Hacker News Reader

> L4D IIRC

This was not using WINE.

I was playing portal before it was available for linux (it was 2008 and I don't think there was even a mac client for steam yet). It ran faster on mac under wine than it did on windows, but I did notice wine was downgrading the graphics a bit (probably to DX8).

It's possible they were playing L4D under wine before the "native" linux client was released.

(the native client still uses a DX -> GL translator for shaders IIRC. Valve open-sourced it.)

> (the native client still uses a DX -> GL translator for shaders IIRC. Valve open-sourced it.)

yes, toGL - but it's not actively developed anymore. It was Richard Geldreich's project if I recall correctly.

> It's possible they were playing L4D under wine before the "native" linux client was released.

I did play it under WINE before the native client was released, but the native one was faster.

And AFAIR once the improvements were discovered these were carried over to Windows versions as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com