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Hooray for Techland! Dying Light is finally playable on Linux, so you can join us in having some cake. It's not perfect, but far far better!

It took them quite a long time to get here, but they got here, so let’s be thankful!

After we (GOL) paid about £80 for myself and Samsai to have a copy, I finally feel like they are earning our money, well, sort of. The game was obviously not tested on Linux before release, but hey...anyway.

My first trial run of the new patch forced me to quit as it popped up saying Dying Light has become unresponsive, good start. I waited, and it died on its own.

Second launch was fine, and the game has a MUCH better overall FPS, and it now feels VERY smooth and responsive, finally!

Testing it on High textures, Medium shadows, and High foliage now gives between 45-80FPS, considering before that gave 15-30FPS that's a solid improvement.
It's no way near perfect, but it's better for now. When you consider I'm on an Nvidia 970 I should still be getting a fair bit more.

Update: I re-tested the Proteus laptop from Entroware that we have, and it's even playable on it. Check the updated review on page 2 for the screenshot as well.

Update 2: It will still crash to the desktop for me when scrolling through the keybind menus, I did report this to Techland before, and have done, again. It happens on the third screen of the keybinds menu, every time.

Update 3: The game will crash to the desktop a lot for me now, so I am still recommending anyone who hasn't picked it up, to wait.

Release notes:
QuoteFeatures:

* Hard Mode added
* National outfits added
* 4 outfits as a reward for finishing the story campaign added
* Over 50 new weapons added
* New weapon rarity level – extremely rare Gold weapons added

Gameplay:

* Various balance tweaks of weapons, loot chests, shops and crafting
* Various improvements to game quests
* Improvements in natural movement flow

Technical:

* Resolved various stability issues including co-op
* Improved overall game performance

Visuals:

* Various improvements in world and character art

Be the Zombie:

* New option to enable zombie invasions with co-op disabled added

Linux specific improvements:

* Added AMD Radeon support (Please note - the NPC dialogue lip-sync will be enabled in a future patch)
* Improved performance significantly
* Fixed glitch when changing resolution
* Improved mouse scroll speed in map menu
* Disabled SSAO and AA options (TBD)
* Fixed minor rendering issues
* Fixed screenshots capturing
* Fixed crashed related to audio driver


Finally I can enjoy the experience! Or so I thought, the game crashes to the desktop quite often now.

You can find Dying Light on Steam. It's still pretty flaky though! Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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60 comments
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vulture Mar 11, 2015
why do i think that all the people that got it working now just got over threshold of cpu bottlenecking to the next level?

especially the... no change on resolution or settings is suspicious and the fact that people with same cpus say same things while gpu seems to not play any special role or at least nowhere near as it should. these are most obvious signs when cpu is bottlenecked.

can anyone with problems check core utilization? usually in this case one core should be 100% non stop

i plan on buying it if i was correct, my cpu is more than good enough it seems. still, they better fix this
Unshra Mar 11, 2015
Seeing how much the patch improved Dying Light on my Linux notebook running a 750M I decided to see how Dying Light ran on the Windows notebook with the 980M (still having issues trying to get Linux working on it.) As I mentioned before the Windows with 980M was a solid 60 FPS with everything maxed but view distance. This time around it was avg 37 FPS and even dipped down to 27 FPS however it was still smoother than the Linux client at the same frame rate.

So I guess you can say that on the Window side of things it got much worse for me while on the Linux side it was better but still not playable without modding. Wonder what the next patch will bring.
Commander Mar 11, 2015
Meh for me the game crashes at launch.

Everything from
*** Error in 'DyingLightGame': malloc(): memory corruption: 0x0000000006dc9520 *** to
*** Error in `DyingLightGame': free(): invalid next size (fast): 0x0000000007cf04a0 ***

Was 70% chance of launch when they first patched the game, however now this happens each and every time. Also when i was able to launch I still had 14-20FPS on AMD 9590 and nVidia GTX 970.

Tired of this crap, already asked for a refund for this game lets see what Steam will say.
metcard Mar 11, 2015
Quoting: CommanderMeh for me the game crashes at launch.

