How Far Valve Has Come: Three Years Ago They Needed OpenGL Linux Help

Written by Michael Larabel in Valve on 30 March 2015 at 08:41 AM EDT. 24 Comments
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While these days there's more than 1,000 Linux games on Steam, just three years ago in their early Source Engine porting process they were barely able to get good frame-rates.

It was on this day (30 March) back in 2012 when Gabe Newell emailed Phoronix about their Linux/OpenGL performance issues that in turn ended up leading me out to Valve's Headquarters a few weeks later to learning all about their Linux plans with exclusives from the Linux-native Steam client to their ultimate plans for gaming machines and their own Steam Linux distribution, etc. That was also the time on behalf of Phoronix readers I did the special Linux delivery to Valve. At that time the Valve Linux cabal was quite tiny and many doubted my claims Valve was even investing in Linux.


How time flies! What are you most looking forward to out of Valve and Linux gaming in 2015? Around November is still when the Steam Controller and Steam Machines should start becoming widely available. At least Valve was able to overcome their OpenGL performance issues and are now working towards Vulkan support and even paid LunarG to develop an open-source Intel Vulkan Linux driver that will be released as soon as the initial Vulkan/SPIR-V specification is public.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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