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valve bits
article: valve bits
The trip to Valve was quite the interesting experience for me. First off, I had never flown before in my life; never mind that I have also never travelled across the country. I’ll spare you the details of the flights, and just hop into the meat of the matter. The day spent at Valve, playing the titles of the Orange Box (Episode 2 and Portal), giving Left 4 Dead a good go around, and interviewing a good variety of developers.

Think of this as more of a "Mega Newsbits - Valve Edition" than a full article piece. I will categorize the information I have compiled from the interviews and things I’ve heard during my trip on Monday. Keep in mind, this is not going to contain everything I saw and experienced. A lot more will come in the form of hands-on previews for Episode 2, Portal, and Left 4 Dead. Additionally, I’ll have a review of the Orange Box titles to coincide with its release on the 10th. This will include Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2.

Stay tuned, it’s going to be quite the ride in the next couple of weeks. For now, let’s hop right into the tasty bits of information gathered from my trip.

Source Technology
Full vs. Extended HDR - We’re kicking things off with a bit of a technical response. I asked the question about the difference between Full and Extended HDR that has been introduced with Team Fortress 2. This option is still present in Episode 2 and Portal as well, and will more than likely be included in future Source titles. The question remains: what is it, and what is the difference?

Extended HDR uses full floating-point 32 methods for calculating the HDR. Essentially, in the Orange Box titles it allows for better handling of the particle effects and other minor visual improvements. On particles, there is full feather filtering. This is in contrast to the “Full HDR� setting that only partially feathers the particles and creates a rather abrupt cut-off line where the particle effect meets the rest of the world. The feathering allows for smoother visual transitions for particles.

I don’t pretend to know much about this sort of thing, so I won’t even try to offer up a technical comparison between the current HDR method and this new, “extended� method. I’m personally under the impression that only cards equipped with SM3.0 support (and above) will be able to make use of the extended option. FP32 HDR is said to have a much higher contrast ratio for HDR ranges. The higher the floating-point number, the closer the contrast ratio comes to accurately mimicking the ratio of the human eye. More in-depth information can be found thanks to Wiki.


DirectX 10 vs. DirectX 9 - At present DirectX 9 is the render path in use for Team Fortress 2. This is a direct result of there being such a small percentage of persons that actually have a DirectX 10 enabled card, at least according to the results of the hardware survey.

As with their previous technologies, Valve has stated that they will add in greater support for DirectX 10 features as more and more people adopt the new technology. Instead of pushing the boundary forward (as some companies feel compelled to do), Valve takes a refreshing approach by monitoring what hardware their consumers actually have and what they use. The company then caters to what a bulk of their consumers use while still keeping their options wide open by including new features for those on the bleeding edge and continuing support for older technologies.


Multicore Support - Team Fortress 2 only makes use of multiple CPU cores for its particle system. However, both Episode 2 and Portal make use of the Source engine’s new scalable multicore system.

Their multicore solution will scale dynamically with however many cores you have on your system. The more cores you have, the more Source engine subsystems will be offloaded to these cores. What are these “subsystems� I speak of, you may be wondering. Areas such as the particle simulation, the materials system, and artificial intelligence are just a few of these subsystems that can be offloaded onto other cores for increased performance across the board.

However, there are some drawbacks to this. There will obviously come a point where the performance gain from offloading these subsystems to additional cores is hampered by a weak GPU. As is the case now with single and dual-core solutions, making sure to strike a balance between a strong CPU and a GPU that can keep up.