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Alex Smith of Feral has been granted the right to push code into Mesa, a continuing sign of the commitment of Feral to Mesa and Vulkan.

In this recent exchange Feral dev and active Mesa contributor, Alex Smith, has asked and gotten permission to create an account to directly access the Mesa driver’s git. His stated purpose is to provide fixes for Vulkan drivers, so we can take that as a sign that Feral is pretty serious at not only contributing to the open source Mesa project but also at using the Vulkan API in their current and future ports.

Smith has been regularly contributing to Mesa for a while and we’ve covered some of the patches previously submitted by Feral to improve Mesa and the Vulkan drivers. I personally find it fantastic to see so many developers collaborating in the mailing list archives and have been amazed at the rapid and dramatic progress Mesa has made since I started using it a few years ago.

Feral’s latest port to Linux, F1 2017, was Vulkan-only and was highly playable even on Mesa. I haven’t had the time to justify picking it up yet but I look forward to taking it out for a spin and dusting off my trusty Logitech Driving Force GT wheel.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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8 comments

TheRiddick Nov 14, 2017
Excellent, I feel RADV probably has %20 or so more performance fixes left in it.
Brisse Nov 14, 2017
Good news. Hopefully this means Feral games will run fine on AMD at release in the feature.
STiAT Nov 14, 2017
This is certainly a sign that they plan working Vulkan only for Linux ports in future. I like that, because on my hardware the Vulkan ports were better playable, and even with OGL in Mesa moving forward / improving a lot, Vulkan will very likely be our future in gaming.
fagnerln Nov 14, 2017
I hope that Feral port to Vulkan their already released games.
Mad Max improved the FPS using Vulkan on my machine, but still on Beta.
Eike Nov 14, 2017
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Quoting: STiATThis is certainly a sign that they plan working Vulkan only for Linux ports in future. I like that, because on my hardware the Vulkan ports were better playable, and even with OGL in Mesa moving forward / improving a lot, Vulkan will very likely be our future in gaming.

... and a sign they plan to continue working on Linux games in the first place, I guess!
(Not having F1 2016 ported gave me some fears...)
x_wing Nov 14, 2017
And this is why I always buy Feral games. No matter if it isn't a game I really like or don't have enough time to play, with the guarantee that they enhance our platform is more than enough for me.
Hal_Kado Nov 14, 2017
This is good news, some of the performance gap between linux and windows can be attributed to game specific driver optimization. While this isn't quite the same thing, having the game devs directly submitting patches can only have a positive impact on game performance.
Purple Library Guy Nov 14, 2017
Quoting: fagnerlnI hope that Feral port to Vulkan their already released games.
Mad Max improved the FPS using Vulkan on my machine, but still on Beta.
Nothing wrong with hoping, but I really doubt this will happen for the most part. You're talking about a good deal of time and money for no additional sales. Sure, some people will like them for doing it, but more people will like them for porting more games, and those people will pay them.

But it certainly looks as if we'll be seeing mostly Vulkan ports in future, and the Vulkan performance on Linux continuing to improve. Good news!


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 14 November 2017 at 4:50 pm UTC
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