Former Valve engineer Rich Geldreich has written up a blog post about the state of Linux Gaming. It's an interesting read that's for sure.
When talking about recent bigger game ports:
QuoteSadly, it's pretty clear that if you run these games on Linux your experience isn't going to be as good, and you'll be getting less "gaming value" vs. Windows. We're not talking about a bunch of little indy titles, these are big releases: Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, Borderlands 2, Tropico 5, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Sid Meier's Civilization V. My take is the devs doing these ports just aren't doing their best to optimize these releases for Linux and/or OpenGL.
Emphasis mine, and I don't agree with him on this. Obviously neither he, nor I have any proof either way that they are/aren't doing their best to optimise, but Aspyr & Feral making a living out of porting games to OpenGL, so why wouldn't they be trying to fix performance issues?
The performance has some way to go sure, but is that really the fault of Aspyr & Feral, or do the drivers still have ways to go to improve their performance? Who knows, I sure don't it goes way over my head at that point.
He does however note how hard it is to get performance on Linux equal to Windows:
QuoteI know it's possible for Linux ports to equal or outperform their Windows counterparts, but it's hard. At Valve we had all the driver devs at our beck and call and it was still very difficult to get the Source engine's perf. and stability to where it needed to be relative to Windows. (And this was with a ~8 year old engine - it must be even harder with more modern engines.) These devs are probably glad to just release anything at all given how alien it can be for Windows/Xbox devs to develop, debug, and ship stuff under Linux+OpenGL.
At least he is pointing out that fact that it's not easy to get decent OpenGL performance to match games on Windows, so he's not completely blasting Feral and Aspyr.
I agree with what he's saying about the Intel drivers 100%:
QuoteThe entire Intel driver situation remains in a ridiculous state. I know Intel means well and all but really, they can do better. (Are they afraid of pissing off MS? Or is this just big corp dysfunctionalism?) Valve is still paying LunarG to find and fix silly perf bugs in Intel's slow open source driver. Surely this can't be a sustainable way of developing a working driver?
No, it's not. Intel ideally needs to be doing this sort of work themselves to find bottlenecks and fix general performance issues in their own Linux drivers. I see this as a stopgap measure while Linux still isn't a focus for many people, and Intel included. This again goes into our marketshare issues, if we had a higher share then Intel would probably be doing it themselves.
His last point is a screen-shot of a slashdot comment where someone is basically saying that SteamOS is done, and that we will never get our hands on the Steam Controller. Their reasoning is that Microsoft snapped and allowed Alienware to create a Windows machine that boots to a Steam UI, and not Windows directly.
I agree that was a bit of a shocker, and I thought it wouldn't do SteamOS any good, but I think SteamOS hasn't even had a chance to have a go at it yet. SteamOS was delayed because Valve decided to revamp the controller again to get it right, so I think we should wait for it to be out before signalling its death.
Read his full blog post here.
What are your thoughts on it? Rich is good at stirring up the hornet's nest that's for sure, but just because he is a former Valve engineer doesn't mean he's going to be right on everything. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Quoting: NyamiouIt's FUD, he has probably been paid by Microsoft (or Apple / Sony / Nintendo) for saying this nonsense.
This "FUD!" and "shill!" stuff has to stop. It makes us look completely disconnected from reality. This comment thread has plenty of examples showing that it is not FUD. We gain nothing by ignoring issues.
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Quoting: SkarjakReal arguments in the blog post :Quoting: NyamiouIt's FUD, he has probably been paid by Microsoft (or Apple / Sony / Nintendo) for saying this nonsense.This "FUD!" and "shill!" stuff has to stop. It makes us look completely disconnected from reality. This comment thread has plenty of examples showing that it is not FUD. We gain nothing by ignoring issues.
- Aspyr having problem with all proprietary drivers except the Nvidia one.
- The Intel driver is not as good as it should be.
FUD parts :
- Few games are not as good in term of performances on Linux that on Windows > Every games are going to have less "gaming value" on Linux because devs don't care about Linux
QuoteSadly, it's pretty clear that if you run these games on Linux your experience isn't going to be as good, and you'll be getting less "gaming value" vs. Windows. We're not talking about a bunch of little indy titles, these are big releases: [...]. My take is the devs doing these ports just aren't doing their best to optimize these releases for Linux and/or OpenGL.We all know that these ports are really good, that the companies behind the ports are working on making it better even after it is released, so saying that this games have less "gaming value" on Linux and it's because the devs don't care is just spreading disinformation.
