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For those that enjoy it, the ARK: Survival Evolved [Steam] launch trailer has arrived ahead of the launch next week.

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You can see the announcement about the trailer and what's to come here.

I've still yet to see them comment anywhere about the broken water on Linux, so it seems with only a few days left it will launch with that broken. The water is still a rather ugly plain brown texture, which isn't great.

What I am pleased to say, is that the graphical bugs inside caves are indeed fixed. You need a recent version of the NVIDIA driver, at least 384.59 (I tested with 384.69). You also need to ensure you wipe the NVIDIA cache stored in your home in a hidden folder named ".nv" (I just deleted the folder). It's entirely possible the game is just not adjusting the shaders for new drivers. Even though I did the same before, it seems it's a probable driver bug (or recent NVIDIA drivers have a work-around for a game issue).

The bug when you leave the water, with a laser light-show happening is still there, at least for me. It's nice to be able to see actual progress though, so my thoughts on it aren't as bad as before. I still think for a £49.99 game that they need to step up their Linux support.

They won't be using Vulkan any time soon either, as they recently got asked about using Vulkan and their answer was this:
QuoteUnreal 4’s own official Vulkan integration was only like half-functional when I last reviewed it a few months ago. I’ll take a look shortly to see if it’s farther along. Once Epic has got it going fully well (fully matching the functionality and pipeline of DX11 & Shader Model 5), I’d like to try to incorporate it into ARK.

However, it's nice to see them actually respond to and it remain open to doing it.

It seems players on Steam aren't particularly happy with ARK overall. The Steam users reviews are "Mixed", with all the most helpful showing on the Steam store page being negative. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Leopard Aug 24, 2017
Quoting: TheRiddickI'm trying to point out here that VulkanAPI on Windows and Linux performs better then DX11 and OpenGL on either platform. Making it a great choice for system performance parity regardless of API comparisons. A PURE OpenGL game works great, but very few are, most have tacked on OpenGL (eg. warthunder) at best, majority of games are still directx based.

Vulkan would be a better wrapping solution for DirectX then OpenGL, which is what most companies are doing now with their Linux ports, why else would we get terrible performance under Linux in comparison to their directx windows counterparts? (which don't have OGL options)

Vulkan is not magic and if a game developed for DirectX , lots of engineering goes on Dx side ; a Vulkan wrapper cannot provide Windows performance.

Only game you can see the real Vulkan is Doom and upcoming Wolfenstein 2 ( both id Software) , others are not native afaik.
TheRiddick Aug 24, 2017
I never said it was magic, I'm just saying neither is OpenGL. And drivers on AMD's side of thing are not overly great when it comes to optimizations for OpenGL. But we have seen good results from Vulkan, why develop 2 Engine API's and not just 1, focus is best put on Vulkan and not these OpenGL wrappers you're praising.


Last edited by TheRiddick on 24 August 2017 at 9:50 pm UTC
Leopard Aug 24, 2017
Quoting: TheRiddickI never said it was magic, I'm just saying neither is OpenGL. And drivers on AMD's side of thing are not overly great when it comes to optimizations for OpenGL. But we have seen good results from Vulkan, why develop 2 Engine API's and not just 1, focus is best put on Vulkan and not these OpenGL wrappers you're praising.

Because not every users gpu's are Vulkan capable. For example ; even some cards on Amd supports OpenGL 4.x but they're not compatible with Vulkan. Being only Vulkan games means they will be outcasted. Same will go for Windows side.
Vulkan's best selling point is ; it is also compatible with Windows 7 and Windows 8. So from this perspective ; Vulkan is advantage but not every card is Vulkan capable. So using two API is a must if you are aiming maximum sale.

Also Vulkan and Dx12 are harder to deal with when compared to OpenGL and Dx11.

You want a fast adoption for it but it is not possible , even for Dx12.
TheRiddick Aug 24, 2017
What GPU's don't support Vulkan? do you mean the ones that can't even achieve playable fps with games that can benefit from vulkan? because those are the games I'm talking about. ARK for example has pretty high demand in GPU specs and uses allot of CPU processing also, it would truly be worth the developers time to ditch all the other API's and stick with Vulkan for cross platform parity and all.

However I do know that Unreal Engine 4 has been slow to adopt Vulkan so its probably partly out of their control, in saying that they have no doubt piles of money to actually do something about it, at least you'd assume so unless they blew it all on coke and hookers?¿
Mountain Man Aug 25, 2017
I only clicked on this article because the front-page thumbnail had a picture of an adorable otter holding a small sphere. Where is that picture in the article!
evergreen Aug 25, 2017
Did someone try the Ragnarok map? since yesterday I couldn't access the online servers.
Ardje Aug 25, 2017
Quoting: GuestThose "half assed implementation of OpenGL" (drivers and/or engines) is the reason why we need Vulkan.
It actually isn't half assed.
But every company will tackle the support in their own way with OpenGL.
So what's fast on bugfree on NVidia will be terrible, slow and buggy on AMD and vv, using the same API.
OpenGL is too high end, needs a lot of state trackers, and all you want is do some things very fast.
It's like wasm... It's a reduced use of javascript of which is known that it will result in certain intermediary code, making it a kind of assembly. But it's just a hack on the lack of a low level VM in the browser. So it doesn't always work on all browsers, and the real web assembly is still lagging in functionality because you have no access to the page.

So what I am trying to say, is that while opengl might be nice to program in for small programs, but gles v2 and higher and vulkan have not been developed for nothing.
gles v2 describes a low level engine, you are responsible for maintaining the high level parts. So in that respect, vulkan and gles have a lot in commmon.
You can probably still create an opengl wrapper around vulkan. But what game makers are trying to do is create a vulkan wrapper around opengl for the speed.
Ardje Aug 25, 2017
Quoting: LeopardBecause not every users gpu's are Vulkan capable. For example ; even some cards on Amd supports OpenGL 4.x but they're not compatible with Vulkan. Being only Vulkan games means they will be outcasted.
That's not really true. You are confusing vulkan capable with having drivers conforming to the vulkan API. Vulkan is lowlevel, the driver should give enough handles to be able to use the hardware. the T-Mali series should be vulkan capable, but I fear it's just a lack of drivers.
To be clear: all samsung t-mali based phones from 2014 are/should be vulkan capable due to having the correct drivers.
Ardje Aug 25, 2017
Quoting: Ardjethe T-Mali series should be vulkan capable, but I fear it's just a lack of drivers.
To be clear: all samsung t-mali based phones from 2014 are/should be vulkan capable due to having the correct drivers.
Meeh... it's a definitive should, but android never got that vulkan upgrade.
https://developer.arm.com/graphics/vulkan
My T760 is hardware capable of conforming to mali, but without drivers no mali. Maybe that's the reason the gear vr sucks on this note 4 compared to the S8+.
But yeah: https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-products
those are a lot of vulkan conformant products, but since GLES is already lowlevel, UE4 will probably use GLES.
Ardje Aug 25, 2017
Ah, I nice showcase of how much better vulkan is according to Epic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnKu7MLB7vQ
Actually they don't show anything really, but they do say some important stuff, like with vulkan you can keep everything in the gpu.
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