A Message From Valve's Gabe Newell

[entropy]

I'd suggest contacting "Chris Wilson"...
IMHO this guy does an amazing job and he really seems to knows what he does.

[FireBurn]

What servers and IP address range did this come from?

I'm betting someone's playing a joke on Michael for April Fools

[Paradox Ethereal]

I`m more of an audio-dsp guy. 50ms in the gfx driver, that sounds bad. Good thing that prob wasn`t in doom3, it would have been no fun.

[byteframe]

poppycock.

all ad's we're blocked during my visit to phoronix for this year's steam april fool's.

[BlackStar]

Some drivers will recompile shaders under specific conditions, for instance when a uniform value becomes 0 or 1, in order to eliminate noop expressions (e.g. add 0), eliminate conditionals, reduce register pressure and total instruction count.

Nvidia used to be very aggressive with such optimizations back in the geforce 5 and 6 days, much to the annoyance of game developers. Typical workarounds include small epsilons (e.g. 0.001 or 0.999) or multiple side-by-side shaders that are bound depending on uniform combos.

As gpus got more complex, these optimizations became less prevalent, but it could very well be that some drivers might still use them.

[Armurier]

poppycock.

all ad's we're blocked during my visit to phoronix for this year's steam april fool's.

Wow, I was about to write the very same thing o______O
Except it's been two years since Phoronix is on my AdBlock black list.

[Armurier]

this isn't a 1.April joke. i got the same information yesterday.

Oh, Gaben sent you a mail too.
Right.

[entropy]

no. they work on steam for linux for over 2 years .

they just do have performance problems because of the "bad" linux drivers.

Let's assume this is correct.
Aren't the Mac OS X OpenGL drivers far worse?

[Pickle]

allquixotic: ok I could believe the cases where a shader is being optimized/changed at runtime, which would require a recompile. I find it hard to believe though that memory consumption would be a reason. Shaders are small so I think you would need 100's or 1000's for it to be an issue.
Really vertex and texture data should be the main consumers of the vram.

Qaridarium: for some reason your confusing vertex data with a shader.

[allquixotic]

Let's assume this is correct.
Aren't the Mac OS X OpenGL drivers far worse?

The OS X drivers are far worse as far as comparing them against the Nvidia binary on Linux, and maybe even fglrx under certain circumstances. But the OS X drivers are a lot better than the open drivers most of the time.

Remember, we're talking about the Source engine. It's pretty much going to be limited to using OpenGL 2.1 anyway. All the content in Source engine games is assuming that the user has DirectX 9.0c (OpenGL 2.1) class hardware, nothing newer. So any support for GL3+ is irrelevant in the comparison.