Valve Steam on Linux (no wine)

Great idea for Valve to do this (even though I am gaming on Windows at the moment) - I think they have the potential to capture a huge captive market with this move. Lets see how it goes.
 
PermaBanned said:
I think one of the clinchers will be if you can play games naively that you already own for Windows.
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+1

and that in future one purchase gives you access to both Linux and Windows - this would really help people migrate away from windows

the only reason i still use windows is for games - if top quality games come out for linux then i'll never buy windows again
 
Diss said:
i'll never buy windows again
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:confused:

The only time I actually pay for any M$ fud is when it comes shipped as OEM unfortunately, with a laptop. It's a different story for Games, that's the only place I actually spend money, though I know secretly some of that money goes toward DirectX licensing etc...

I think the client is more like a launcher, it's the studios that have to pull their fingers out! As mentioned there is no reason why games such as CIV can't run on Linux since they run native on MAC.
 
inSilica said:
I think the client is more like a launcher, it's the studios that have to pull their fingers out! As mentioned there is no reason why games such as CIV can't run on Linux since they run native on MAC.
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Yes, as far as I understand Steam on Linux doesn't mean that all the games Steam provides will work under Linux, and when it is released Linux will still be a long long way away from being a decent gaming OS...unfortunatley.

Saying that, this past fortnight I have spent more time playing Hedgewars with my son over LAN then I have playing BF3. :D
 
Ash-Lee said:
Yes, as far as I understand Steam on Linux doesn't mean that all the games Steam provides will work under Linux, and when it is released Linux will still be a long long way away from being a decent gaming OS...unfortunatley.

Saying that, this past fortnight I have spent more time playing Hedgewars with my son over LAN then I have playing BF3. :D
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No problem

I DL'd and installed Origin/BF3 and have not even opened it to play at all yet :eek:

You'll still have the porting problem with games even if this does come to fruition

ie steam = Linux
 
Linux all the way in my book. Just need to sort out paid software, the modified open source licence allows paid content such as android marketplace. I think the best thing ubuntu could do is make more sence of the control panel and give you an option allbe it hidden to install kde as it is so much better rather than having to do it in command line.

The other thing get crysis 2 on linux and get it running faster than windows it can be done with open gl.

The mac eara needs to dissapear, I have a mac for djing thats it need to show all these wanabe cool kids that there mac aint all that. I find OSX slow and unresponsive vs fedora or ubuntu. I wont even mention how much faster arch is
 
tombruton87 said:
Linux all the way in my book. Just need to sort out paid software, the modified open source licence allows paid content such as android marketplace. I think the best thing ubuntu could do is make more sence of the control panel and give you an option allbe it hidden to install kde as it is so much better rather than having to do it in command line.

The other thing get crysis 2 on linux and get it running faster than windows it can be done with open gl.

The mac eara needs to dissapear, I have a mac for djing thats it need to show all these wanabe cool kids that there mac aint all that. I find OSX slow and unresponsive vs fedora or ubuntu. I wont even mention how much faster arch is
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Amen! I much prefer KDE over Gnome when it comes to desktop interface etc.

For DJing I use Rekordbox (Pioneer software) and was running it in Kubuntu, although it was a bit sluggish as I had to run it under Wine. Recently switched my Win7 install for Win8 so dualboot Win8/Kubuntu and switched over to Win8 for DJing.
 
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/ said:
Faster Zombies!

One factor in creating a good gaming experience is throughput. This post discusses some of what we’ve learned about the performance of our games running on Linux.

As any software developer can tell you, performance is a complicated issue. In the interests of simplicity, we’ll concern ourselves with the following high-end configuration:

Hardware

  • Intel Core i7 3930k
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680
  • 32 GB RAM

Software

  • Windows 7 Service Pack 1 64-bit
  • Left 4 Dead 2
  • Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit

We are using a 32-bit version of Linux temporarily and will run on 64-bit Linux later.
Running Left 4 Dead 2 on Windows 7 with Direct3D drivers, we get 270.6 FPS as a baseline. The data is generated from an internal test case.

When we started with Linux, the initial version we got up and running was at 6 FPS. This is typical of an initial successful port to a new platform.

Performance improvements fall into several categories:

  • Modifying our game to work better with the kernel
  • Modifying our game to work better with OpenGL
  • Optimizing the graphics driver

An example of the first category would be changing our memory allocator to use more appropriate Linux functions. This was achieved by implementing the Source engine small block heap to work under Linux. The second category would include reducing overhead in calling OpenGL, and extending our renderer with new interfaces for better encapsulation of OpenGL and Direct3D.

The third category is especially interesting because it involves working with hardware manufacturers to identify issues in their drivers and, as a result, improving the public driver which benefits all games. Identifying driver stalls and adding multithreading support in the driver are two examples of changes that were the result of this teamwork.

After this work, Left 4 Dead 2 is running at 315 FPS on Linux. That the Linux version runs faster than the Windows version (270.6) seems a little counter-intuitive, given the greater amount of time we have spent on the Windows version. However, it does speak to the underlying efficiency of the kernel and OpenGL. Interestingly, in the process of working with hardware vendors we also sped up the OpenGL implementation on Windows. Left 4 Dead 2 is now running at 303.4 FPS with that configuration.

OpenGL versus Direct3D on Windows 7

This experience lead to the question: why does an OpenGL version of our game run faster than Direct3D on Windows 7? It appears that it’s not related to multitasking overhead. We have been doing some fairly close analysis and it comes down to a few additional microseconds overhead per batch in Direct3D which does not affect OpenGL on Windows. Now that we know the hardware is capable of more performance, we will go back and figure out how to mitigate this effect under Direct3D.

Working with hardware vendors

We’ve been working with NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel to improve graphic driver performance on Linux. They have all been great to work with and have been very committed to having engineers on-site working with our engineers, carefully analyzing the data we see. We have had very rapid turnaround on any bugs we find and it has been invaluable to have people who understand the game, the renderer, the driver, and the hardware working alongside us when attacking these performance issues.

This is a great example of the benefits that are the result of close coordination between software and hardware developers and should provide value to the Linux community at large.
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Bit of an update, interesting to see L4D2 running faster in Linux, and the Windows version showing additional fps improvement as a result of working with the Linux version. Looking forward to future updates :)
 
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cb_linus said:
Bit of an update, interesting to see L4D2 running faster in Linux, and the Windows version showing additional fps improvement as a result of working with the Linux version. Looking forward to future updates :)
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It runs faster on Linux because Valves ancient Source engine is only DirectX 9. DX10 and 11 have less overhead, L4D2 will certainly get higher frame rates with these. But obviously Valve conviently leave this out. Cant have their dated engine looking bad now can we.

The whole blog is just bias and PR for their Linux port because they hate Win 8 as the built in Windows Store is competition to Steam.
 
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