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I remember when you could use dxlevel 7, it wasn’t looking that great but it gave a good damn fps increase. What’s the reason why they removed it?

2 years ago you could still use it

Quoted from Popcorp

Because graphics cards were shit back then and when Gaming progressed, they stopped supporting Dxlevel 6 and 7 (yes there was also Dxlevel 6), because by the year when they got rid of Dxlevel 7, most of people had a decent PCs and they wouldn’t waste their time supporting Tf2 with Dxlevel 7

They still support Dxlevel 8 just because they are aware that not all players can handle dx9, but expect them to get rid of Dx8 in next few years, they most likely gonna implement Dx10 and 11 into Source 2 engine when it gets released.

tl;dr Dx7 died, expect them to get rid of Dx8 in next few years, most likely when Source 2 gets released

Thats what i think at least

That sounds like the most reasonable explanation, thank you!

well i don’t know their plans on Source 2, lets see if they give Tf2 Source 2 engine, it’s going to change Textures a lot (if L4D2 with Source 2 Leaked screenshots were not fake).

Is OpenGL better than DirectX?

Wouldn’t Valve also have to make sure everything also works on DX7 (textures, particles, shaders, etc.) as they add new updates?
Not everything works even on DX8, e.g. some cosmetics don’t have proper textures (replaced by a fire texture).

Quoted from Lex

Wouldn’t Valve also have to make sure everything also works on DX7 (textures, particles, shaders, etc.) as they add new updates?
Not everything works even on DX8, e.g. some cosmetics don’t have proper textures (replaced by a fire texture).

-dxlevel 81
in the launch options, it fixes the fire textures

Quoted from Selek

How does TF2 run performance-wise in OpenGL? Or is it hard to say across platforms?

TF2 performance is the same or even better with Nvidia cards on Linux.

Note that Valve currently converts DirectX calls to OpenGL ones with a translation layer, so I guess a even higher performance would be expected with true OpenGL.

(Some non TF2 benchmarks:
Ubuntu 14.04 vs Windows 8 with Nvidia:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=geforce_ubuntu14_win81&num=1
AMD performance seem to be pretty much the same between Windows and Linux as well:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=radeon_1404_win81&num=1

EDIT: I guess these benchmarks actually use OpenGL on Windows as well)

any downsides for OpenGL? pros and cons of OpenGL and Dx?

and fire textures appear if you have mat_specular 0
enable specular and no more fire textures