- It's hard to make a game that perform better on Linux
QuoteI know it's possible for Linux ports to equal or outperform their Windows counterparts, but it's hard.Well, not even an argument here.
- It was hard to port a very old engines designed only for Windows > It will be even harder with recent engines
QuoteAt Valve we had all the driver devs at our beck and call and it was still very difficult to get the Source engine's perf. and stability to where it needed to be relative to Windows. (And this was with a ~8 year old engine - it must be even harder with more modern engines.)I highly doubt this guy don't know about Unity and Unreal Engine, so again this is just disinformation.
- Windows/Xbox developer that don't know anything about Linux are developing the ports
QuoteThese devs are probably glad to just release anything at all given how alien it can be for Windows/Xbox devs to develop, debug, and ship stuff under Linux+OpenGL.Most ports are made by people whose jobs is to port game to other platforms (Ryan C. Gordon, Aspyr, Feral), so not by Windows/Xbox dev. Here again this is disinformation.
- Valve developers are crappy
QuoteHay, this is just a thought, but maybe Valve developers could stop locally optimizing for their bonuses by endlessly tweaking and debugging various half-broken dysfunctional codebases and instead do more to educate developers on how to do this sort of work correctly.It's pretty sure now that this guy didn't leave Valve in good terms.
- Steam Machines is a vaporware
QuoteI don't agree that SteamOS is done just yet, but you've got to wonder what is really going on. (So where are all those shiny Steam machines they showed earlier this year anyway? Does all this just go into the Valve memory hole now?)If this part isn't FUD, I don't know what FUD is anymore.
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FutureSuture Nov 11, 2014
Quoting: AstroGamingOnLinux has had a spotless community in my eyes so far. That changed for me when I read this comment, especially the bit in bold. Please do not post here again unless you stop being so completely and utterly obnoxious. I mean, seriously, what the actual fudge? You must be a troll.Quoting: BeamboomThis right here is what I talk about in my post above. Ferals work on Xcom is the exact opposite of garbage, it's one of the best ports to Linux so far, and to sit an spew out stuff like this on forums on the net... We're just in no position whatsoever to do so!A lot of people contact me after reading my comments about Feral. We talk and I recommend them contact Feral and ask them don't port any more games on linux. So, I don't need to argue with you here. Sorry, nothing personal. What I need is just leaving my comments and do what I do.
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Quoting: FutureSutureGamingOnLinux has had a spotless community in my eyes so far. That changed for me when I read this comment, especially the bit in bold. Please do not post here again unless you stop being so completely and utterly obnoxious. I mean, seriously, what the actual fudge? You must be a troll.
I may not have been around here long, but I have quickly fallen in love with this community as well.
Unfortunately he isn't trolling though.. there is some back story there. You see, in the year 2014 he is still running a 32bit Linux install even though he has 64bit hardware from what I understand, and for some(no?) reason, he refuses to install a 64bit distro. Feral released XCOM:EU as 64bit only... and he is butthurt. Makes absolutely NO sense to me, or anyone else it seems. To each his own i suppose?
I completely agree though, that is not the kind of drivel wanted around here. I applaud any efforts to bring games to our OS of choice, however unoptimized they are. Baby steps.. everything has to start somewhere.
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BL2 is running on my laptop at around 18-25FPS at max resolution (1366x768) with everything but AA and sunshafts enabled. Intel Ivybridge Graphics, latest 01.org drivers and 3.17.2 kernel. With recent discoveries by LunarG along with the work the Mesa team has been doing, we should be seeing at least a 57% increase in performance. This means I could get up to ~=43FPS if not more after all these changes are made stable and released.
If you don't believe me, take a look at the LunarG blog, get the average percentage from the kernel patch and add that to the Glassy Mesa percentage, and see for yourself.
Edit: I forgot to factor in kernel level enhancements, so there could be even more to gain than I thought. Fingers crossed, folks.
If you don't believe me, take a look at the LunarG blog, get the average percentage from the kernel patch and add that to the Glassy Mesa percentage, and see for yourself.
Edit: I forgot to factor in kernel level enhancements, so there could be even more to gain than I thought. Fingers crossed, folks.
