Valve Finds Open Source Drivers To Be Great

An anonymous reader writes "Intel's Open-Source Technology Center was given source-code access to Valve's Left 4 Dead 2 game in order to help them fix Linux bugs and to better optimize their graphics driver to this forthcoming Linux native game on the Source Engine. Intel has talked about their Valve Linux development experiences and now they managed to get Left 4 Dead 2 running on their open-source graphics driver. Valve also has grown fond of open-source hardware drivers: 'Valve Linux developers have also been happy looking at an open-source graphics driver. Valve Linux developers found it equally thrilling that now when hitting a bottleneck in their game or looking for areas for performance optimizations, they are simply able to look into Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver to understand how an operation is handled by the hardware, tossing some extra debugging statements into the Intel driver to see what's happening, and making other driver tweaks.'"

Comments

What? This story isn't about Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Open Source != Linux

In case you are not familiar with basic programming/math syntax, the above means that the two are not the same.

Re:What? This story isn't about Linux

[not already in use]

The interesting thing is how the OSS allows Valve to tweak or examine the driver code on the fly to find out how to optimize performance.

Anyone who *actually* games wants to know who the fuck cares about underpowered Intel video card drivers. Oh, it will be able to play 5 year old Valve games? WHOOPTY-FUCKING-DOO.

Perhaps you forgot about the time, years ago, when the FOSS crowd courted ATI, saying "Release your specs! The FOSS community will do the rest!" What did ATI do? They released the specs. An opensource driver was born, and it's an unstable, slow piece of shit. When these FOSS folks realized they weren't technically competent enough to actually create a driver for a modern GPU architecture, they went back to demonizing ATI for not releasing their proprietary driver under a free license.

What's the moral of the story here? Just because something is open source doesn't mean "the community" is going to be able to do shit about it. Intel wants to point and say, "Look! Intel GPU can play 5 year old valve games!" Valve wants to say, "Look, Linux is a viable gaming platform!" At the end of the day, it's totally irrelevant to people who want to play new games on modern GPU's.

Re:Yes, we get it.

[micheas]

Apples and oranges. Carmack was talking about the financial viablity of targeting games to run on desktop Linux. Valve is talking about the two platforms from a developers perspective.

Carmack as said that Valve entering the desktop Linux market changes thinks somewhat.

Re:Presenting Valve as friendly company

[gman003]

FYI, it's always been phrased as a "subscription".

The recent change only tries to ban class-action lawsuits, which yes, is kind of a dick move.

Re:Presenting Valve as friendly company

[ravenshrike]

On the other hand if you ask for less than $10,000 in arbitration they'll pay for your lawyer fees win or lose.

Re:Valve finds Intel's driver to be great.

[Baloroth]

It'd have to be "discrete" anyways, even if it is integrated into the board. There isn't enough room or thermal overhead to put the necessary power on the same die as the CPU, which is what modern Intel graphics does.

Re:Yes, we get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

On UNIX machines, some filesystems actually use the free memory as a cache, but leave it marked as free in case an application needs them.
UFS for instance does this, while ZFS for instance does not (it uses an explicit cache).

Re:Valve finds Intel's driver to be great.

[Tanktalus]

And yet the major reason why I moved from Catalyst to the radeonhd (and then radeon) drivers was that they didn't crash. I'd rather have a few less FPS if it meant I could have more frames ;-)