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Major Steam Client Update Released
By Half-Shot, 15 August 2014 at 1:26 pm UTC
Quoting: aLWhat I miss is in-home streaming... It was working at some point, but is gone now :(
Me too :(
Demand wasn't as much as Windows -> Linux
But I'm not dualbooting just to stream.
Major Steam Client Update Released
By aL, 15 August 2014 at 1:24 pm UTC Likes: 2
What I miss is in-home streaming... It was working at some point, but is gone now :(
Major Steam Client Update Released
By Half-Shot, 15 August 2014 at 1:09 pm UTC
Quoting: Metallinatus
Quoting: Half-Shot
Quoting: MetallinatusThe Steam Client is still missing a working version for my PC.... but the blame for that falls in AMD with their crappy drivers, not Valve -.-
The thingy can't even handle Cinnamon anymore in its last "stable" version....
I'm totally jumping to Nvidea in the next upgrade to never return-, but oh, yeah, we were talking about Steam, right?
You must be running an incredibly old card or on catalyst for that to be the case though...

I wish I was.... last year I was still using a HD 3000 series card and it wasn't veeery powerful but the mesa drivers worked fine with it at least (and there were not even AMD drivers for it anymore)....
Then I bought a HD 7000 series card released last year and, well.... this is how it looks like with mesa.
Catalyst worked (without direct rendering) for one day and then broke Cinnamon.
PS: this is a fresh brand new install of Mint 17 because Catalyst already broke my system last time.

As a result, my underpowered notebook is my saviour once again.

I have a 7000 card on the git drivers which are a tad buggy and from my testing I have NEVER seen that. But to me that looks like a hardware fault and you should get it refunded right away.
Ziggurat, An FPS Dungeon Crawler Now On Linux And It's Good, But With Issues
By loggfreak, 15 August 2014 at 1:08 pm UTC
looks great like the old-school RPG's like heretic and hexen, might pick it up once bugs are fixed
with the game only lasting 40 minutes though, i will probably wait till it's on sale
AMD Working Closely With Khronos Group On Next-gen OpenGL, Gives Mantle Access
By Half-Shot, 15 August 2014 at 1:07 pm UTC
Quoting: Cimeryd
QuoteThat's pretty good of AMD to offer it up like that, but to what end? What would be the point of having an OpenGL API that very closely mimics the Mantle API? You would then have two competing API's that are near the same.
My first thought is that AMD are fighting a losing battle on both the CPU and GPU front, being quite clearly second best at both. "Helping" both OpenGL and DirectX by giving them code and direction tailored to AMD hardware will bridge that gap, and might even push them over the top in some performance tests. AMD is a hardware company first and the software is there to sell the hardware. This makes perfect sense.

I'm sure you guys will jump on me for this, but they appear to be the underpowered but of good morales on the Linux side and while it's hard to deny that the CPUs are not competitive enough, the GPUs on Windows are still competitive.

However it's these little things that make me stick with AMD. I would take an open standards advocator over more power any day.
Major Steam Client Update Released
By Metallinatus, 15 August 2014 at 12:40 pm UTC
Quoting: Half-Shot
Quoting: MetallinatusThe Steam Client is still missing a working version for my PC.... but the blame for that falls in AMD with their crappy drivers, not Valve -.-
The thingy can't even handle Cinnamon anymore in its last "stable" version....
I'm totally jumping to Nvidea in the next upgrade to never return-, but oh, yeah, we were talking about Steam, right?
You must be running an incredibly old card or on catalyst for that to be the case though...


I wish I was.... last year I was still using a HD 3000 series card and it wasn't veeery powerful but the mesa drivers worked fine with it at least (and there were not even AMD drivers for it anymore)....
Then I bought a HD 7000 series card released last year and, well.... this is how it looks like with mesa.
Catalyst worked (without direct rendering) for one day and then broke Cinnamon.
PS: this is a fresh brand new install of Mint 17 because Catalyst already broke my system last time.

As a result, my underpowered notebook is my saviour once again.
Ziggurat, An FPS Dungeon Crawler Now On Linux And It's Good, But With Issues
By killx_den, 15 August 2014 at 12:22 pm UTC
Looks awesome, this game will be an instant buy for me as soon as I get home.

