RE: Valve's Gabe Newell Thinks Windows 8 Will Kill PC Gaming; Plans Penguin-Flavored Future

3vi1 — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 13:11:00 GMT

@MayhemMatthew: Well, according to Phoronix (for as much as you're willing to trust Michael ), he did have some negative comments about Windows 8 several months prior. So yeah, that's probably what you recall.

As for his comments - I agree with Joel; I don't think Win8 will significantly tank the PC market... I just don't think it will sell well. There are some early-adopter types (i.e. everyone here) that like to have all the new shiny stuff and will buy it. But, if most feel as I do after trying it, they'll be telling their relatives and friends that there's no significant reason to upgrade from Win7. And, corporations won't touch Win8 with a 10ft pole - it's entirely consumer oriented.

Using the Win8 interface on a desktop machine is like running the Android interface on a desktop. Not... ideal. Or, as that Gartner analyst (who got his chain yanked back hard) put it: "bad".

It is particularly interesting to see these comments from Gabe though. As a former MS employee, he's always been a big promoter of their way of doing things. I remember back when the GldSrc/Source engine was evolving from Quake, they were yanking out OpenGL support and tying everything tightly to DirectX. It took forever, but now the pendulum has finally swung the other way.

Re: Left 4 Dead

3vi1 — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 16:14:37 GMT

[quote user="Crisis Causer"]

I ran it at max settings + 4xAA 8xAF at 1920x1080. I didn't have a framerate display, but it was fine. This was with only one of my Radeon 3850s. It's a Source game, so it's not stressful.

[/quote]

I have a 9800GTX+, which should should smoke the 3850 under Linux, so I'm guessing that you're talking about under Windows.

The real problem with running it under Linux is that Wine's DirectX implementation still needs to be optimized for any game that uses versions later than 8.1. I found that I could run it with shaders and settings set much higher if I force the game to detect 8.1 by using "-dxlevel 81" in the launch parameters. This is pretty much the norm for Source games at the moment.

It's weird and a little disappointing, because other games like EverQuest and City of Heroes run at the same speed as Windows (if not faster). I'm sure it will be worked out in time, though.

Search results matching tags 'Valve' and 'DirectX'

RE: Valve's Gabe Newell Thinks Windows 8 Will Kill PC Gaming; Plans Penguin-Flavored Future

Re: Left 4 Dead