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Is It Time For an OpenGL Gaming Revolution?
MrSeb writes "In a twist that reinforces Valve's distaste for Windows 8, it turns out that the Source engine — the 3D engine that powers Half Life 2, Left 4 Dead, and Dota 2 — runs faster on Ubuntu 12.04 and OpenGL (315 fps) than Windows 7 and DirectX/Direct3D (270.6 fps); almost a 20% speed-up. These figures are remarkable, considering Valve has been refining the Source engine's performance under Windows for almost 10 years, while the Valve Linux team has only been working on the Linux port of Source for a few months. Valve attributes the speed-up to the 'underlying efficiency of the [Linux] kernel and OpenGL.' But here's the best bit: Using these new OpenGL optimizations to the Source engine, the OpenGL version of L4D2 on Windows is now faster than the DirectX version (303.4 fps vs. 270.6 fps). If OpenGL is faster, and it has a comparable feature set, and hardware support is excellent... why is Direct3D still the de facto API? With Windows losing its gaming crown and smartphones (OpenGL ES!) gaining in popularity, is it time for an OpenGL revolution?"
Not necessarily better than OpenGL, but better than 270.6 fps.
Valve's blog post, near the bottom, indicates that they plan on fixing the hang-up with Direct3D, now that they know that the hardware can do better than 270 fps.
because it makes steam obsolete.
Who let this one through?
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/08/02/1236203/valve-shares-performance-numbers-on-port-of-left4dead
I don't think anyone ever reasonably stated that Linux wasn't efficient, or that OpenGL wasn't adequate compared to Direct3D. Or maybe they did, but it wasn't factual. A properly configured Linux system has been faster than Windows for some time, at least for the past few years. The main problem with Linux has always been the lack of polish and presentation to the general public. The pieces have always been there, it's just been very fragile. Maybe now that someone is stepping up to the plate, Linux can receive what it's needed all along: better marketing and polishing. IMHO, it hasn't been large technical issues keeping Linux back. The technology is sound, and has been for quite some time.
I use OpenGL at work and as much as I prefer it over DirectX, the ARB (opengl board that decides on additions/updates/changes) sometimes takes a while to introduce new features that DirectX gets much earlier and they sometimes make questionable choices on how things are supported and the OpenGL docs are sort of terrible and vague.
-SaNo
The only issue is that they are claiming that Open GL version runs better then the Direct X version is we really do not know if they are the same graphic detail. The reason I say this is look at the TF2 Mac port that uses Open GL, its not in any regards the same graphic quality as the Direct X windows version. I am beginning to wonder if the same thing is why the Windows version is rendering using less fps. We don't have any screenshots of the differences, just one paragraph on a blog that is quite lite in details.
Major software companies will put more effort in the tablet and more portable touch displays.
That's already starting to happen. Tablet sales are 24% of the market in 2012, but are increasing 100% year over year. If that continues for 18 more months, tablets will be outselling "traditional form factor" PCs, including laptops and desktops, within a few years. Of course, the installed base of traditional PCs is still larger so it will be several years after that before the tablet form factor has a larger install base, but the writing is on the wall.
It was never about performance or features. The issue has always been about return on investment.
If I wrote an OpenGL engine in 2006, I could release my title on Mac, Windows and Linux. That sounds great, but how many additional sales do I get for Mac or Linux in 2006? Conversely, writing a DirectX engine in 2006 means I can release on Windows and XBox, where there is a massive return on investment.
Now that Mac has stormed to over 14% market share, and mobile development is huge, there is a return on investment in OpenGL. That is what matters. If wonder if it is too late for Sony to capitalize on this approach for their PS4? Surely they have development hardware in the hands of key developers. If the PS4 used a standard x86_64 processor and supported OpenGL, it would make game development that much easier. Maybe the really smart move is a low-power, quiet Nvidia ARM CPU paired with a beefy NVidia GPU.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Tablet sales really don't mean much because people are not replacing desktops with tablets. They are using tablets in addition to desktops. Now, tablets COULD affect laptop sales, as they are much similar to each other as to what they can do, in some respects anyway.
