I still would like to know what Valve and Blizzard have encountered with Win8 that makes it trouble. I have not had any problems with Steam and WoW. Maybe they do mean drivers though..
The VentureBeat interview [1] makes it look like gaben is referring to the changes in app ecosystem (eg. integrated Windows Store with 30% margins) rather than a specific technical problem. Although I suspect a major games studio coming to Linux might also enjoy the ability to poke around the source for the few graphics drivers which are open.
Seems likely. I think Apple only got away with the shift to the Mac App store because the market for third-party Mac software is minuscule compared to that of Windows and includes a lot of smaller devs for whom relinquishing control of sales and distribution is as much a blessing as a liability.
On Windows big players like Valve are going to be less willing to play sharecropper.
Steam is a Windows 8 program. It's not a WinRT program. Steam works perfectly in Windows 8.
The point I was making is that Steam doesn't work on Microsoft ARM tablets powered by Windows RT, but that shouldn't be a big surprise considering no desktop software works on ARM computers without being recompiled for that platform. It's no different than OSX vs iOS.
I would imagine all major gaming engine companies already have source code deals with the graphics card vendors, and vice versa. It's the kinda thing where everybody wants compatibility with each other and it wouldn't make sense not to share it.
Maybe it has something to do with the Microsoft App Store and MS being the gatekeeper that decides if an app runs or not there. Oh, and by the way getting 30% cut of the price of the software, all software a la Apple.
Windows 8 is a change in direction for the Windows app ecosystem and for the user interface as well. Valve games make a lot less sense on a touch interface, and they worry that's where Microsoft is quickly heading - to a Metro-only future. A future where everything also has to come through the app store.
No matter what kind of company you are, whether a software or hardware one, if you're doing "well" in the current/status quo Windows environment, then Windows 8 is a threat to you, because it will change a lot of things, and most likely for the worse for regular "PC-oriented" companies.
In their one test app they observed FPS values of 315 on Linux, and 303.4 on Windows. This seems small enough that it's a stretch to call it "trouble" on Windows--probably wouldn't even notice it.
Given that screens physically refresh at 60Hz these days, you definitely wouldn't notice it. High FPS numbers are useful as a guide to efficiency, not subjective experience.
> High FPS numbers are useful as a guide to efficiency, not subjective experience.
Not really. FPS readings >= monitor refresh rate give skewed results that may not reflect the actual performance. Despite this, it's still used widely in performance benchmarks.
Yep, most probably. For ex: I have had audiophile-grade sound quality differences in Linux (Ubuntu 10.04) and Windows (Windows 7) due to the drivers [1].
[1]Dual boot on a Sony Vaio FZ-21S, with onboard ASIO chipset, headphones - Pioneer SE-A1000 (Equivalent to a Sennheisser HD - 595) with no equalizers.
The only way to make "audiophile-grade" comparisons is through blind tests in an appropriate room.
I'd just like to point out that you'll have more variations in your sound by just turning the mini-jack connector than by modifying any driver, who do nothing more than copying a stream of digital audio into the buffer of the sound card to be sent to the DAC.
The only area where I've seen changes caused by drivers is on latency, a latency that matters only in a creative context.
who do nothing more than copying a stream of digital audio into the buffer of the sound card to be sent to the DAC
That's a grosse simplification of what the audio driver does. Mixing, leveling, EQ, spatiality and a lot of other details are handled by driver as well. My last Linux laptop, running Ubuntu, had an annoying hiss when the levels were at 100. The fix was enabling SSE2, which got disabled everytime the kernel was upgrading. From that example I know the driver is doing far more than streaming audio to the DAC.
Hmmm, maybe..I suspect it could be something to do with the ASIO drivers, because there is some "spatial-ness" enabled when I use Linux instead of Windows for such stuff. To verify this, I tried playing a FLAC ripped directly from an Audio CD I had @ 1140kbps approx. and I'm not sure how to put it, but I can confirm there was a "spatial-ness" and more instrument-level distinguish-ability while on Linux. Maybe its specific to just this laptop? Who knows...
An increased "clarity" or "spaciousness" of sound can be caused by anything from a slight increase in total gain (even as small as 0.5dB) to bypassing or enabling bass and treble controls, even if the controls are set to zero. Some sound chips also have "3D" effects which mix inverted and/or delayed copies of the left and right channels with each other, that can increase or decrease perceived spaciousness. Differences in power management approaches between the operating systems can increase or decrease electrical noise in the system (more noise means finer details are masked), and could also affect the accuracy of the sample rate clock, resulting in different amounts or types of sample jitter between OSes. There are other DAC parameters (i.e. DC bias -- some chips might be able to produce a balanced signal between -Vs and +Vs, but only if they have a negative supply; otherwise they have to fall back to 0V to Vs) that Linux may be programming differently.
The best way to identify any differences is to run the audio into a calibrated measurement device (at the very top end an Audio Precision box) and check the gain, frequency response, jitter, THD+N, etc.
These kinds of things can be surprisingly subjective. An audio driver in this case shouldn't be doing much more than shoveling bytes into a device buffer.
An example of expectations shaping opinion in audio: I remember walking into a small upmarket shopping mall and thinking "wow, the sound system in here is amazing - it sounds just like there's an actual piano being played". I turned the corner, and there was a pianist on a baby grand...
Latency can be a problem also when listening to music. HP Power Manager in recent versions (January to June 2012 verified on several EliteBooks) adds so much latency once each 30 seconds that even I can hear it. I even lost entire keypresses.
I don't think it has anything to do with the OS itself. At least not in a "oh well now making games for Windows is 50 times harder!" way. It's mostly a disagreement with MS's push for an Apple-like app store for a DESKTOP OS.
1. http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/25/valves-gabe-newell-talks/