this is exactly why big companies need to invest way more time in risky, it-would-be-cool-if, projects<p>most studios would have avoided even trying to work on a linux port to their games often citing that there arent enough users to justify the engineering time. yet the unintended consequence of this [allegedly bad business decision] was that they found sizable optimizations to even their flagship Windows version as a by-product of linux optimizations. this in turn brings the system requirements down for the game on Windows, more people can play it, and more profits. all because of the effort used to port to Linux.<p>cool stuff valve.
I had a feeling that the Linux version would actually run faster. I can't put my finger on why that is though. Valve says it's because of the underlying effeciency of the kernel.<p>However, I'm still very much concerned about the things that come with proprietary games on the Linux platform. On the one hand it will open up Linux for a lot of users but then again I want a fully free platform without any DRM drenched material or proprietary code. This is what made Linux so powerful in the first place.
"After this work, Left 4 Dead 2 is running at 315 FPS on Linux. That the Linux version runs faster than the Windows version (270.6)"<p>I can see hope for linux in the gaming industry!!
Well, that was quite useless and I'm surprised no one has mentioned it.<p>1. What you really care about is consistently having a framerate of more than 60 fps. A higher fps count can actually be worse.<p>2. Relatively few linux users have a gtx 680. It's a 500$ graphics card and there just aren't that many linux applications who needs it.<p>3. If this down-scales linearly, which it might not, we are looking at around 3 fps difference at 60 fps.
Link to the same article which appeared on the front page : <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4327908" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4327908</a>