As for a linux port, so what? Xbox/PS games have been ported to PC and vice versus for years. Doesnt mean much that Valve is porting to Linux. All it means is they see a new area to make money, from sole linux users, which are a SMALL % of desktops.
the 800 gorilla.
Wow, that's a lot of gorillum.
It's too feature limited. It's not even up to par with Direct3D 9.0c/9_3, let alone D3D10+. No MRTs, no compute shaders, no geometry features (tessellation, instancing, etc), no standard texture compression format, etc.
Besides that most, if not all, of my console games are OpenGL not DirectX.
Not if your console is a Wii or a PS3 since everyone uses the vendor supplied graphics API. On the PS3 this is PSGL which while smilar to OpenGL ES 1.0 is not OpenGL and is instead based on Cg created by NVIDIA. On the Wii this is another proprietary API that is similar to fixed function OpenGL but is again not OpenGL.
I followed a few links and found my way here:
http://www.paranormal-entertainment.com/idr/blog/posts/2012-07-19T18%3A54%3A37Z-The_zombies_cometh/
It's a blog about an experience intel driver developers had working with the Valve Linux team. What I found interesting is that the Valve developers prefer working with open drivers for an obvious reason - It's hard to find out what went wrong when you're dealing with a black box. What I gathered from the discussion is that this openness was a huge boost to development of both the game and the driver. This gives me hope that there may be a bright future for open source graphics drivers and even gaming on Linux.
From the blog:
Haswell will have 40 execution units in it’s best bin. It’s 2,5 faster even if they not gonna change anything in shaders, which is unlikely. Plus 64 MB of on-package memory to deal with bandwidth problem.
With that performance and official open-source driver Intel will be the best choice for gaming in Linux next year, at least in notebooks.
A pretty good GPU + an open driver + an open kernel coupled with a working relations ship between the 3 groups should result in a super graphics and games on Linux. I'm not a gamer, but I'll buy their games just to support this. Typing this on a Sandy Bridge machine pulling from xorg-edgers.
As far as reason for not liking Win8 goes, making your entire business model at best second fiddle to the MS store and at worst obsolete is a pretty good reason.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
A 0.5-millisecond difference in a 3.6-millisecond frame time is “hardly worth mentioning”? You know, people get paid a lot to find out how to gain those 0.5 milliseconds in a 33-millisecond frame time.
God, root, what is difference ?
I've played a few Linux ports - America's Army Online, Diablo 2 (with Cedega), etc.
And they've all palyed faster under Linux, than windows on my own PC.
Also crashed a lot less, when played in Linux.
So I'm not surprised, and think they are reasonable numbers
..........FULL STOP.
People don't change the game they play, that much I have gathered. I have always been more concerned about the games I wont be able to play anymore than the games that are about to come out net week. So to me, windows has always been an unstable platform that barely looks after its own. In my mind, if someone finally bursts their bubble, at least they wont be able to fuck anything else up by forever changing the rules of the game in the name of selling new versions. Did we ever need direct X? Any reason why direct X couldnt be an open standard? Were they too self centred to just work on opengl? No, of course like any other company, microsoft is the best at anything ever, the only way...
I have never ever given a flying fuck about the difference between opengl and directx apart from one thing: one was open, and one was not. In the process of cynically trying to control the game market, microsoft have forgotten that it needs to also be preserved for posterity... but fuck all that, as long as we have angry birds, who cares about all that other shit... //end drunken rant. more beer needed.
My mouse moves in a space that is less than a square foot and it allows me to have absolute precision.
My displays at work cover close to three square feet and has horrible precision if I was to use it as a touch compatible surface.
Mouse wins.
Go wave your arms in front of you for 8 hours and then tell me touch input is the future.
Also, having a keyboard is non-replaceable as an input device when actually doing anything more than looking at information.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
> On the PS3 this is PSGL
Technically the PS3 supports _2_ graphics API: CGM and PSGL. I don't know of any games that have actually shipped with PSGL. (Almost?) Everyone uses the lower level CGM for performance reasons, even though it is more work.
