Linux Can Deliver A Faster Gaming Experience Than Mac OS X

[blackshard]

We can talk 100 pages about how LCD Vtrace is limited at 60 frames anyway, but in practice anything before 85fps is not playable in fps shooters. You need two systems to be able to compare. Of course some persons are SO slow, that they cannot distiquish 30 and 60 fps. Its highly personal and reaction based.

60fps is far enough for anyone, even in fast-paced online games.
IF you're lucky to get stable 60fps, you're in good condition to play: it's 16 msec resolution, I don't think humans can take decisions in less than 16 msec...

Albeit I'm slow because I can't distinguish between 60 fps and 120 fps

[curaga]

"60fps ought to be enough for everyone"

[Wheels]

I don't think any of these tests make use of AA by default.

BTW, that minimum fps that you see in the graphs isn't the absolute minimum framerate that the game hit, but rather the minimum average framerate (since the graphs only show that) from all the test resolutions. The current PTS doesn't record minimum and maximum framerates for each test run, only average.

Well that's some useful info.

If you ever played online fps, you will know that anything before 80fps is not acceptable. The 60hz thing is what once medics found out, but it turned out to be still eye-restraining(on CRT) so it was later highered to 70hz. Still the best hz non-eye restraining started at 85hz. Same for fps - 60 is acceptable, 45 and lower unplayable.

60Hz maybe headache-inducing on the CRTs in my computer classes, but at home I've found it's not a big deal on my LCD monitor or laptop unless there are a lot of horizontal stripes or something.
And no, I don't tend to play a lot of online FPSers. Maybe that makes a difference, but to me having more frames served to the monitor than it can actually display for you is just a waste that doesn't improve the experience. Like I said, a lot of LCDs are limited to 60 frames no matter what your graphics card can put out; but if the game drop lower than that frequently it's going to be a less than ideal experience so the more its fps can stay off the floor the better.

In fact my HD4770 system with Athlon II x4 630 reaches ONLY 60 fps on opensource radeon drivers (fullhd though) in OpenArena and it is much less playable than current nvidia chipset 8300 system with proprietary that Im now typing from(not at home) - 120fps+.

Is that because you get frequent fps sags on the open source driver?

We can talk 100 pages about how LCD Vtrace is limited at 60 frames anyway, but in practice anything before 85fps is not playable in fps shooters.

Wouldn't that mean that shooters aren't playable on most LCD monitors "in practice" because of the frame rate limit?

[allquixotic]

Apple's stack probably sucks because they use LLVM in there somewhere Every time I've seen LLVM comparisons, on Phoronix and elsewhere, LLVM sucks, and completely fails to live up to the hype that it makes things magically faster. The ONLY thing it does faster is it produces valid binaries faster than GCC when compiling C/C++. But so what? Would you rather spend a few more seconds compiling in order to create faster-executing binaries, or build quick-and-dirty binaries that are poorly optimized? What's a few seconds on a multi-core build server? Unless we're building binaries in-place on mobile devices, build time just doesn't matter, as long as it isn't unmanageable. Even the ugliest of builds I've ever seen -- things like OpenOffice, the whole Mozilla suite, or the Linux kernel with everything built as a module -- can be easily tackled with a small cluster of icecreamed build servers.

[deanjo]

Apple's stack probably sucks because they use LLVM in there somewhere Every time I've seen LLVM comparisons, on Phoronix and elsewhere, LLVM sucks, and completely fails to live up to the hype that it makes things magically faster. The ONLY thing it does faster is it produces valid binaries faster than GCC when compiling C/C++. But so what? Would you rather spend a few more seconds compiling in order to create faster-executing binaries, or build quick-and-dirty binaries that are poorly optimized? What's a few seconds on a multi-core build server? Unless we're building binaries in-place on mobile devices, build time just doesn't matter, as long as it isn't unmanageable. Even the ugliest of builds I've ever seen -- things like OpenOffice, the whole Mozilla suite, or the Linux kernel with everything built as a module -- can be easily tackled with a small cluster of icecreamed build servers.

Going by the last benches it would show LLVM to be pretty much on par with GCC.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=llvm_gcc_atom&num=1

Of course LLVM also has additional pluses like using clang which has better expressive diagnostics then GCC does and your not tied to the limitations of the GPL licensing.

[Dukenukemx]

Would have loved to seen a Wine test comparison, or just common commercial games between the two OS's. Lets be realistic, who really plays these open source games?

[curaga]

Surprisingly many, actually.

[Dukenukemx]

Not as many.

[kgonzales]

it's because apple only cares about gay men, not gaymen.

Congrats you are a homophobe. That's exactly what the Linux community needs, more bigots.