Quoting: alexWhy? Well because it's impossible. That's why. Just like all this pseudo-programming bullshit

Obviously it is impossible as proven beyond any doubt by your most enlightening anecdote. If they don't detect every programming mistake or lost optimization opportunity imaginable, surely it is impossible to hack around anything at all. The rest of us are simply talking out of our asses. Glad that's settled then.

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Quoting: alex>> My understanding is that Nvidia hacks around a lot of common mistakes and bad practices in OpenGL code. <<

This quote is just waaaaay wrong. The driver cannot change the way your app uses OpenGL. If you do things in a bad style then it will perform badly. This the driver cannot change. You should use OpenGL in the "approaching zero driver overhead" way.

Nvidia's driver can and does detect and catch OpenGL call patterns and outright errors that can severely affect performance. Sometimes this is game or application specific and sometimes based on heuristics. There's tons of "magic" like this in their drivers (and to lesser extent in AMD's as well), accumulated over the years. This is pretty much common knowledge. I won't do the research for you though if this is the first time you've heard of it.

I am a bit curious. Why would you think it can't be done? OpenGL is a rather messy group of specs, at least up until the latest versions. AMD's and Nvidia's blobs implement these specs as they see fit, without official validation or compliance testing available, let alone enforced by Khronos or anyone else. The oss drivers all (?) share mesa's implementation, but the proprietary drivers roll their own.

I'm not calling Nvidia evil or anything, drivers that magically make bad code work fine is just good business for them even if I think it's bad for the spec, bad for developers and - in the end - bad for end users. This is similar to (but not the same as) how MS crippled the web until a few years back with IE's liberal and wilful perversion of the web standards.

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Quoting: melkemindOther than that, shouldn't common OpenGL functions work the same on both cards? These are open standards that both drivers should meet...right?

My understanding is that Nvidia hacks around a lot of common mistakes and bad practices in OpenGL code. Basically it'd be better for compatibility if games were primarily (but not exclusively) tested and optimized on an AMD gpu, as this would - at least in theory - result in cleaner code that would most likely run just fine on Nvidia's drivers as well. Although coding strictly to spec without great documentation and tooling (test suites etc.) is really hard and time-consuming.

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Seems like all these popular franchise games they've made in the last few years have been nothing more than choose-your-own-adventure style interactive stories with loads of quicktime events. I would be interested in playing pretty much anything they released up until Back to the Future: The Game and Puzzle Agent 2 from 2011, but the rest of them not so much. Don't really know much about this latest one but I've never player minecraft so it's probably not for me either. Reviews certainly aren't very encouraging.

EDIT: It's a bit funny that their first Linux game will be for a franchise owned by MS.

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Quoting: EikeThis really needs to be fixed to "Send private massage"...! ;)

Obviously!

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Excellent! The calendar is much better now. Thanks, Liam.

PS: Now that you're in site improvement mode, how would you feel about fixing the "Send Private Mesage" typo in user profiles as well? Or have you grown attached to it in the months it's been there? :P

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Quoting: alexWell I think this is ridiculous. I can't be the only one?

I think you are entirely missing the point of this exercise. Feel free to ignore if you're not interested.

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Quoting: linuxgamerDon't know why they all demand 14.04 LTS or 15.04, my intuition tells me they should run in 12.04 LTS eg. if the OpenGl driver is new enough.

They don't officially support earlier releases for the same reason they don't list all the other distributions the game works with. Would take a ton of testing and make them responsible for maintaining that compatibility. The latest LTS is usually fine as a target for Ubuntu. I'd assume gamers are not exactly the most likely bunch to use older or outdated OS releases anyway.

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Quoting: fraghopperAnybody know?

I guess Liam's wording was a bit ambiguous. People have been unhappy about the game's length, as it's quite short. The developer has said they had to cut down on content due to budget issues.

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Quoting: maodzedunI guarantee you there are enough people who will be entertained with how hilariously bad this game is :))).

True, but what's new is that jokes like this used to be freeware. I can't believe people are actually willing to pay for this stuff. Although I admit this isn't much of a problem.

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