Counter-Strike: GO Might Soon Be Out On Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 10 April 2013 at 11:26 PM EDT. 38 Comments
LINUX GAMING
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the latest installment to Valve's Counter-Strike franchise, is being tested on Linux and might soon be released to the general public.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is one of Valve's more recent titles that was officially released last August as their fourth CS title. Counter-Strike: GO improves some of the assets found within Counter-Strike: Source and also offers a wealth of new content, engine improvements, and other enhancements.

I have heard that Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is currently being tested on Linux and that the port is shaping up fairly well, similar to their already debuted Linux games. As some independent confirmation of that aside from what I've heard, a few days ago there was an Intel Mesa driver commit pertaining to an optimization that also benefits "CS:GO." The Mesa commit is a GLSL optimization to flatten simple nested if-blocks, where for CS:GO they can save a few instructions from being generated by this flattening process. This was the first Intel Mesa commit pertaining to this Valve game.

It's not a surprise that Intel's Open-Source Technology Center developers are already working on optimizing Counter-Stike: Global Offensive, just as the in-house developers at AMD and NVIDIA are also doing to their proprietary drivers.

Left 4 Dead 2 still hasn't debuted on Linux while Intel OTC developers have been running it and making L4D2 driver enhancements going back to last summer. Intel developers even have had access to Valve's Perforce repositories with the game source-codes.

For CS:GO on Linux, things hopefully won't take as long as it has for L4D2 and some other Source Engine titles. With this being one of Valve's newer titles, they're likely trying to get it out the door at a more pressing rate while the game is still fresh amongst gamers.

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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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