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Worrying Aspects of Linux Gaming
jones_supa writes: Former Valve engineer Rich Geldreich has written up a blog post about the state of Linux Gaming. It's an interesting read, that's for sure. When talking about recent bigger game ports, his take is that the developers doing these ports just aren't doing their best to optimize these releases for Linux and/or OpenGL. He points out how it took significant resources from Valve to properly optimize Source engine for Linux, but that other game studios are not walking the last mile. About drivers, he asks "Valve is still paying LunarG to find and fix silly perf bugs in Intel's slow open source driver. Surely this can't be a sustainable way of developing a working driver?" He ends his post by agreeing with a Slashdot comment where someone is basically saying that SteamOS is done, and that we will never get our hands on the Steam Controller.
It is kind of weird reading all of the negative comments about the steam Linux experience because mine has been largely positive. After spending about a decade screwing around with wine to get various games to play often with limited functionality or weird graphics bugs, playing natively through steam has been amazing. I don't know what the Civ V experience was like on windows I guess but it looks great even on my 2 year old laptop. Beyond the indie stuff, I find it absolutely amazing that any AAA titles are getting ported to linux *at all*. Could it be better? Probably. Seems to me that is going to take time as the Linux gaming user base needs to expand to the point where it makes financial sense to go that extra mile. I'm willing to be patient and buy the ports as they come in, because that's likely the only way it is going to get better.