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http://betanews.com/2012/08/13/will-windows-8-make-linux-the-new-gaming-os/

 

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/

 

Interesting times. :)

 

Screw M$. They've ruled and held us down long enough.


Edited by Wolfie

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The question that matters is when (ever) would companies like ED shift to it...? Until they do, LINUX remains irrelevant to this community.

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They might, because if you read the articles, there is one HUGE CHANGE in Linux. Valve has gotten ATI and NVidia to start working on gaming drivers and OpenGL. They're now getting speeds quite a bit faster than their Windows counterparts. So now does Steam not only support Linux, ATI and NVidia are as well.

 

Windows 8 is an fugly bitch. Valve has seen the light, as have other companies like Blizzard. Windows is now trying hard to go to the "walled garden" approach just like the MAC. A lot of companies are not liking it, and are starting give Linux a serious look over.


Edited by Wolfie

"Isn't this fun!?" - Inglorious Bastards

 

"I rode a tank, held a general's rank / When the Blitzkrieg raged, and the bodies stank!" - Stones.

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I use Ubuntu at home (as dual boot via GRUB) and office but I think Windows will always be mandatory for gaming.

i.e: How can you make a DirectX game work under Linux? (Wine does not count, we're heading for performances)

Since our beloved games are not developed under OpenGl, Unity,...

 

EDIT: 'Valve has seen the light, as have other companies like Blizzard'; They're just afraid to be rejected with 'Windows Store' emergence. But the fact is everyone still can install Steam,...

OK, MS tries to introduce their store. That's fair. What's not fair is the manner they do this, by 'forcing' users to use it. But if you look well, Windows store is not mandatory if you're not interested in what it has to offer.


Edited by Cedaway

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Yes, but its not only the store. Win 8 is just not a REAL PC OS. And this is another reason why some companies are not pleased. Win8 just sucks. I think some companies have also wanted to get out from under the Iron Fist of M$, and now they see their chance.

 

As for DirectX, this is why Valve is looking to kill it off with OpenGL. Now they can go to Linux and MAC as well. No longer locked up by M$. Can you say "Jail Break"? Plus, the article shows that OpenGL, even in beta stage drivers, is significantly faster than Direct X. It just took some NVidia and ATI engineers to work with it and make it plugin right.

 

Viva Revolt. Its about time M$ got some competition.

 

EDIT: I also noticed in the article, they are looking for MAC developers as well.


Edited by Wolfie

"Isn't this fun!?" - Inglorious Bastards

 

"I rode a tank, held a general's rank / When the Blitzkrieg raged, and the bodies stank!" - Stones.

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Interesting, but matter of the fact is, Steam is big business for Valve and Microsoft having their own portal for selling software can and will eat revenue off of Steam. Valve are claiming this is bad for consumers, free the people enslaved by Microsoft etc, when in fact many of us are "slaves" of Steam. They're trying to future proof themselves and this is a sane business minded way to look at it but don't think for a minute that Valve are just doing this for charity, it's all about money. The fact that they ARE putting real effort in to the Linux Project shows that they are genuinely concerned that Microsoft in the end will eat up a considerable amount of their profits. Also, Microsoft are trying to get developers onboard by undercutting the industry standard fees for selling your apps on online "marketplaces". Microsoft is offering 80% of the profit of selling an app or game to the developer after they pass the 25,000$ line as opposed of most of the "competition" that only offers 70% of the profit however much they might sell.

 

Still, I think Valve should be careful not biting the teet that they feed off of. ;)

 

P.S I'd like to say that I love Steam. I have A LOT of games on Steam (many I haven't even had the time to install yet, *ugh*) and I can see why Valve are looking elsewhere with there business but what I don't like is how Gabe Newell keeps dissing Microsoft and saying things will get worse for the consumers, closed eco-systems are bad etc. That's just populistic BS, it's all about the almighty $, nothing more nothing less but saying that publicly won't create any popular sympathy for Valve. I don't like when people try to manipulate popular opinion by pretending that they care about people, you know, like just about every politician out there.

