Comment by wjoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wjoe | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame if the biggest impact of Steam on Linux has been to encourage Microsoft to improve DirectX performance. I wasn't aware of Valve layoffs particularly hitting the Linux team, but it doesn't surprise me. Valve's efforts towards Linux have been quite minimal in the last year or so. Perhaps they're working on something behind the scenes, but SteamOS/Machines were effectively dead on arrival, and even Steam VR/HTC Vive still doesn't support Linux.

The "faster zombies" blog post mentioned was very big news at the time for Linux gaming, but since then, not a single OpenGL game has replicated the performance of L4D2. It's an accepted fact that games will see an FPS hit on Linux - not the end of the world, but not something that's ever going to attract gamers to switch to Linux unless they have other reasons.

Vulkan may change things, Dota 2 and Talos Principle benchmarks have been promising, and showing signs of the Windows beating (or at least matching) performance they promised 5 years ago.

A shame from the perspective of larger linux adoption, maybe, or by other viewpoints.

From the perspective of most consumers in the population of gamers it's a superb result. Competition in the platform space has resulted in improved performance and spurred development of technologies that facilitate better gaming experiences across several dimensions.

Why should Valve be a crusader for Linux? Their goal is to make great games and serve gamers.

> Why should Valve be a crusader for Linux?

Because they can put a definitive end on the standoff between them and Microsoft.

But that is not, and should not be their main goal. And if it's too expensive, it may end up detrimental to the "great games" goal. So, they should be looking into it, but there may be really good reasons to not do it.

I'd imagine it's because little effort is put into optimizing games for Linux.

Overall, I'd guess the Gabe (having worked at Microsoft) is pretty comfortable with that platform, but likes having Linux their as a hedge (with potential to open up new markets too).

> I'd imagine it's because little effort is put into optimizing games for Linux.

I wonder what's changed. Used to be people would reboot into Linux for better performance in Quake.

I don't recall that ever being a thing, and my quake addiction began playing on a cyrix based computer at large (for the time) lan parties.

We did a lot of things to eek out more performance but as far as I recall no one was booting to Linux to do anything except run dedicated servers.

It certainly worked for me. Linux ran SNES9x, Quake, and UltraHLE faster than Windows 95/98. I even got better pings. I stopped doing this around the time Windows 2000 came out.

It's not that people aren't willing to put in the effort to optimize games for Linux, it's the reality of graphics drivers being effectively a massive collection of bugs and special cases for specific titles or common programmer errors. If you have a direct line to the manufacturers like Valve does, you can ask for bugs to be fixed, for specific optimizations, or even for engineers to fly over and tune your shaders. For regular developers, you're happy if your game just works.

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