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Valve: Linux Better Than Windows 8 for Gaming
dartttt writes "In a presentation at Ubuntu Developer Summit currently going on in Denmark, Drew Bliss from Valve said that Linux is more viable than Windows 8 for gaming. Windows 8 ships with its own app store and it is not an open platform anymore and Linux has everything they need: good OpenGL, pulseaudio, OpenAL and input support."
The mere fact that Valve has a slot on the Ubuntu Developer Summit should have been a clue that they are actually working on supporting Linux. While rumours about this have existed for years we our now beyond the rumour stage. Valve does not try to hide it. In fact you can register for their beta-program right now.
I was there for the talk. He didn't really say that "Linux is better for gaming." Given the current user base, state of drivers and various flux in the stack, nobody in their right mind would say such a thing.
What he did say is that Ubuntu is an "open platform." Not really the same thing as "better," unless you're a writer at an Ubuntu fanboy site.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Thank you for mentioning this without actually linking to the survey. I don't want a flood of Slashdotters lowering my chances of getting in the beta early.
Do you like Japanese imports?
If a 3.8% advantage is "massive", what words do you reserve for things that have advantages/improvements on the order of 50%+?
That's 3.8% after Valve improved the OpenGL version using what they'd learned from Linux. It's 20% going from DirectX Windows to OpenGL Linux. That's pretty close to massive, considering the vast amounts of work and money MS has poured into developing DirectX and Windows in general.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
If people would stop referring to "Linux" as if it could have "internal bickering" like it were a single, homogenous company we'd be better off.
The reason Microsoft dominates gaming on the PC is because they dominate PC operating systems as a whole and pushed their proprietary DirectX down everyone's throat.
That's why they're exclusively targeting an Ubuntu LTS release. Most popular Linux platform with the least amount of pain, and 4 years of stability.
Not really. Most games that are a decade old or less almost always show improvements over framerate using OGL/OAL vs DX, this included the experimental OGL APIs for these engines.
This is because D3D is CPU-bound whereas OGL is GPU-bound (and only barely CPU bound since the CPU sends all the stuff to the GPU.)
This has been demonstrated with various wrappers/native implementations from PC-primary games to emulators. Starting from Unreal Tournament GOTY '99 through most iDTech engines and the latest Unreal engines, and also Torque3D.
Plain and simple, direct to hardware (Open*L) is faster than CPU-to-hardware (DirectX)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.