Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

How Valve Made L4D2 Faster On Linux Than Windows

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • How Valve Made L4D2 Faster On Linux Than Windows

    Phoronix: How Valve Made L4D2 Faster On Linux Than Windows

    Following this morning's Here Is Valve's Source Engine Left 4 Dead 2 On Linux article, here is most of the details that were shared during yesterday's SIGGRAPH presentation about Left 4 Dead 2 running natively on Linux with OpenGL and outperforming the Windows version...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Here's my report on the talk:

    I was fortunate enough to attend the talk Rich Geldreich of Valve Software gave at the OpenGL Anniversary party duing SIGGRAPH 2012 in the JW Marriot Gold Ballroom in LA: “Left 4 Dead 2 Linux: From 6 to 300 FPS in OpenGL.” Update: As Rich himself was so kind to …

    Comment


    • #3
      What's stopping Valve now to create a gaming console based on Linux? It would beat the pants off XBOX and PS3 even with a slightly older graphics card. Ouya needs competition!

      Comment


      • #4
        Dynamic translator vs Preprocessor

        I'm wondering if this work on the dynamic API translator between D3D and OpenGL is worth the work.
        May be they could use it as a preprocessor before compiling their game engine, thus they would avoid the involved overhead.

        Comment


        • #5
          So the game isn't truly OpenGL? It just dynamically translates Direct 3D to OpenGL? That's still impressive, but couldn't they get a bigger performance boost by replacing Direct 3D with OpenGL?

          Also, couldn't WINE do this for a performance boost?

          Comment


          • #6
            I would imagine they did this to port their existing games and will do it properly in Source 2. Maybe that's even one of the reasons for jumping to a new major version.

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by Dukenukemx View Post
              So the game isn't truly OpenGL? It just dynamically translates Direct 3D to OpenGL? That's still impressive, but couldn't they get a bigger performance boost by replacing Direct 3D with OpenGL?

              Also, couldn't WINE do this for a performance boost?
              No cause any-direct3d-application isn't a fixed target as the source engine is internally.

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by Dukenukemx View Post
                So the game isn't truly OpenGL? It just dynamically translates Direct 3D to OpenGL? That's still impressive, but couldn't they get a bigger performance boost by replacing Direct 3D with OpenGL?

                Also, couldn't WINE do this for a performance boost?
                From what I understand...
                The bottleneck would be CPU bound instead of GPU bound.
                Multiple threads have to be used in order to translate D3D to OpenGL so that there isn't a huge bottleneck.
                Last edited by SolidSteel144; 09 August 2012, 05:42 PM.

                Comment


                • #9
                  Maybe with the new Source engine they could go the other way around. Translate from OpenGL to Direct3D dinamically. There's only two systems using Direct3D: Xbox and Windows. Everyone else is using OpenGL or an equivalent (Sony, Nintendo, AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, Apple, Google ...)

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Filiprino View Post
                    Everyone else is using OpenGL or an equivalent (Sony, Nintendo, AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, Apple, Google ...)
                    Sony PS3 uses low-level libGCM (no one is using PSGL derived from GL ES 1.1+Cg), Nintendo Wii uses proprietary GX API (GX2 in Wii U).

                    Comment

                    Working...
                    X