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Valve Shares Performance Numbers On Port of Left4Dead
New submitter nschubach writes in with an update on Valve's progress porting one of their games to GNU/Linux. From the article: "One factor in creating a good gaming experience is throughput. This post discusses some of what we've learned about the performance of our games running on Linux. ... After this work, Left 4 Dead 2 is running at 315 FPS on Linux. That the Linux version runs faster than the Windows version (270.6) seems a little counter-intuitive, given the greater amount of time we have spent on the Windows version. However, it does speak to the underlying efficiency of the kernel and OpenGL. Interestingly, in the process of working with hardware vendors we also sped up the OpenGL implementation on Windows. Left 4 Dead 2 is now running at 303.4 FPS with that configuration."
nschubach adds "It seems there are good things coming out of this for both Operating Systems!"
They weren't expecting it to run more efficiently *given the level of work they invested*. They've sunk years of work into making the Windows version run quickly. Getting a Linux port to run faster, only months after getting their initial port running (the first running Linux version ran at 6 fps under the same test), is impressive.
Er, no, it actually doesn't.
Microsoft had planned to do so in Vista (they actually wanted to run old versions of DirectX on top of DX10, then the newest), but they scrapped that plan well before release after half the game industry, most of the professional graphics industry, and the graphics card companies themselves rose up in arms (Nvidia was actually planning on circumventing it, offering direct OpenGL).
So on any actually-released version of Windows, OpenGL is as low-level as DirectX.
This was 300fps on an *extremely* powerful system. The GeForce 680 is the most powerful single-GPU card on the market, and the 3930K is one of Intel's top consumer chips. I myself have a 660 and a 3610, weaker versions of the ones they used, and I can max out every game I have.
Getting 300fps on that means that, on a system a tenth as powerful, you get 30fps without dropping the graphics settings. Valve just doesn't chase the extreme high-end hardware - they don't bother adding more particles and such that make it look better only on a fraction of a percent of systems. Valve has perhaps the best knowledge of what real-world users are gaming on, thanks to the Steam Hardware Survey. So they can make an informed decision as to whether it is worth it to have the artists come in and add yet another layer of detail that will only be seen on the newest and most expensive computers.
That said, 120hz monitors seem to be rising in popularity, making rendering at 120fps a worthwhile goal. And it's often good to have a buffer of 10-20fps or so, because the amount of stuff you have to render isn't constant. In combat (with all the particle effects, explosions, flying debris, etc.), it often drops by 10%-20%, which can put you below 60fps if you're running at 70-80 normally.