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Comment by Mavrik | Hacker News Reader

I might be the only sceptic here, but the fact that it seems that Valve has conflict of interest when it comes to Microsoft lately (see Gabe's comments) makes me doubt the authenticity of these results.

I'd love to see real performance improvements when it comes to Linux, but right now I just see a company that (it seems) has something to gain by smearing Microsoft giving out results without any methodology or explanation. They never even said how they avoided the typical pitfall of "FPS" benchmarking - making sure the GPU and the engine is actually drawing the same things (that means making sure all the same shaders are executed, similar extensions are used so that image quality is identical).

Until we get some confirmation in the wild I'll remain highly sceptical towards claims on the blog.

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Bear in mind that Left 4 Dead 2 is still using DirectX 9! The exact performance issues they are having problems with are fixed in later versions, as well as them adding speed improvements in many other areas too. If they spent as much time optimizing the DirectX renderer as they have done with the OpenGL one (which, bear in mind, is hardly work from scratch either as it's in use on the PS3 and OS X versions of their games already) then the DirectX renderer would probably be out in front.

You're not the only one. Valve are not the first people to port Windows games to Linux, and while some people claim they're faster, the general benchmarked consensus I've seen over the years is that both platform are, within 10% or so, basically identical.

Their results are basically within 15-20%. The major achievement is just having acceptable performance. After that there tends to be so many other factors that you can tweak that only two metrics make sense: FPS and image quality without any non-automatic tweaks, and then the maximum that can be obtained by extensive optimization.

For most people, they just want the game to run such that the difference is not big enough to warrant switching OSes for gaming. For me, I just want it to be close enough that I can't be bothered to reboot.

I've been getting some great performance through wine for some games for quite a while now. Under the same settings I've occasionally had slightly better or slightly worse performance depending on the game, patch-level and settings. For me the bar is whether it is playable and looks decent at all.

They said that some of their optimizations applied to both Linux and Windows, bringing the final scores to 315 and 303.4 fps respectively. That's well under 10%. Seems believable to me.

I played the Windows versions of many games before then on Linux and the Linux versions always were faster to me.

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