State of Linux Gaming

jeremy · 11-10-2014, 09:50 AM

Quote:

I've got one more blog post before I depart for Dallas. Here's an interesting report showing framerates and loading times of various big titles on Linux vs. Windows:

Slashdot: PCGamingWiki Looks Into Linux Gaming With 'Port Reports'
PC Gaming Wiki: Linux port report

Sadly, it's pretty clear that if you run these games on Linux your experience isn't going to be as good, and you'll be getting less "gaming value" vs. Windows. We're not talking about a bunch of little indy titles, these are big releases: Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, Borderlands 2, Tropico 5, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Sid Meier's Civilization V. My take is the devs doing these ports just aren't doing their best to optimize these releases for Linux and/or OpenGL.

A nice little tidbit from this report: "Unfortunately, Aspyr are currently still unable to provide support for non-Nvidia graphics cards, as with Borderlands 2. This doesn't mean the game won't work if you have an AMD or Intel GPU, but just that you're not guaranteed to receive help from the developer - the current driver situation for non-Nvidia cards may lead to degraded performance." Huh? This is not a good situation.

I know it's possible for Linux ports to equal or outperform their Windows counterparts, but it's hard. At Valve we had all the driver devs at our beck and call and it was still very difficult to get the Source engine's perf. and stability to where it needed to be relative to Windows. (And this was with a ~8 year old engine - it must be even harder with more modern engines.) These devs are probably glad to just release anything at all given how alien it can be for Windows/Xbox devs to develop, debug, and ship stuff under Linux+OpenGL.

Hey, this is just a thought, but maybe Valve developers could stop locally optimizing for their bonuses by endlessly tweaking and debugging various half-broken dysfunctional codebases and instead do more to educate developers on how to do this sort of work correctly.

The entire Intel driver situation remains in a ridiculous state. I know Intel means well and all but really, they can do better. (Are they afraid of pissing off MS? Or is this just big corp dysfunctionalism?) Valve is still paying LunarG to find and fix silly perf. bugs in Intel's slow open source driver:

More at Rich Geldreich's Tech Blog...

The post also covers the future of SteamOS. Any thoughts on this?

--jeremy