreatEmerald]

But surely that is comparing Apples and Oranges there isin't it? You can compare Direct3D to OpenGL, but for the rest it is SDL that provides a similar or even arguably better feature set to DirectX (at the very least on Linux but also on other systems as well).

The way you wrote "Apples and Oranges" made me think that in IT discussions, it would be interesting to grow a habit of saying "it's like comparing Apple to Orange"

[artivision]

Idiotic thing No1: OpenGL isn't multi-threading. Its actually multi-threading and super-threading: if you have a multilevel software rasterizer for LLVM for example, you can run the graphics part on many different instruction sets like CPU cores and GPU cores at the same time just with 2 back-ends, see PlayStation3 (6 SPEs /1.8macTflops used for graphics). Idiotic thing No2: Opengl is slower than Direct3D. They have only a small difference: OpenGL has extensions(ARB) of the protocol build inside GPUs. Even if you don't use assembly and use GLSL, you will still be faster. Important No3: OpenGL is "Open". So you can find it inside GPU drivers on all operating systems, and you can develop libraries for it: Imagination has OpenRL, wile NVidia develops Voxel-Raytracing solution for OpenGL (ID-tech 6).

[BO$$]

Your post smells with fud.

First, yes, DX is easier. Eaxh individual component is notably easier is some aspect and DX is easier overall due to integrating all components into one.

Second, yes, it was a predictable improvement, but not for those reasons. The real reason is this is a highly skilled team which took the arguably most stable game Valve has and spent a year porting and optimizing it, effectively rewriting a lot of code, while the Windows version relies on ages-old code in a state just "good enough" where Valve doesn't need to optimize it.

I'm as much of a Linux enthusiast as anyone, but no need for fud and lies here.

When I started learning graphics I started with directx 9 because I also thought that dx was easier, and since there were samples plus documentation already installed with the dx sdk. But after switching to opengl I don't think opengl is harder. It is more C-like but is quite equivalent to dx. Now I was asking why would a dev choose dx when if you choose dx all you can write to is windows, xbox and windows phone, and if you choose opengl you can write to windows, linux, os x, ios, android, ps3. The only ones you can't use opengl on are xbox and windows phone(that nobody uses). You have a larger market if you choose opengl. So why did they choose dx in the first place?

Second, the valve team isn't exactly a newbie in dx, they basically used it from 2004 until now in their source engine so I don't think it's really that unoptimized, while it is a newbie in opengl arena. While they do use opengl in their ps3 port I wouldn't really say they could take optimizations from there and use it on the PC. They are different architectures that require quite a different approach.

Since any sane developer abstracts away the api we can expect that internally it's the engine with two different renderer implementations(both dx and opengl). Technically they should yield the same performance since only the ends are different but knowing that source is an object oriented c++ engine we can expect that it performs worse in opengl because opengl is a state machine that doesn't really mix well with an OOP approach(check out performance differences in OGRE renderer for dx and opengl and you'll see that opengl is a bit slower).

What I am trying to prove is that the opengl version should be slower that it's dx counterpart and since it isn't that is probably the linux kernel behaving better. I suspect that either the linux video drivers are better optimized(unlikely) or that the linux kernel, with its superior memory management and perhaps less layers than windows kernel make the difference.

[narciso]

We don´t know in which conditions the benchmark was done in linux, because a default ubuntu 12.04 install with nvidia blob performs much much worse than windows 7.

Also, a curious note. The reason why opengl is not widely used, is because the xbox alone sells more games than pc, mac, linux and similar

[gamerk2]

We don´t know in which conditions the benchmark was done in linux, because a default ubuntu 12.04 install with nvidia blob performs much much worse than windows 7.

Also, a curious note. The reason why opengl is not widely used, is because the xbox alone sells more games than pc, mac, linux and similar

No. For one, console games typically don't make extensive use of their higher order API's. On the PS3, for instance, the native libgcm graphical library is MUCH preferred over the use of PSGL. Same for the 360. Higher order API's are simply to slow for consoles with limited resources. Its understood that any port between any console/PC will need its entire graphical engine re-written from scratch, due to the API/hardware differences.

The "consoles holding DX back" or "Xbox killing OGL" are both false statements, but repeat something enough...

I blame a combination of three factors for OGL becomming more or less a dead spec for PC gaming:
1: OGL 3.0 failing to deliver
2: Id Tech 4's steep HW requirements
3: Unreal 3 [seriously, how many major titles use Unreal these days?]

[Scali]

I blame a combination of three factors for OGL becomming more or less a dead spec for PC gaming:
1: OGL 3.0 failing to deliver
2: Id Tech 4's steep HW requirements
3: Unreal 3 [seriously, how many major titles use Unreal these days?]

I can add another one:
4: Poor driver support from all vendors except nVidia

In recent years even Autodesk has made the move from OpenGL towards Direct3D, and the main reason they cite is driver compatibility (http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/...lution_788.pdf)
The release of Rage also demonstrated the poor state of OpenGL drivers on Windows once again. The game just would not work properly on Radeons or Intel drivers. It worked on nVidia, but with bugs.
I had to try no less than 4 special 'Rage-optimized' beta drivers from AMD before my HD5770 could run Rage acceptably.
The reason for this is a bit chicken-and-egg I suppose. Because the API is near-dead anyway, no OpenGL software is released, so OpenGL driver issues are neither found nor fixed.

[blackout23]

For those of you wondering if the extra performance could be due to the game looking shittier on Linux

Valve Linux team says:
August 2, 2012 at 10:55 am
The image quality equals that seen on Windows with Direct3D.