Over on the Valve blog a post appeared recently detailing the information of a port to linux, in particular the Left 4 Dead game.
They had run some tests on the ported version initially and ended up with a frame rate of 6 FPS, not very exciting but Valve said this is typical of an initial port over to a new platform.
The System Specs
Hardware
- Intel Core i7 3930k
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680
- 32 GB RAM
Software
- Windows 7 Service Pack 1 64-bit
- Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit
- Left 4 Dead 2
The final results for each of the setups is quite astounding, especially in the fact that more time has been spent already on the Windows version of Left 4 Dead 2. Left 4 Dead 2 on Linux ended up running at 315 FPS. The same game running on windows was running at 270.6 although by working with hardware vendors they also managed to speed up the Windows version of OpenGL to 303.4 FPS. The final outcome is that on the linux version of Left 4 Dead 2 it runs at 11.6 FPS higher than on windows.
Many of us gamers just play on Windows without much thought into what other options there are (because there is very little) but if there was the potential to play your games on Linux and not have to spend around £90 for a new operating system, do you think you would make the switch over to Linux?
Personally I have some invaluable pieces of software which I use which I am not sure if they would run or Linux or not, but purely for gaming it would be enticing indeed.
Leave your comments below about the results of the Valve tests and if you would switch across to a different operating system if it was available. Check out our gaming forum for a frenzied gaming discussion as well. Have fun and keep on gaming.
For the full post then head on over to: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/.