I love old games like Hexen I / II, Heretic, ... :)
AMD Working Closely With Khronos Group On Next-gen OpenGL, Gives Mantle Access
By Cimeryd, 15 August 2014 at 12:15 pm UTC
QuoteThat's pretty good of AMD to offer it up like that, but to what end? What would be the point of having an OpenGL API that very closely mimics the Mantle API? You would then have two competing API's that are near the same.

My first thought is that AMD are fighting a losing battle on both the CPU and GPU front, being quite clearly second best at both. "Helping" both OpenGL and DirectX by giving them code and direction tailored to AMD hardware will bridge that gap, and might even push them over the top in some performance tests. AMD is a hardware company first and the software is there to sell the hardware. This makes perfect sense.
Major Steam Client Update Released
By Half-Shot, 15 August 2014 at 12:12 pm UTC
Quoting: MetallinatusThe Steam Client is still missing a working version for my PC.... but the blame for that falls in AMD with their crappy drivers, not Valve -.-
The thingy can't even handle Cinnamon anymore in its last "stable" version....
I'm totally jumping to Nvidea in the next upgrade to never return-, but oh, yeah, we were talking about Steam, right?

You must be running an incredibly old card or on catalyst for that to be the case though...
A New The Witcher 2 Linux Beta Appears, Improved Performance
By Cimeryd, 15 August 2014 at 12:05 pm UTC
Witcher 2 now at 80% sale.
Major Steam Client Update Released
By GoCorinthians, 15 August 2014 at 11:16 am UTC
STEAM maxsettings FTW!^_^
AMD Working Closely With Khronos Group On Next-gen OpenGL, Gives Mantle Access
By godlike, 15 August 2014 at 11:15 am UTC
Personally, I feel extremely excited with GL-Next. The direction that Khronos follows is to create a spec where the application developers have the power and the control over the GPUs. The driver layer is going to be thin and way less complicated than the current GL.

Some notes on the GL-Next initiative:
- AMD made a major contribution by giving Mantle to Khronos (I believe DICE contributed to Mantle as well).
- There is a consensus on the major goals of GL-Next between Khronos members. This gives a great momentum on the whole effort.
- It's really nice to see game developers contributing with proposals and feedback. Valve, Epic, Unity, DICE, Blizzard etc. Valve is sponsoring some stuff as well!

So next time, carefully consider to whom you give your money to ;)

Some notes on Mantle:
- Obviously, Mantle is close to AMD HW and it will require some changes to accommodate other HW.
- It not going to be easy to code with Mantle. Some "nice" driver abstractions will become an application problem. And GL 4.5 has tons of those abstractions.
- Drivers will have far better quality. Implementing something like Mantle is way easier that implementing the whole GL 4.5 stack.
- The opensource drivers will probably be up to speed a lot quicker than before.
Major Steam Client Update Released
By Metallinatus, 15 August 2014 at 11:01 am UTC
The Steam Client is still missing a working version for my PC.... but the blame for that falls in AMD with their crappy drivers, not Valve -.-
The thingy can't even handle Cinnamon anymore in its last "stable" version....
I'm totally jumping to Nvidea in the next upgrade to never return-, but oh, yeah, we were talking about Steam, right?
The Witcher 2 Gains Yet Another Performance Beta
By Mohandevir, 15 August 2014 at 10:18 am UTC
At least, what is positive, it's the frequency of the game updates. It's the 3 one in about 2 weeks. We can hope for a playable game for all in a near future.
Check Out 20 Minutes Of Footage From The New Unreal Tournament
By lave, 15 August 2014 at 10:02 am UTC
found some more - a twitch streamer that plays alpha every day and also knows how to play, heres a recent VOD with awesome content:
chumbo. but oh well.. i guess quake has ruined it for me, whenever i see UT it looks like driving a car with rectangular wheels to me
Check Out 20 Minutes Of Footage From The New Unreal Tournament
By Beamboom, 15 August 2014 at 9:45 am UTC
ooooh yes, this is the Unreal Tournament I know and love.

