Valve looking to OpenGL means Microsoft should be worried
Posted on 15th Mar 2010 at 10:09 by Alex Watson with 23 comments
Valve has been on a bit of a roll recently, with its beautifully executed Portal mystery and smart re-working of Apple adverts to announce Steam coming to Mac OS X.
The approachable, inclusive nature of Valve’s marketing – and the thoughtfulness of features such as SteamCloud, where you won’t need to repurchase games – means gamers love the company, but we shouldn’t be blind to the interesting political movements that Valve’s recent actions hint at.
While most of the press focussed on saying it was Steam that was coming to the Mac (and rightly, that’s what consumers care about), Valve was careful to point out that both Steam and the Source game engine were headed to OS X.
Valve is able to do this because it has incorporated OpenGL into Steam – making it perhaps the biggest game engine at the moment that’s not solely DirectX. Valve’s move will be – or should be – extremely interesting to Microsoft, because it represents the first serious challenge to DirectX in years.
John Carmack and id software might talk a good game about how keen they are on OpenGL, but the slow pace of releases from id, lack of licensing wins and lack of multiplayer success means that it’s not really a concern to DirectX’s dominance. Source however, while it’s not widely licensed, is in regular use by millions of gamers and by incorporating OpenGL into it, Valve is enabling millions of gamers to imagine gaming on a PC that’s not running Windows.
You can argue that no serious gamer would want to buy a Mac – the graphics cards on offer in the Macs that any indivudual would be buying (ie not the Mac Pro) run the gamut from terrible to depressing to deeply average – but Source isn’t demanding in terms of hardware, and many people will find their Mac does just fine, especially if they’re occasional gamers.
What should be really worrying for Microsoft is that Source doesn’t yet incorporate any DirectX 10 or 11 features – and Valve has shown little interest in doing so. The addition of OpenGL means they’ve now got another option about pushing the engine forward, especially as the recently announced OpenGL 4.0 includes DX11 comparable features such as Compute Shaders and Tesselation.
In addition to this, adding OpenGL means Valve can now extend support to Linux – whether they’ll do this officially, or whether enterprising Linux users will just manage to hack the OpenGL libraries inside Source, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Valve games running well on Ubuntu et al within a few months of the Mac launch.
Why Valve is doing this is an interesting question and it comes down to whether they’ve added OpenGL in so that they can go after the Mac market – or, more intriguingly, perhaps the Mac market is a natural benefit of them deciding to explore OpenGL more fully. This latter scenario would imply Valve being dissatisfied with being tied solely to DirectX. Either way, the disappointing rate of adoption of DX10 and 11 looks set to continue, and there are likely some stormy seas ahead for DirectX.
The approachable, inclusive nature of Valve’s marketing – and the thoughtfulness of features such as SteamCloud, where you won’t need to repurchase games – means gamers love the company, but we shouldn’t be blind to the interesting political movements that Valve’s recent actions hint at.
While most of the press focussed on saying it was Steam that was coming to the Mac (and rightly, that’s what consumers care about), Valve was careful to point out that both Steam and the Source game engine were headed to OS X.
Valve is able to do this because it has incorporated OpenGL into Steam – making it perhaps the biggest game engine at the moment that’s not solely DirectX. Valve’s move will be – or should be – extremely interesting to Microsoft, because it represents the first serious challenge to DirectX in years.
John Carmack and id software might talk a good game about how keen they are on OpenGL, but the slow pace of releases from id, lack of licensing wins and lack of multiplayer success means that it’s not really a concern to DirectX’s dominance. Source however, while it’s not widely licensed, is in regular use by millions of gamers and by incorporating OpenGL into it, Valve is enabling millions of gamers to imagine gaming on a PC that’s not running Windows.
You can argue that no serious gamer would want to buy a Mac – the graphics cards on offer in the Macs that any indivudual would be buying (ie not the Mac Pro) run the gamut from terrible to depressing to deeply average – but Source isn’t demanding in terms of hardware, and many people will find their Mac does just fine, especially if they’re occasional gamers.
What should be really worrying for Microsoft is that Source doesn’t yet incorporate any DirectX 10 or 11 features – and Valve has shown little interest in doing so. The addition of OpenGL means they’ve now got another option about pushing the engine forward, especially as the recently announced OpenGL 4.0 includes DX11 comparable features such as Compute Shaders and Tesselation.
In addition to this, adding OpenGL means Valve can now extend support to Linux – whether they’ll do this officially, or whether enterprising Linux users will just manage to hack the OpenGL libraries inside Source, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Valve games running well on Ubuntu et al within a few months of the Mac launch.
Why Valve is doing this is an interesting question and it comes down to whether they’ve added OpenGL in so that they can go after the Mac market – or, more intriguingly, perhaps the Mac market is a natural benefit of them deciding to explore OpenGL more fully. This latter scenario would imply Valve being dissatisfied with being tied solely to DirectX. Either way, the disappointing rate of adoption of DX10 and 11 looks set to continue, and there are likely some stormy seas ahead for DirectX.
23 Comments
Discuss in the forums ReplyThere is a slight typo in the blog.
SteamCloud is the feature which saves game data and configs remotely.
Therefore I think it should read
Wolfire did a blog post a while back pointing out the great advantages Opengl has over DirectX since they are building Overgrowth to work on Mac Windows and Linux they must know what they are talking about.
I think that PC gamings future could be in OpenGL without windows but we need more companies to give it a go.
Are we getting closer to that dream?
If this had been 5 years ago I'd have been extremely happy but now... Good for Valve, I guess?
I suppose it's also good for people with lower spec hardware.
WoW, one of the few games that runs natively on both Windows and OS X, runs noticeably slower under OS X than Windows/Boot Camp. FPS drops about 20% and there are a few notable drops in image quality - ground vegetation popping up instead of fading for example. How much of this is down to the graphics library or Blizzard's programming is tough to say, but MS can't be too worried when all the graphics hardware/drivers currently available is specifically tuned for DirectX performance, with OpenGL being something of an afterthought.
graphics drivers for linux are pretty terrible though, but if there is demand like this then i can imagine AMD/Nvidia pulling their collective fingers out.
but then, by the time Fermi is available to buy, 6870 will also be on the shelf.
Last time I checked, Steam wasn't a game engine. Don't you mean Source?
Encouraging article though!
OpenGL 4 will run on all videocards we already know to be DX11-compatible. OpenGL 3.3 will be the version supported by cards prior to these.
My company's in-house game engine also uses OpenGL. We decided early in the development process to use this API because it's the most open, non-proprietary (ever read the DX SDK EULA?) and runs virtually everywhere. It's good to see that this API is getting more love from large studios like Valve.
what are you smoking? I have a MBP laptop running both Windows and OSX, I have WoW installed on both and the frame rate is much higher under OSX running identical settings. I was under the impression that apple intentionally doesn't release highly optimized drivers so that things run faster natively in OSX