First of all, I need to thank
- the BMS crew, obviously. It was and is an incredibly nostalgic experience. The level of finesse matches that of commercial titles, the level of polish and fine-tuning is far better than others (i.e. very few bugs and other signs of rushing things),
- the Wine developers for their outstanding work - everything, literally everything Source related runs out of the box, directly from Steam, just like it should,
- the Bumblebee project for making it possible to utilize nvidia’s Optimus technology
- and everybody else who contributed to the entire free software stack that’s between me and the iron. Great work.
- Edit: and Valve obviously!
Some technical details for those interested: I’m running on an Asus laptop (i5, 8 gigs of RAM) with Intel and nvidia GT 540M graphics. The Intel GPU is the primary, wired directly to the output, while the secondary (nvidia) gets powered only when heavy lifting is required. Its output is copied into the primary GPU’s framebuffer and that’s how it gets to the display. This is implemented with the Bumblebee daemon (an implementation of nvidia’s Optimus technology). The game runs on a separate X server and its output frames are copied using a VirtualGL transport back into the main X server. As a nice side effect of that is that Source allows me to set “High” shadow details, something which it never seems to permit in a Windows environment (on Windows it’s either Low or Medium). Overall, performance is pretty much identical to native environment, mostly at constant vsynced 60 Hz at 1366x768 with every option maxed out.