Man I look forward to enter the madness again. I sincerely hope this release don't drown in the FPS sea of today.
Check Out 20 Minutes Of Footage From The New Unreal Tournament
By lave, 15 August 2014 at 9:41 am UTC
"one youtuber"

talking about the prolly most known esports guy there is (or was.. :D), beeing the only one in the top 20 of gaming when it comes to earnings that didnt play dota/warcraft/starcraft but instead shooters. featured in articles and reportages in foxnews, mtv, times magazine and maybe the first guy that made a living by gaming alone.

nice trolling, sir! :D

[edit]
if you are looking for alpha footage with guys that actually knows how to play and move in this game, check this out.
View video on youtube.com
i think its far closer to what we can expect this game to look like than watching "can barely move fatal1ty" vs "has never played fps before" random victim
theres additional content in hypnos channel with movement demonstrations and so on
The Witcher 2 Gains Yet Another Performance Beta
By omer666, 15 August 2014 at 9:23 am UTC
Quoting: GuestEdit: I found this benchmark that measured TW2 at 63 FPS on my GPU. The game uses almost exactly 50% of my CPU though so I think it’s limited to 2 threads, and the faster CPU used in the benchmark must have helped.

Indeed it tells that it should run at 63 FPS, but they don't tell about the rest of the config... On my computer since last update I'm running it at an average 45-50 FPS at 1920x1080, measured using voglperf, so in fact it's getting closer to the performance reported in this article...

[Edit] Didn't see this article was 2 years old... so yeah CPU usage must still be insufficient compared to Windows. Hopefully they'll continue to improve it.

[Edit 2] This benchmark (in french) was done on the following config:
ntel Core i7 3960X (HT off, Turbo 1/2/3/4/6 cores: 4 GHz)
Asus P9X79 WS
8 Go DDR3 2133 Corsair
Windows 7 64 bits

Here are the results : http://www.hardware.fr/articles/896-20/benchmark-the-witcher-2-ee.html

We can see that it runs at an avergae 48 FPS... I'm quite lost now...
The Witcher 2 Gains Yet Another Performance Beta
By Liam Dawe, 15 August 2014 at 9:20 am UTC
Oddly in the same area at 1920x1080 that gave me 20FPS now gives me a solid 30+ FPS today.
AMD Working Closely With Khronos Group On Next-gen OpenGL, Gives Mantle Access
By Eike, 15 August 2014 at 9:13 am UTC
If OpenGL Next would closely resemble Mantle, AMD would have a headstart in implementing it.
On the other hand, if it's quite close, it might make Mantle obsolete.
Major Steam Client Update Released
By Eike, 15 August 2014 at 9:09 am UTC
I've been craving for hiding games (outdated betas sitting ugly in the game library anyone?) and setting multiple categories for games. Now we'd only need to be enabled to actually look for games that are in two categories for searching. Didn't find that. And obviously, when you can set several categories, the category setting ui shouldn't close autommatically anymore when having set the first (which did make sense before).
OpenGL 4.5 Announced, Work Started On Next Generation OpenGL
By sherlock, 15 August 2014 at 9:00 am UTC
I used the edit function because I realised that what you wrote can be seen in two different ways. Ergo, saw the error in my conclusion and revised the post to add content instead of starting this... ;) I'd still point out that AMD is working on Mantle in that context but I'd leave out the "fun" just to leave my own opinion out of it. Anyone reading can see the irony.

I also saw the date, which is the other reason which had me change the text, shortly after posting it.

You as an individual are free to express your opinion all you like but as an editor of something that can be seen as a news site, I'd argue that you should try to remain more objective. I had my fair share of bad experiences with both manufacturers.

Anyway, I did not mean to offend you but I see now that my original reply was a tad too harsh with its judgment. I therefore would like to offer my sincere apologies.

Thanks for the work you put into gol.
AMD Working Closely With Khronos Group On Next-gen OpenGL, Gives Mantle Access
By Sslaxx, 15 August 2014 at 8:51 am UTC
Well, if OpenGL 5 comes to resemble Mantle (which resembles OpenGL anyway), technically speaking the assertion "a lot of developers are going to support it" would be true.
The Witcher 2 Gains Yet Another Performance Beta
By Liam Dawe, 15 August 2014 at 8:27 am UTC
Quoting: n30p1r4t3Liam, I understand you're upset with people criticizing your system etc, but we're really just trying to demonstrate our experiences.