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Quoting: BeamboomWhat worries me more than the technical hurdles is our market share. Cause with less than 2% of us being on Linux how can you possibly argue that devs should spend a lot on Linux optimizations?This. We've always had a chicken/egg problem with gaming and game-related graphics performance issues (and some other issues) on Linux. That is, nobody would port games to Linux or make Linux be good for games because our market share was small, and we couldn't grow our market share because no games and to the extent there were games, there were bottlenecks when it came to making them good.
To put it simple: We NEED SteamOS to do the magic on those numbers, or we'll remain a smaller gaming platform than Mac. It's just how it is.
There are signs of this deadlock breaking thanks mainly to Valve and their determined efforts of late to move gaming to Linux. But it's not dead yet. There remain a group of technical issues--mostly drivers, development tools, X being obsolete, OpenGL's ability to compete with DirectX. And there remains the market share issue. Now some of the new engines make porting, or rather developing a game to be cross-platform to begin with, so easy that when using them it would actually be well worth it to make sure the game ran on Linux even if it only meant 1% more sales; the "porting" potentially costs well under 1% of overall game development costs. But even if this leads the majority of games coming out to technically run on Linux, that won't by itself create market share or momentum. And if the market share does not increase, the technical issues likely will not be fully solved and may even get worse as technology on other platforms moves forward while Linux lags.
To solve the market share problem, which in turn is very likely to lead to sufficient effort being spent on the technical problems to make Linux a competitive or even superior gaming platform, right now what we really, really need is a successful launch of the Steam Machines. If they come out and take hold, that would be a lot of users using Linux specifically to do graphics-intensive stuff for which they pay money. It would be an increase in critical mass from an open source development standpoint, and it would vastly increase the field of companies and people with a financial stake in the graphics side of Linux. I mean, Linux is already big, even dominant, in many fields, but few of them require it to make topnotch use of a PC graphics card. Server-related problems in Linux get solved; desktop ones, let alone gaming ones, not necessarily.
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Quoting: AstroQuoting: BillNyeTheBlackGuyStill bitter about the whole 32 bit thing huh?Nope. Still cool with my 32 bit system. And more than that, I have a big list of games I want to play on my 32 bit system. I guess, it takes me at least 2 or 3 years to play all linux games I've already bought. So, no crying and no grieving about a few games I can't play natively on linux. If I wanted I'd play XCOM. There is no problem to use Wine for that.
Then stop being such a baby and bother Feral. They choose what they choose to do.
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QuoteRich Geldreich:"FWIW - while at Valve I seriously supported open source Linux GL drivers and I got seriously burned by doing so. There are some powerful concerns out there that are not yet on board with the idea of open source GPU drivers. It cost us quite some time."
He isn't on the dark side.
In my opinion Microsoft's "deal" with Alienware was just a demonstration of their power. As soon as the Steamboxes are becoming a real thread, Microsoft will try to knock them out. As many said the keyword for the Steambox to succeed is market share. With more users its more likely that AAA titles are ported to SteamOS/Linux. In general the whole situation will improve. We can sit in front of our computers, cross fingers and wait until the year of the Linux desktop comes or we can actually do something about it.
People here at gamingonlinux.com are already convinced that Linux is the better platform. I was asking myself why somebody would switch from Windows to Linux. My idea is to have a small competition every month. Former Windows users have to write a story why they switched to Linux. The GOL community will decide which is the best and the writer will be rewarded with a Linux game. Of course this idea can be slightly tweaked a bit.
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Well, I think this man is right. But Aspyr and Feral makes ports, that are analogs of Mac ports (I mean performance). So, I don`t think it`s Linux problem, but it`s problem of Dx \ OpenGL porting.
And I don`t think Steam OS is done.
And I don`t think Steam OS is done.
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Mohandevir Nov 11, 2014
Exactly, just from the start, if game developers could switch from DX to OpenGL, to develop on windows, it would be a first step and the ports to Linux/MAC would get a performance boost and be much easier to make. OpenGL would get much more love from developers and would become much better.
Spin that wheel! :)
But let me guess... DX is required and OpenGL is not available on Xboxes... That would be Microsoft way of doing things.
Spin that wheel! :)
But let me guess... DX is required and OpenGL is not available on Xboxes... That would be Microsoft way of doing things.
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