How Valve Made L4D2 Faster On Linux Than Windows

[phoronix]

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...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE1NzE

[Forceflow]

Here's my report on the talk:

http://www.forceflow.be/2012/08/09/valve-left-4-dead-2-on-linux-talk-at-siggraph-opengl-anniversary/

[JantarMantar]

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!

[spykes]

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.

[Dukenukemx]

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?

[eisbehr]

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.

[AJenbo]

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.

[SolidSteel144]

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.

[Filiprino]

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 ...)

[kwahoo]

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).