Valve-Sponsored Mesa Work Makes Games Load A Lot Faster

[jsa1983]

Only for Intel driver?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the GLSL compiler thing is common to all mesa (gallium and non-gallium drivers) drivers.

[GreatEmerald]

Not exactly... there's actually plenty of games out there based upon open source engines that are comparable (See all the various freespace mods for instance), however open source really just isn't part of the culture of game development at this point even among modders who have nothing to lose, and everything to gain by opening their source, and so as a result we lose out on a significant number of the free fan-games/mods that otherwise really should be open-sourced.

Well, in the Unreal Tournament series modding community, most people are quite open to the idea. In fact, even from the early days there were attempts at writing a license similar to GPL (although it was pretty badly worded). These days there are still quite a few people who don't release code or don't use licenses, but when asked about it, they usually do both of these things. So it's a matter of people not being informed about it more than anything. The licenses themselves are a bit of a problem, since the games are covered by a somewhat restrictive EULA (mods can't be used commercially and have to have a disclaimer that they are not supported by the original game's authors), which means that you can't just use an existing free license, but have to adapt it first. I adapted three of the permissive licenses, and they seem to be doing well so far in the UT2004 modding community.

[Mike Frett]

Did anyone else not get a warm fuzzy from reading this article? I know when I play a game I usually have to suffer through a lot of stuttering until the GL cache is built.

Another +1 for D3D.

And yet you seem to conveniently forget DirectX is a one platform solution and in the long run too expensive to develop for. Why use DirectX when you can make more $$$ using OpenGL on MANY platforms...

[Ancurio]

Thanks for the info

Here is the tweet by the way: https://twitter.com/grahamsellers/st...72705248403456

Seems as if Nvidia even goes so far as to cache previously compiled shaders.

[erendorn]

Thanks for sharing your observations, the proprietary focus of game development is very interesting. From my observations (which are not first hand, but I have enjoyed discussions with at least one well-known gaming house that are all directx evangelists). My impression is similar to yours, they seem to have little knowledge (and hence appreciation) of open software or standards in general.

Personally I have come to the conclusion that the open development model is currently not able to compete on game development, and I fear this situation will not change in the near future. That is also why I welcome Valve's linux adventure. They keep the games proprietary (which I see as inevitable in the foreseeable future anyway), but contributes to make the underlying operating system competitive. I am convinced that it will be a huge success for Valve as long as they keep on going. The only question is how long it will take. In this industry things can change really fast though.

Well, you can get the cryengine source code for 10$, the unreal engine 4 one for 20$.
It's not exactly open source, but it's getting close to it, and these are AAA engines. I hope the trend catches on.

[smitty3268]

Seems as if Nvidia even goes so far as to cache previously compiled shaders.

There's not much reason not to, once you've got the support for GL_ARB_get_program_binary present.

Mesa had some patches to do this as well, although they never got committed.

[_SXX_]

What has worked well in the past is: Open source game engine + closed source game.

It's never worked this way. All open source commercial games we have was released as proprietary software and source code was only released after EOL. Possible there is some commercial indie games that was open source from start, but you can't compare them with Valve products because they actually support them for many years.

[_SXX_]

Well, you can get the cryengine source code for 10$

Pardon?

It's was never announced that source code will be included and it's not available yet.

[DaVince]

I don't really see what do you mean as "help" there. I doubt Valve have access to their drivers source code or can pay to 3rd party company to drivers optimization.

Valve has, in the past, invited over driver developers from NVIDIA, Intel and AMD to have sessions where they take a look at bottlenecks in graphics performance and try to solve the issues in both the software and the drivers (as well as solve other bugs preventing Valve from doing certain things in their games). This is actually one of the reasons the proprietary drivers have improved so much in the past year or so. There's a few slideshows around detailing what they did during these sessions, but I can't be bothered to look for them right now. Maybe they're on Valve's publicity page.

[GreatEmerald]

It's never worked this way. All open source commercial games we have was released as proprietary software and source code was only released after EOL. Possible there is some commercial indie games that was open source from start, but you can't compare them with Valve products because they actually support them for many years.

Depends on what you call "open source" (Unreal series games have open-source game logic, for example, and some come with the C++ headers), and no AAA game has ever tried to use the fully open engine + proprietary content way up to now, as far as I know. So you can't say "It's never worked" when nobody ever tried it to begin with.