
The “Faster Zombies” blog post - BuuQu9hu
https://richg42.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-faster-zombies-blog-post.html
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pjc50
_" Valve being deeply involved with Linux also gives the company a "worse case
scenario" hedge vs. Microsoft. It's like a club held over MS's heads. They
just need to keep spending the resources to keep their in-house Linux
expertise in a healthy state."_

This is absolutely the point of Valve's Linux involvement, Steam Machine, and
so on. It doesn't have to be perfect. It barely has to even work. It's a
"fleet in being", ready for a fight with Microsoft that may never come.

Apple take 30% from all game transactions on Apple's iOS.

Google take 30% of all game transactions on Google's Android. (Amazon
presumably take 30% from all Fire devices, but hardly anyone uses their
store).

Valve take 30% of (many) game transactions on _Microsoft 's_ Windows.
Somewhere at Microsoft there is a whiteboard with 'Valve' crossed out and
'Microsoft' written instead. They've a long way to go there without getting
shot down by anti-monopoly authorities, but don't think they'll never try.

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jMyles
> Somewhere at Microsoft there is a whiteboard with 'Valve' crossed out and
> 'Microsoft' written instead.

This is exactly the kind of visual that we need in order to coherently think
about the past and future of software.

It's a great short-story writing prompt.

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wjoe
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.

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wonko1
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).

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elsonrodriguez
> 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.

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Fuzzwah
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.

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elsonrodriguez
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.

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dreta
I remember Valve articles from that period when the Windows 8 Store was being
introduced, and Valve started pushing Linux. I remember reading a similar
article from them on the subject, but that one mentioned DirectX 9 Source
Engine on Windows performance versus OpenGL 3 on Linux, which is a shady
comparison to say the least. Just mentioning it, since such details got
curiously ommited in the referenced article.

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pklausler
s/discrete/discreet/

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cma
A mod should perhaps retitle this. It's an insider's look at Valve's Linux
effort. The title is correct, but not great out of context.

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madcow2011
Agreed. The title really doesn't make sense.