Everything from
*** Error in 'DyingLightGame': malloc(): memory corruption: 0x0000000006dc9520 *** to
*** Error in `DyingLightGame': free(): invalid next size (fast): 0x0000000007cf04a0 ***

Was 70% chance of launch when they first patched the game, however now this happens each and every time. Also when i was able to launch I still had 14-20FPS on AMD 9590 and nVidia GTX 970.

Tired of this crap, already asked for a refund for this game lets see what Steam will say.

Did you make any modifications to the varlist_performance.src file in the data folder to disable sun shadows, cloud shadows etc?
If you did, maybe delete, or move the folder and see if that works. I had a few issues with this update which were all solved by deleting the data folder.
Commander Mar 11, 2015
Quoting: metcard
Quoting: CommanderMeh for me the game crashes at launch.

Everything from
*** Error in 'DyingLightGame': malloc(): memory corruption: 0x0000000006dc9520 *** to
*** Error in `DyingLightGame': free(): invalid next size (fast): 0x0000000007cf04a0 ***

Was 70% chance of launch when they first patched the game, however now this happens each and every time. Also when i was able to launch I still had 14-20FPS on AMD 9590 and nVidia GTX 970.

Tired of this crap, already asked for a refund for this game lets see what Steam will say.

Did you make any modifications to the varlist_performance.src file in the data folder to disable sun shadows, cloud shadows etc?
If you did, maybe delete, or move the folder and see if that works. I had a few issues with this update which were all solved by deleting the data folder.

I tried to verify the data, deleted it and reinstalled the game on a ext4 ssd partition nothing.... (since it was on a luks partiton).
godlike Mar 11, 2015
Quoting: GuestWhat's worse, is that some of the object rendering setup is done the "GL2.x way". This introduces some overhead and internal driver checks on a per-frame basis that could otherwise be optimised using the "GL3.2 way" (basically, vertex attributes should be packed in a special object, a Vertex Array Object, or VAO, which reduces validation checks to the creation time instead of every time things are rendered). This kind of thing I'm hopeful they'll be able to easily fix - it should improve certain parts a lot.

While VAOs will remove some internal checks they have another problem. Being a separate object means that the app will have to access (most of the time) one before every drawcall. Accessing a different part of the memory will result in cache misses. On the other hand, by touching a single VAO (or the default VAO in GL ES) you ensure that everything will be in the cache.

Cache misses are a huge performance problem that people often forget. One of the great things about OpenGL is that it's very cache friendly. Many operations touch only the context and for the most part the context is in the cache.
Xpander Mar 11, 2015
Quoting: vulturewhy do i think that all the people that got it working now just got over threshold of cpu bottlenecking to the next level?

especially the... no change on resolution or settings is suspicious and the fact that people with same cpus say same things while gpu seems to not play any special role or at least nowhere near as it should. these are most obvious signs when cpu is bottlenecked.

can anyone with problems check core utilization? usually in this case one core should be 100% non stop

i plan on buying it if i was correct, my cpu is more than good enough it seems. still, they better fix this


FX 8320 @ 4,3GHZ, overall CPU usage 50% from 100%.. if i check the cores, then none of the cores goes to 100% its all spread around... few cores top 70% at times.
GPU usage(970) is 40% max.. so clearly some issues with my CPU bottlnecking? ..
janpan Mar 11, 2015
I will wait for one more performance update before I buy. I am still a little sceptical , but happy they are fixing it !
godlike Mar 11, 2015
Quoting: GuestWhile I'm not sure of the spatial coherence of indexed vertex buffers, they are at least using instanced rendering where possible it would seem. Though I agree - there might be cases where they could batch meshes together for more cache-friendly rendering. I haven't looked in depth enough to know that for certain.
Not using VAOs is also inflating their API call count by quite a lot. Basic guesstimates in my head mean that 100k API call count could be reduced to between 15k and 20k. Fix up the texture generation at the start of each frame, and it should do wonders for performance - and that's just the low hanging fruit.

To be honest I am not sure about nVidia's or AMD's drivers but traditionally the most expensive calls are the drawcalls. For some drivers the drawcalls are expensive since this is the point where they check which part of the state have changed or do shader re-compilations or set dependencies or refcount objects and many more.

I have a question though since you looked at the game's behaviour. Do you know if it's CPU or GPU limited? It will be CPU limited if at least one CPU core is maxed out.
Liam Dawe Mar 11, 2015
Seems i'm getting a lot of crashing to the desktop now :(
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