GuitarHero/RockBand fans... side project anyone?

Marco Leise Marco.Leise at gmx.de
Sat Dec 14 04:54:16 PST 2013


Am Fri, 13 Dec 2013 21:25:13 +0100
schrieb Jacob Carlborg <doob at me.com>:

> Unfortunately most games suck on Mac OS X. I don't know if they're just 
> badly coded, if it's the drivers or the OpenGL implementation. Many 
> games that work perfectly fine at highest resolution and detail level on 
> Windows is barley playable on low settings on Mac OS X. Only a few games 
> are good on Mac OS X.

Read about Valve's port of Left 4 Dead 2 here:
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/

They say their Linux port ran at 6 FPS before they started
optimizing. But it was also in part due to a bad OpenGL
implementation. (I remember even Doom 3 running at 2 FPS on my
previous PC until the drivers were updated. -.-)

Anyways here is an excerpt:

"[…] Running Left 4 Dead 2 on Windows 7 with Direct3D drivers,
we get 270.6 FPS as a baseline. The data is generated from an
internal test case.

When we started with Linux, the initial version we got up and
running was at 6 FPS. This is typical of an initial successful
port to a new platform.
Performance improvements fall into several categories:

* Modifying our game to work better with the kernel
* Modifying our game to work better with OpenGL
* Optimizing the graphics driver

An example of the first category would be changing our memory
allocator to use more appropriate Linux functions. This was
achieved by implementing the Source engine small block heap
to work under Linux. The second category would include reducing
overhead in calling OpenGL, and extending our renderer with new
interfaces for better encapsulation of OpenGL and Direct3D. […]"

-- 
Marco



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