 

P.S I have to give Valve credit for getting Nvidia onboard considering the rather chilly relationship between the Linux community and Nvidia in the past, just ask Linus Torvalds:


Edited by swe_badger

 

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DirectX is not the problem. I've played DirectX games with good performance on Linux since ~2004. A few graphics glitches here and there was the worst usually - if the game wasn't supported at all. :)

 

(And no, that's not with Wine, Wine doesn't do D3D last I checked.)

 

The problem is that the OS is catastrophically fragmented (you think Windows is a mess with current users being spread over XP, Vista, 7 and 8 + variants thereof?) and quite simply not userfriendly. It is also questionable how much of the Linux market is even interested in games; at least payware games. Ubuntu has been making strides in userfriendliness, but at the same time it managed to alienate people like me. :P (I've been Debian since about Hardy Heron, just couldn't stand the dumbing down of the system anymore. It's one thing to make the UI userfriendly, but to literally dumb the system down is just silly.)

 

At the end of the day, the real reason behind this is that Microsoft is doing the same thing Apple has already done: setting up a software sales channel. And then people that have software sales channels get afraid of the competition and start hedging. That's pretty much it.

 

A Steam internal test article with one single playable game when we played DX games in Linux quite well in 2004 and earlier is, unfortunately, not very impressive.

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(And no, that's not with Wine, Wine doesn't do D3D last I checked.)

 

It can support Dx ;)

 

But you're right, it's not recommanded

 

EDIT: And how are you running games (non-openGl) under linux? :curious:


Edited by Cedaway

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"...And no, that's not with Wine, Wine doesn't do D3D last I checked..."

You probably did not check wine for quite long time...

http://www.wine-reviews.net/wine-reviews/microsoft/directx-90c-march-2008-redistributable-on-linux-with-wine.html

 

Anyway, it does not matter if it is wine, phoronix, or whatever. DirectX is not native to linux, and that is always a problem if you want to run d3d-based games, where every bit of performance counts...

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I have no reason to believe Betteridge's Law doesn't apply here...

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

 

 

It's been interesting times for Linux for the past 10 years, and sweet FA has happened, as Winz says.

 

My feelings are that something can only compete in this day and age with BIG money and a single focus behind it. Sony/Microsoft/Apple. The open-source / designed by committee nature of Linux hobbles it from competing against the big boys, IMHO.

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You probably did not check wine for quite long time...

Quite true. :)

But, also note an important difference: in the linked case you don't have Wine doing D3D, you have the actual Windows redist running on top of Wine. That's different, and problematic in a whole other set of ways.

 

You can run DX games without DX. You just need some other implementation of the same API calls. (A classic here would be Transgamings Cedega, though I haven't used that in years. They ceased the service right?)

 

Anyway, it does not matter if it is wine, phoronix, or whatever. DirectX is not native to linux, and that is always a problem if you want to run d3d-based games, where every bit of performance counts...

 

Explain why you expect an inherent performance cost?

If we were talking about emulation, sure, but we're not. Just a black-box implementation of DX. It can be better, it can be worse. If you want better performance, just get programmers that are "better" than the team Microsoft had for the Windows implementation. ;)

 

Think of it like this: OpenGL is multiplatform, but there's no magical multi-platformness to it aside from the fact that it was open enough to be implemented freely across platforms. The only thing DX needs to be "multiplatform" is to have it actually implemented on multiple platforms - something I expect Microsoft to not be keen on, but it has been done before, and with DirectX specifically as well. (See Cedega, for example. I used to play EVE Online's official Linux version (now discontinued), which was basically the same client except with a standalone Cedega wrapper. Performance was pretty much the same as on Windows, the only real problem was those inherited from crappy drivers. Also played the windows versions of Guild Wars, Battlefield 2 and a few other fun ones through Cedega. All worked just fine, excellent performance, a few wonky effects a little here and there though from the then incomplete D3D implementation.)


Edited by EtherealN

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I've read somewhere (can't find the source anymore:doh:) that the problem was not DirectX api itself but the driver support for graphic cards in linux.

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Yeah, that has always been very sketchy.