Back in the day I was able to Fully max this game out (Uber on) with my 560 TI at 1600x900, so I wouldn't even call Mid 30fps acceptable, even if it is on Linux.

Also, It might be worthwhile to compare performance on different distros etc. Just my 2 cents, but please don't turn off the comments.

No one has criticised my system, and my twitter wasn't about this article, and no comments have been deleted.
OpenGL 4.5 Announced, Work Started On Next Generation OpenGL
By Liam Dawe, 15 August 2014 at 8:24 am UTC Likes: 1
Quoting: sherlockLiam, how about you tell the full story? And please leave the constant punches against AMD out of it, it's unprofessional, especially when you see what they're actually doing for OpenGL next: http://techreport.com/news/26922/amd-hopes-to-put-a-little-mantle-in-opengl-next
That was what you originally said, so:
a) I cannot tell the future, so try looking at article dates before you start making little digs at me
b) I am free to make comments about AMD all I like when I have used them for many years and seen how bad their drivers can be first hand when I've had none of the issues with Nvidia.
c) Just what punches did I pull against them this time?
Mini Metro A Deceptively Simple Looking Strategy Game Now On Linux
By lucifertdark, 15 August 2014 at 5:49 am UTC
I thought the name Mini Metro was copyrighted by the company that makes the car of the same name, someone should tell them before they get themselves in legal trouble over it.
The Witcher 2 Gains Yet Another Performance Beta
By Eike, 15 August 2014 at 5:27 am UTC
With i3570, GTX660, 8 GB and 1680*1050, I got 20(!) to 30 fps on high settings in the first open air scene. Not what I'd actually call playable.

It's good that they're working on it, it's nice to have frequent updates. But they're far from finished. And while we can be happy with games working and being playable at the moment, we will call for the same performance (more is always welcome) as on Windows some day.
The Witcher 2 Gains Yet Another Performance Beta
By Rutine, 15 August 2014 at 4:56 am UTC Likes: 1
Quoting: HamishAt any rate, you all can come and laugh at my graphics card from 2008 if you want. I really wouldn't mind. ;)

Same here :)

And I think that with my GeForce 9600GT, and my Core2 @ 1.6 GHz, I should'nt even bother trying the Witcher 2
The Witcher 2 Gains Yet Another Performance Beta
By EKRboi, 14 August 2014 at 11:55 pm UTC
Quoting: n30p1r4t3
Quoting: EKRboi2x EVGA GTX-580 SC
Just a suggestion, but what's your performance without SLI? I wonder if just having the one card would improve your performance as a 580 (in Windows) should be able to max this game out.

My setup with linux is a bit different. I have 3 1080p monitors (2 monitors on one card, 1 on the other) using nvidia's basemosaic option. Most things I play spanned across all 3 @ 5760x1080 (http://www.gamingonlinux.com/forum/topic/302/page=5). Short of turning off monitors and changing up my xorg.conf I can't exactly disable one. Maybe ill try for sh*ts-n-giggles when I feel like diggin under my desk ;D

EDIT* without vsync it does run closer to 60 fps than not most of the time.. but vsync drops it to 30 since it's stable.
The Witcher 2 Gains Yet Another Performance Beta
By Mohandevir, 14 August 2014 at 11:01 pm UTC
i7-2600
16gb DDR3-1333Mhz
GTX-750 Ti with NVidia Driver version 340.24
Ubuntu 14.04 with Steam Desktop from Thor 27 repository (Adds a SteamOS icon in your login session selector)

I run the game at Ultra settings and it runs flawlessly. No lag, no crash except when I exit the game.

Have you tried lowering the texture cache size? In my case, it gave me a good performance boost before the last 2 upates. Not mentionning solving many game chrashes.

The other thing I found on The Witcher 2 Github is the fact that too many saved games makes it unstable.

Happy W2!
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