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The new Linux port of Metro Exodus sadly came with a rough launch but for AMD GPU owners it's set to get more playable, with a fix in the Mesa RADV driver now merged. I've been following this quite closely, first posting about it on Twitter yesterday after being told about it.

What's the issue then? Well, this Vulkan port caused a lot of RAM to be eaten from a leak, it got real hungry really fast. A bug report was made with Mesa on April 16, and as of April 19 the fix was merged in - a pretty amazing turn around and shows again the power of open source drivers for solving issues.

Since it's merged it will for sure be in the Mesa 21.2 release, and should also be backported to the next stable update to the current Mesa drivers - hopefully the upcoming Mesa 21.1 release too which would be ideal.

For NVIDIA users, making sure your drivers are up to date is a good idea. My own NVIDIA system seemed more stable with Metro Exodus on the latest 465.24.02 release. There's still crashes in the desert area, but after plenty of research this appears to be very common on even Windows. Adjusting graphical settings down to medium for a bit gets around the areas to cause the crashes.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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48 comments
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Eike Apr 20, 2021
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I don't know anything about the technology, but is my feeling right that the game shouldn't be calling with layout_size=0 in the first place?
OlliC Apr 20, 2021
Very nice. I could only play 5-10 minutes before the next crash with my RX590. Othwerwise i ran very smooth
and good looking on ultra settings. So i will just wait a bit until this fix hits Fedora and continue my playthrough then.
BielFPs Apr 20, 2021
I will install it again once this patch reach Manjaro stable.

Hope I can play with my weak notebook.
Xpander Apr 20, 2021
~11 hours in. So far the game seems fine for me linux. There's the crashing issue on the desert map, which people say is same problem under windows. Had to lower to medium settings for those parts where it crashed there. Other than that solid experience with few gameplay bugs like floating enemies, floating items etc... No mem leaks noticed. always seems to use 8.5-9.5GB of RAM and ~4GB VRAM.

Arch Linux, MATE desktop, Ryzen 3700X, 32GB DDR4, GTX 1080Ti, 465.24.02 drivers and kernel 5.11 with upds scheduler. Game running on 1440p, Ultra RTX Off, FoV tweaked to 70 from user.cfg, motion blur disabled from there. vkabasalt dlssharpness 0.5.

Will give my full review once i finish the game.
Love how immersive it is! Gunplay is solid also.

Nice to see mesa devs are on it, so more people can enjoy this game.
whizse Apr 20, 2021
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I read the merge request and I can't believe it took until now for me to get the Marge/Merge bot joke!

Mesa guys should be careful though, they might end up getting sued both by Disney and Morrissey!
DebianUser Apr 20, 2021
Hmmm, i think i have to drop Debian... MESA is the only thing problematic (i can have recent packets via flathub integrated to gnome-software, but MESA is another story).
Maybe Ubuntu... any advice on a good Debian-based distribution, maybe rolling release ?
I can debootsrap on my old Windows partition (not booted from 2017).


Last edited by DebianUser on 20 April 2021 at 3:43 pm UTC
Xpander Apr 20, 2021
Quoting: DebianUserMaybe Ubuntu... any advice on a good Debian-based distribution, maybe rolling release ?
I can debootsrap on my old Windows partition (not booted from 2017).

if you already are familiar with debian then yeah the rolling variant would be for you i would think.
DebianUser Apr 20, 2021
Quoting: Xpander
Quoting: DebianUserMaybe Ubuntu... any advice on a good Debian-based distribution, maybe rolling release ?
I can debootsrap on my old Windows partition (not booted from 2017).

if you already are familiar with debian then yeah the rolling variant would be for you i would think.

I'm pretty familiar with Debian, but there is no rolling variant (it is possible to use testing but its seems to be radical, and testing does not receive updates during freezes).

Maybe Arch is the way to go ?
BielFPs Apr 20, 2021
Quoting: DebianUserHmmm, i think i have to drop Debian... MESA is the only thing problematic (i can have recent packets via flathub integrated to gnome-software, but MESA is another story).
Maybe Ubuntu... any advice on a good Debian-based distribution, maybe rolling release ?
I can debootsrap on my old Windows partition (not booted from 2017).

My "stable" setup used to be Mint + Mesa ppa + Libreoffice ppa + Newest kernel (installed by their update tool) and I've never had problems with just mesa packages updated.

So if you're thinking about change from Debian, but doesn't want to leave the deb group, then I would suggest this :)
Eike Apr 20, 2021
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Quoting: DebianUserI'm pretty familiar with Debian, but there is no rolling variant (it is possible to use testing but its seems to be radical, and testing does not receive updates during freezes).

I don't think using Testing for a while would be that radical.
It's quite some time ago I used it myself, some people say though it would be at least as stable as other distributions' releases. :D
You're right about the freeze, though.


Last edited by Eike on 20 April 2021 at 4:26 pm UTC
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