 

Though to be entirely fair, the performance situation in Windows is absolutely horrible too - soo many abstraction layers and stuff going on to ensure compatibility with all these disparate combinations of hardware we have on PC's. (This is the same thing as why consoles like the Xbox and PS3 manage to stay competitive in spite of current PC's being 10-20 times more powerful - gets so much easier on performance when being able to work more directly to specific hardware. Classic example is to compare early Commodore 64 games with late C64 games - same hardware, but people sure learned to get a lot out of it. :) )

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You can run DX games without DX. You just need some other implementation of the same API calls. (A classic here would be Transgamings Cedega, though I haven't used that in years. They ceased the service right?)

IMHO that is not true. Cedega from TransGaming was nothing else than early Wine-fork. Yes, they implemented dx-api (partially, and very limited), but inside of wine, which still uses opengl. And they were not able to keep with Wine development, that's the true reason why they gave it up. AFAIK, there is no true direct d3d-api for linux (for X-server). If you know about one, let me know...

 

Explain why you expect an inherent performance cost? If we were talking about emulation, sure, but we're not. Just a black-box implementation of DX.
Up to now, it *is* only emulation. If someone wants to make native d3d-api for linux, I suspect there might be serious license-incompatibility problem between X (Xfree, Xorg, etc) and Microsoft proprietary licensed d3d-api.

 

It is the same deja'vu as with graphics drivers: it was impossible to develop (by community) a good gfx-driver just with reverse-engineering, without opening gfx-specifications. And how's the situation now? You have community-drivers which are somehow limited in feature/models supported, and you have binnary "bloatware" developed by NVidia/ATI as kernel-module. Do you really expect Microsoft to develop linux-kernel-module for D3D? ;-)

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No, there's a key difference between what these are doing and what an emulator is doing:

 

An emulator implements the actual logic that takes place in the original product. (Though might do so with a different language towards getting onto a new platform, etc.)

WinE, Cedega etcetera implements APIs - that is, they know what the API call is, they know what the desired output is; but they don't (necessarily) know nor care what is actually happening inside a given DLL to achieve said output.

 

Think of it like the difference between the following two schemes towards running software on a non-intended platform:

1) Emulate the windows operating system and run the target program inside this emulation.

2) Implement some measure (abstraction layer etcetera) to take the calls from the application and get them into something the host OS understands.

 

WinE and Cedega do the second one, and there is no reason in principle why this would come at any performance cost at all - because this is what is happening on Windows too!

 

The problems that exists is the following:

1) Resources. WinE and similar endeavours have way smaller resources than Microsoft has implementing and supporting DX for windows.

2) Time-lag. On top of the above, they will always be "behind" when it comes to new features.

3) Q/A is a lot more problematic since rather than software developers bugtesting towards ensuring there are no problems with their software, instead the WinE/Cedega/etc developer has to backtrack and tweak for each game.

 

I'll say though: yes, there is an intrinsic performance cost to what is being done here: the exact same intrinsic performance cost that has people like Carmack rip hair off of their heads at the PC platform in general - so much crap in between the application and the hardware. But you don't get MORE of said crap through reimplementing the API on another OS, just a different brand of crap.

 

Do you really expect Microsoft to develop linux-kernel-module for D3D? ;-)

 

Point me to where I said anything of the sort. ;)

 

Now, if people like Valve etcetera were to decide that "eff it, we'll do our own implementation and include it with Steam for Linux", then it might happen. Then there could be the requisite resources for it. But I wouldn't be surprised if MS didn't, at that point, put some sort of legal blocker on it like either claiming patent/copyright/yadayada or simply placing a massive license fee on it. :P

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Actually, from what I've heard, Valve is working with Nvidia and ATI on developing OpenGL drivers that are currently giving better framerates than Direct X in Linux. Probably because Linux isn't as bloated as Windows.

 

Yeah, and I'm not much of a fan of Ubuntu either. What I would like to see is an OS with the nice GUI / Graphics of Windows, and the internal power of Red Hat, etc.

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"I rode a tank, held a general's rank / When the Blitzkrieg raged, and the bodies stank!" - Stones.

