A Message From Valve's Gabe Newell

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Message From Valve's Gabe Newell

Gabe Newell of Valve, the company behind Steam and the Source Engine, has allegedly sent over a message to Phoronix...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA3OTY

[Khudsa]

This will be great but... april's fools is so close...

[allquixotic]

Too close to April 1. Tomorrow, Steam and the entire HL2 series will be released for Linux, along with Microsoft Office 2010. Oh and Catalyst will be released as open source and merged to Linux 3.4 mainline.

Also expect Stereoscopic 3d support "real soon now", a native Linux port of Mass Effect 1 - 3, and pre-releases of Intel's Haswell platform being shipped free to Linux users for their undying adherence to their belief in their platform.

[Qaridarium]

no this isn't a April 1. joke!...

[Pickle]

That statement doesnt even sound right, with opengl 2+ you compile your shaders so that you can use to them to draw. Compiling is a one time thing, your not doing it during draw calls. I say its bogus.

[[Knuckles]]

Yes, this time for sure!!!

[curaga]

Surely Valve knows how to pre-compile their shaders at level-load time for example. Or have they been DX-only for too long?

[allquixotic]

That statement doesnt even sound right, with opengl 2+ you compile your shaders so that you can use to them to draw. Compiling is a one time thing, your not doing it during draw calls. I say its bogus.

Actually, some really ugly 3d engines will compile shaders very frequently, not just at load-time. Sometimes it's easier to ship different code based on dynamic occurrences within the engine. Sometimes that code is written "on the fly"; sometimes that code is pre-stored, but loading all the shaders at once would eat up too much VRAM (or what they perceive as too much for certain hardware at least).

It's not out of the realm of imagination that an engine might want to load a shader at render-time, not just at load-time. In fact I think the Valve Source engine might do this, because I often get these very obvious freezes in Source engine games during the early stages of a match. The frequency and severity of them drops off as I play the game longer, to the point that they simply don't happen after 10 minutes or so. Seems like it's trying to load some resource at runtime the first time it was utilized, rather than simply throw everything at the VRAM and/or RAM during the initial engine load.

The only advantage is that the engine would appear to run better on cards with really low VRAM (128MB or less)...

[Qaridarium]

That statement doesnt even sound right, with opengl 2+ you compile your shaders so that you can use to them to draw. Compiling is a one time thing, your not doing it during draw calls. I say its bogus.

no they use "wine" libs and they use openGL3.2+ you can check this start aram2 in wine wine always compile shaders "in game"

also modern engines like Arma2 are Streaming games this means new land comes up new shaders and so one the engine always drop part and load new parts.

imagine a modern engine like arma3... 900km? you can't hold this in VRAM! never! because of this the engie need to load and unload stuff all the time.

valves half-life 3 engine its the same the game engine is made to be so big that you always need to compile shades.

[curaga]

Or perhaps the correct term is pre-cache? Anyway, even the blobs don't fully compile the shader until you use it to draw something.