> On the Wii this is another proprietary API that is similar to fixed function OpenGL but is again not OpenGL.
Correct. The native API on the Wii is GX.
I implemented OpenGL on the Wii a years back and shipped a couple of games with it. (We also had a shipping OpenGL implementation on the PS2!) The design of the GX is very, very, similar to OpenGL.
The biggest PITA is that the Wii only has 1/2 pixel shaders. You have multi-texture support via TEVs and can do some pixel math but it is very tedious, say for shadow mapping.
On the plus side the biggest hack is you can get 32-bit palettized (8-bit) textures if you burn through 2 TEVs ;-)
How do we nominate a Slashdot post for a Pulitzer?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I'd also suspect that WinRT and Win8 Metro apps won't support OpenGL... (Can anyone confirm/deny?)
I'd also expect WinRT won't support graphics, mathematical functions or English. (Can anyone confirm/deny?)
I don't know, but it works for me.
On the referenced blog, I asked whether they'd repeated the test for a 64-bit Linux distro to directly compare to the 64-bit Windows installation they used. Unfortunately, my comment there got deleted. Does anyone have any insight as to what effect switching to a 64-bit distro might have? On one hand, x86-64 has a reputation for being more compiler-friendly than x86-32, what with more explicitly-named registers and all the other goodness. On the other hand, it'd have to sling around longer pointers (and possibly waste more space on 8-byte-aligned data structures? Is that true?). What would the net result likely be?
Put another way, I wish they'd eliminated that rather large test environment variable before publishing their numbers.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
If L4D2 was using the latest DX11.1 implementation and the latest technique, I'm not so sure it would be faster on OpenGL.
That's really not true. Google for performance of DX11 vs DX9: in many cases, DX11 is actually slower (20% slower or so seems to be the trend). Crysis 2, Dragon Age 2, Lost Planet 2: all slower in DX11. A lot of this is the fact that they are simply tacking on DX11 features, since they have to support DX9 for legacy hardware and OSes (which Source definitely would), but DX11 is not necessarily faster simply because it is newer. Indeed, it is often slower because of that: graphics card support for it is no-where near as good as it is for DX9.0c.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Tablet sales are 24% of the market in 2012, but are increasing 100% year over year. If that continues for 18 more months, ...
... they will have 174% of the market?
May Peace Prevail On Earth
Here is a complete list of Win32 APIs that are supported for Metro apps. If you look under "Graphics", you'll notice that it has Direct2D and Direct3D, but not OpenGL.
Did we ever need direct X? Any reason why direct X couldnt be an open standard? Were they too self centred to just work on opengl?
Don't forget the origin of DirectX: Microsoft wanted to encourage game developers to embrace Windows 95 at a time when Win 3.11 had been seen as a business-application-only platform, with DOS preferred for games. DirectX was developed as a collection of APIs for games running in Windows 95 that handled input, graphics, music, sound, networking, etc. Only Direct3D, which initially shipped with DirectX 2.0, is directly competing with OpenGL.
I don't think there was a similar comprehensive API available for the PC market at the time DirectX was released. My copy of Need for Speed SE actually runs on either DOS 6.22 or Win95 w/ DirectX.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
Not anymore! DirectInput, DirectSound, DirectPlay, etc have all become obsolete and are there only for compatibility. The only real difference is D3DX, which includes a little more functionality for loading shaders and models, but "DirectX" is pretty much obsolete, save for D3D.
That's a pretty loaded statement. If you use a tool for a specific tasks, and forgo newer tools that come out in favour of revisions of the tool that you have been using because it remains the best tool for the job, then you haven't "gone out of your way to avoid every computing trend," rather, you've continued to use the best tool for the job. There are no devices more suitable for the kind of stuff these people do than desktop computers with discrete video cards.
A netbook is a laptop whose display is too small and of too low a resolution to do anything but the simplest tasks on, whose keyboard is too compact and cramped to comfortably type more than a few paragraphs on and whose hardware is so lacking in performance that few applications run sufficiently fast on it. Gaming is pretty much impossible due to the low graphics performance. There are only two advantages over a full-blown laptop: portability (smaller size, lighter weight) and battery time.
netbooks are great for playing nethack.
