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

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

[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.

[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 ;-)