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.

[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)...

[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.

[halion]

I find this quite hard to believe...

They do Xbox360, PS3, Mac ( OpenGL ), PC ( Direct3D )

yet they have an issue with shaders which should not be done during a loop except initial loading

plus... april fools coming

[Armurier]

@Michael

As I said on Twitter :
Pics (plus a video of Gabe Newell confirming) or it didn't happen.

You are sickening me Michael.
Your gaming news are garbage.
This isn't even news ! What is this shit doing in my RSS feed ? F*** you !

EDIT:
Plus, how come you receive an email from Gaben though you don't have Valve's favors ?
Valve is silent enough when it comes to talking about their next games, & evasive when giving a release date...