Coincidence? I think not.
Uh.... considering Glide was the first and only 3D api for quite a while and it was later followed by DirectX/OpenGL. That's quite wrong. Also, Microsoft went into a deal with SGI to create a 3d API based on OpenGL which Microsoft Cynically shitcanned/backstabbed SGI on.
Glide was based on a subset of OpenGL features specifically chosen by 3DFX for gaming. So I guess it may have been the first 3D API designed specifically for gaming (though I think Direct3D began around the same time, it just sucked), but it certainly wasn't the first 3D API.
DOS was preferred for games because it allowed low-level hardware access. Windows 3.x required everyone to use dog-slow GDI for graphics, which was only good for stuff like solitaire and minesweeper.
With DOS mostly invisible in Windows 95, Microsoft knew they would be completing against their own legacy OS so they had to change it. They had to create a way to play games in Windows but still allow low-level hardware access. DirectX was born.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
You must be working on wall street.
If you sell 2 tablets in 2009 and sell 4 tablets in 2010, that is what percentage of growth?
Meanwhile, if you sell 100 million desktops in 2009 and 110 million desktops in 2010, what percentage of growth is that?
It is the same with the so called BRIC economies. Massive growth? Yup, percentage wise. Easy when you come from nothing. I could double my speed on the mile if I actually did some excersise for once. Meanwhile olympic athletes are happy with a tenth of a second! They must SUCK!
Calculating what is really being used out there, that is hard. For instance, mobile gaming devices. We know they are being sold but I don't see them in public. Turns out that many use them at HOME and NOT on the go. Many a laptop never leaves its desk. Meanwhile how many tablets are gathering dust like the Wii which outsold in hardware but severely undersells in software? Nintendo ain't reporting losses for nothing.
People who claim because item X sold a lot is going to kill off item Y are the kind who just love headlines and stop to think. Like you.
Attach a keyboard and a tablet becomes a laptop? Really? So all of a sudden it gets a HD? USB Hub? Ethernet port? Multi-channel sound output? Expansion bays? Right click? Multi screen support?
I didn't understand how people could be reviewing Windows 8 in a positive way. And then I saw a video review on a "reputable" site and they reviewed it on a "desktop" with a resolution that would make a netbook weep. Yah... no wonder then that the slashdot sentiment differs a bit, how many here run at netbook resolutions?
Tablets can only replace a PC for those people who barely use a PC, in the same way a bicycle or public transport can only replace a car for those who barely use the functionality of a car. I should know, I don't have a car and don't miss it and when people ask, but how do you move house with your own car then, I say "I don't!". Really who the fuck wants the hassle, I pay a company who sends a big truck and strong men and they do it faster, safer and me not getting tired which is the most important bit.
If you use a PC without needing to easily cut and paste, have a right click menu for ease of access or for that matter, pin-point control... well... then a tablet can replace your PC. I have tried to make slashdot posts on a tablet and it is a pain in the ass for editing.
And ergonomic. I know the kind of people that can replace a desktop with a laptop. They are the ones who will develop back problems. You are NOT SUPPOSED to work in the position that a laptop forces you to work in. Head UPRIGHT, screen at eye height!
Sure, you can buy a dock and external monitors and you just made your laptop into an easily overheating overly expensive non-upgradable desktop. Wheee!
But hey, if you think tablets can replace PC's, fine. I give you my tablet for free. But if you EVER even touch a PC or laptop for the rest of your live, you put a tattoo on your forehead "I am to dumb to exist, please kill me". Deal?
Didn't think so.
People have been crying the death of the desktop for years if not decades. By the way, what happened to smartphones replacing the desktop? That seems to have dropped away, suddenly it is the tablet that is the new king... odd that... did you ever post that the smartphone would replace the PC?
Zero growth is normal in mature markets, it is inevitable that someday everyone will have the product and you can only sell replacements and PC's last a long a time now. High growth is normal in immature markets. Only a fool would make absolute predictions by comparing these two figures.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.