Quoting: KimyrielleMac really isn't a viable gaming platform anymore and Apple doesn't seem to be interested in changing that. It doesn't surprise me that they are losing ground. Which in all honesty is good for us, because it makes Metal irrelevant and Vulkan a more viable alternative for developers interested in cross-platform development.

You also have to take into account that Metal is also on iOS which is the largest mobile gaming platform in terms of revenue (not install base but you revenue is what keeps the lights on). Metal is far from irrelevant right now, you could easily argue it's a much bigger API than Vulkan is right now as it has thousands of games using it, this will likely change over time but I would not make generalisations yet :)

As a long term Mac & Linux user I think what you have to accept is one platform doesn't have to do badly for the other to do well. Both platforms are minor players even if Mac is a lot larger than Linux they are both small compared to Windows. If Windows loses 10 % over the next decade to Mac and Linux combined that would be a massive impact to the viability of both markets. I would say Mac and Linux combined eating into Windows is a better result (and more likely) than Linux overtaking Mac.

Linux being a slightly bigger niche and Mac's a slight smaller niche but Windows still being 95% of the install base doesn't change anything. Mac & Linux both getting bigger and Windows shrinking to 85% starts to change the game as the potential install base is that little bit bigger making more games that little bit more viable.

This is just my personal view as a long term Mac and Linux user (not Feral's official position).

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Quoting: grigiAs a Laptop user stuck with 1G of VRAM on a still-relatively-beefy 7770M, I do notice stutters even with compositing when I have a 2'nd external 4K monitor and tens of apps open in virtual screens. it will be smooth, then stall for 1/4s even.
Exciting times to be an open-source AMD user :-)

Usually the rules are make it work correctly then make it work quickly. It's nice to see Mesa has more time for the second option as more and more of the first part has been completed :)

Quoting: buenaventuraHow nice, it's great that they are working on this. When could one expect to see it in the driver in the ubuntu repositories? Does it take a long time?

This will take quite a while to make it into the official Ubuntu repositories, possibly 17.04 however it will be in a PPA (like the padoka one) a lot sooner once the change has been committed and approved.

Last I checked nothing has been committed yet so it's more like they know the issue and they have a fix in progress but it still needs to be completed, checked in, approved and merged into the trunk, built into the drivers (at this stage you can check it out in padoka) then included in a stable release and finally have that stable release included in the official Ubuntu repository that you can see inside software updater.

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This issue is all about memory management of the cards memory, this will usually be seen in games as a dramatic slowdown or stall that will suddenly happen at some point only for the game to (usually) recover again some seconds later.

These are caused by VRAM pressure. Most complex games over the course of playing allocate more memory than the card has VRAM. As a result, the memory manager constantly migrates buffers between VRAM and RAM depending on which buffers are
used at the given time. Eventually VRAM becomes fragmented, so the memory manager decides to evict a lot of less important buffers out of VRAM to make space, when this happens you'll experience a stall in gameplay. The size of the stall depends on the size of the buffers involved.

The improvement being discussed the last time I read the thread was to split the memory on the card into smaller chunks reducing the chance fragmentation will require a flush of buffers to fit larger buffers in memory.

Bottom line this is unlikely to boost your base frame rate but it could make noticeable improvements to games where you get stutters and stalls as these could be being caused by memory fragmentation on the card.

However it won't fix all instances in all games as stalls in rendering can be caused by many different things and this is just one possibility.

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Quoting: mrdeathjrFirst thanks for patch

In my case appears huge performance improvement

^_^

Glad our performance fixes have helped improve your experience :)

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Quoting: GuestMakes me think it's the different display managers that are the culprit but then again the Linux gamer said he had this issue on Ubuntu.....so who knows.

We haven't had any reports of people having this on Ubuntu, all instances we found were due to window managers doing strange things in certain situations. If anyone reading still has this issue with black screens please do let us know mentioning your disto and window manager. Ideally just send us the support report from the pre game launcher as this file will generate information about your setup so we can look at mimicking it at Feral HQ to we can reproduce the issue (and fix it).

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Quoting: GuestI hope it still works with my bépo keyboard :D.

Oh BTW thanks for the news; I got the update but couldn’t find the changelog on Steam.

Well it's there in the support section of the community forums were it always is. :-)

I think this article has a link to it as well.

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Quoting: cxphergmailcomI still get the black screen on launch issue but now it allows me to alt tab in and out and it works.

Previously I had to use a button to bind shortcut to desktop in GNOME and fullscreen it again after that. Alt tab didn't work.

Please do report this to Feral with details of your distro and window manager etc and we can have a look. Sounds like you're (yet another) window manager edge case we'll have to have a look at :)

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Quoting: AkamanahHas someone tested port performance?

We haven't had anyone with supported hardware complain about performance and the first episode is free so just download and have a look for yourself :)

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Sure please do and link to this thread. We'll add it to our weird unsupported distro list. :-)

These issues we can't guarantee to fix but sometimes something happens that helps expose the root cause so we can workaround or log a bug with the library causing the issue. Also the same thing goes for workarounds if you ever find one let us know we can then use that to help others or even narrow down a permanent fix.

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Quoting: pedrojmartmAny benchmarks?

There isn't anything hugely different on this build, we did release a patch that was performance focused a while back and I think GoL even did a few benchmarks about the speed improvements.

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