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Yeah, the really big question is whether they'll end up selecting one distro and optimising stuff a lot there, leaving everyone else with the same old dance to get things running properly.

 

And of course, getting OpenGL drivers is nice and all, but they still need a solution to the API translation/abstraction layers.

 

If anyone can do it it's probably Valve, but I'm skeptical about whether they'll want to put in the money towards this and be able to get enough of an okey from game publishers. If it ends up being just their own games and a spattering of other games this will just be pretty much the same thing as Steam for Mac; nice for those that want those specific games, but not even close to replacing Windows as the premier gaming OS.

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Actually, from what I've heard, Valve is working with Nvidia and ATI on developing OpenGL drivers that are currently giving better framerates than Direct X in Linux. Probably because Linux isn't as bloated as Windows.

 

Yeah, and I'm not much of a fan of Ubuntu either. What I would like to see is an OS with the nice GUI / Graphics of Windows, and the internal power of Red Hat, etc.

Yes, their new finetuned drivers perform better on the new finetuned engine, then the regular drivers do with the old source engine version. But it's good marketing, and it's working :)

They could get the same kind of performance from directX by finetuning their old engine. But there is no point in doing that, because even office hardware can run the source games at good fps.


Edited by winz
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OpenGl seems to be very powerful and highly compatible. Why isn't it more used? Maybe should we ask that to several developers.

 

Maybe this is the beginning of an answer:

 

In the earliest days of 3D accelerated gaming, performance and reliability were key benchmarks and several 3D accelerator cards competed against each other for dominance. Software was written specifically for a particular brand of graphics card. However, over the years, OpenGL and Direct3D emerged as software layers above the hardware, mainly because of industry support for a cross-hardware graphics library. Competition between the two rose as each game developer would choose either one or the other.

In the early days of 3D accelerated gaming, most vendors did not actually supply a full OpenGL driver. On the one hand, most consumer-oriented accelerators did not implement enough functionality to properly accelerate OpenGL. On the other hand, many vendors struggled to implement a full OpenGL driver with good performance and compatibility. Instead, they wrote MiniGL drivers, which only implemented a subset of OpenGL, enough to run GLQuake (and later other OpenGL games, mostly based on the Quake engine). Proper OpenGL drivers became more prevalent as the hardware evolved, and consumer-oriented accelerators caught up with the SGI systems that OpenGL was originally designed for. This would be around the time of DirectX 6 or DirectX 7.

In the console world proprietary native APIs are dominant, with some consoles (e.g. the PS3) providing an OpenGL wrapper around its native API. The original Xbox supported Direct3D 8.1 as its native API while the Xbox 360 supports a modified version of Direct3D 9.0c as its native API. Most console developers prefer to use the native APIs for each console in order to maximize performance, making OpenGL and Direct3D comparisons primarily relevant for PC platforms.

 

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nope sir, the reason would be only one - your laziness. you clearly have all the knowledge how to build a good software product of such complexity, yet for some reason you not bothering.

 

Probably because Linux isn't as bloated as Windows..

can i for once get a good explanation of what that mysterious bloat is?

 

and no, linux is not rising anywhere just because steam is suddenly feels pressure from MS.

it is a viable tool for a specific needs and it will remain as such.


Edited by agrasyuk

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can i for once get a good explanation of what that mysterious bloat is?

 

If someone needs to be convinced that Windows is bloated then the conversation is hopeless.

 

 

Its kind of like trying to explain to an Apple user how his hardware and software isn't in fact the greatest thing since the Russians built their first Sukhoi.

 

it is a viable tool for a specific needs and it will remain as such.

You mean a viable tool to run the internet, chinese satellites, military hardware, the city of Munich, and a million things in between?

 

Yea... its a very specific tool... so specific that the list of specific things would exceed the list of things you could do with Windows. Not that Windows 7 didn't finally impress me. Finally M$ is starting to figure it out. Same with Apple and the fact that their OS can now run on any hardware, meaning hardware you don't pay an arm and a leg for.


Edited by P*Funk

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