Does anyone else find it a weird contrast that AMD are busy putting out all these no doubt highly useful resources about how to do stuff with Vulkan, but can't seem to put out a driver that does stuff with Vulkan?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Always wanted to meet Alf, the sacred river.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I will definitely be buying this before I buy XCOM2. Something about price tag . . .
Harebrained Schemes rock, I've really had fun with the previous two games, they work great on Linux and it's great to see this kind of stand-up support for their games.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Thank you very much, Dr. McCoy, that elucidated exactly what I was wondering about very clearly.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Does anyone have some context for this? I can't quite tell whether this means "Xoreos generally works at least on certain games except for various annoying glitches, and we just cleaned up some of those", or whether it means "Xoreos technically makes certain games run but they are unplayable, and this release cleans up certain issues but leaves that broader unplayable status largely intact".
The progress described, not to mention the tools for easing the continuation of progress, sound very positive, but I can't tell what that means for the general prospects.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: KeyrockThis doesn't surprise me one bit. This is the latest in a string of articles from Ars centered around gaming where it was readily apparent the person writing said article was woefully underqualified/underinformed and they've been dipping into click-bait territory with their article titles.

Overall, one wonders if people won't soon be starting to add a letter to "'Ars' Technica".

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Hmm . . . kind of looks like it's going to be MOO 2 with a modern UI and, presumably although it looks like that part isn't finished yet, some spiffed up graphics. I can work with that. I kind of wish Civilization: Beyond Earth had just done that with Alpha Centauri . . .

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Well, people can say sure, there's quantity but what about the quality.
But when you get to this kind of numbers, quantity has a quality all its own. If you've got 10 games and only 10% of your games are any good, you've got one good game. If you've got 1800 games and only 10% of your games are any good, you've got more good games than I can play in years.
Basically, it seems like in the course of a couple of years, Linux gaming has gone from ridiculously marginal to vague parity with Mac. That's hard to believe when I think about it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: neowiz73sounds great, I hope they learned a lot since moo3. moo1 and 2 were great games though.

They were. People sell moo1 short. Moo2 was great, but I sometimes think that in the rush to kind of jump on the bandwagon of "Civilization" style, some good ideas from the first game got lost. Like, in moo1, your planets could work on different things at the same time and it was about balancing them right; same goes for your tech research. In moo2 they'd picked up the Civilization paradigm and your planets were suddenly like a city from Civ, with a list of "buildings" you could make which you worked on one at a time, and the same for technologies--research this technology, then that technology. This had its advantages but I couldn't help feeling something had been lost. Also in moo1 automating ship movement felt more intuitive somehow. Things like that.
Still, moo2 was great. Every so often I'll find me a 4X space game to play, often touted as cool and all, and find myself thinking "Hmmm . . . Moo2 is still better."

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Samsai

Quoting: runeIf the game is rather demanding in the first place, then you will definitely notice a difference (if it's a DirectX game). Rewriting an engine, and optimizing the code takes time, and time is money. I guess that they (Feral, Aspyr, etc.) can not afford to spend that much time optimizing the code.

Unless you have optimized code, you can not compare DirectX to OpenGL. I don't believe that the games we're getting now are 100% optimized, not even close.

In a purely theoretical world (read perfect) OpenGL and DirectX might perform the same but, as we have seen, that is not typically the case in our practical world. Code is never 100% optimized. Currently ports seem to choke especially when it comes to multithreading due to technical differences between OpenGL and DirectX.

Simply put, you cannot write DirectX in OpenGL and expect it to perform well

I suppose one issue is that we never see it working the other way. Lots of things written in DirectX get half-assed ports to OpenGL. But if something was written in OpenGL in the first place there is no point porting it to DirectX because OpenGL is already cross-platform. So we don't see what the performance of half-assed ports from OpenGL to DirectX would look like, performance-wise.

View this comment - View article - View full comments