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Comment by nbevans | Hacker News Reader

They don't state whether the comparison between DX and OGL was running identical quality rendering or not. Given that OGL doesn't support many niceties that DX does; one can assume not.

Which would make the entire comparison completely pointless. To the point of the blog post almost being a trollpost. Valve have a clearly defined agenda here, remember.

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> Given that OGL doesn't support many niceties that DX does; one can assume not.

This is incorrect. OpenGL is almost feature equivalent to D3D.

Properly done, they should be able to get similar results. If they spend a lot of effort on it, they should be able to get bit accurate results.

The blog post makes no mention of the steps they went through to achieve quality parity though. So one can assume that they did not.

OpenGL 4 and D3D 11 are pretty much feature equivalent.

And the speed difference measured is also "pretty much" insignificant.

20% is quite significant. If it was 50% better, then we'd already be saying that DirectX performance is cr*p compared to OpenGL. But 20% is definitely a decent boost, especially since you'd expect DirectX to fare better than OpenGL.

To be fair though, if you would take a game that seriously stresses the GPU you wouldn't see a 20% difference. You would probably see about the same constant difference of about 0.5 ms.

For 60 FPS that's an increase to 61 FPS.

I don't think it's fair to compare DirectX and optimized OpenGL. After they optimized OpenGL implementation on Windows they got: 315/303 = 1.04. That is 4%.

It doesn't look significant because the game is old and runs already pretty fast on modern hardware. If it was more gpu intensive game, a 20% difference could make a difference between a tolerably fluid framerate and a jerky framerate.

i know some people would claim certain Wine games ran faster in Linux than Windows (WoW) but it turned out a lot of the advanced shaders and things weren't running through Wine causing the performance increase.

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