First results from the GZDoom 3.3.0 survey

[Marisa the Magician]

I'm very amused by the Linux numbers in these stats. I could guess it's due to the FOSS nature of gzdoom that it attracts more of us compared to, say, Steam, with its now less than 1% of Linux users.

On the topic of software rendered GL. You'd have to be a real masochist to do that. From tests I've done, even on middle-high end CPUs, emulated GL is way too slow for GZDoom (even the main menu lags).

[_mental_]

I'm very amused by the Linux numbers in these stats. I could guess it's due to the FOSS nature of gzdoom that it attracts more of us compared to, say, Steam, with its now less than 1% of Linux users.

I guess that's because Windows 8 and 10 disappointed many advanced users. Apple's products are expensive but buggy things too.
With exception of modern PC games and other Windows-only software (often used to produce these games, like 3ds MAX), there is no point to stick with Windows.
This doesn't apply for casual users though. They have no skills to get software outside of fancy marketplaces corporate vendors are offering.
Configuration of hardware can be long and painful process. So pre-installed Windows 10 seems to be a reasonable choice for them.

[Rachael]

On the topic of software rendered GL. You'd have to be a real masochist to do that. From tests I've done, even on middle-high end CPUs, emulated GL is way too slow for GZDoom (even the main menu lags).

Have you tried -glversion 2? It should run much faster - shaders are a real bitch to emulate on a CPU, depending on how they're compiled. (LLVM seems promising though, but it still lags regardless - both Mesa and Swiftshader use that)

Keep in mind though that ultimately you need a lower resolution for it to work. High resolution really kills it because CPU's were not designed the way GPU's were and having more pixel fill to do actually really affects it. This is why hyper-threaded quads do a lot better with software emulation than single-cores do.

I've found that without shaders and at 512x384-ish or so, GZDoom is almost playable, even with the hardware renderer. In Software mode it runs smooth as butter with Swiftshader's D3D9.

[drfrag]

Runs well with Mesa if your hardware supports natively 320x200 (intel), also without render buffers and glversion 2. Tested on an old P4 with trident integrated video, not that much slower than hardware there really. But the old renderer runs well even with shaders.