I have quickly tried it and the performance is now amazing. Before the patch, it was unplayable, stuttering every few seconds. After patch, I have a stable framerate and almost no stuttering. Well done!
Radeon 270 with open source drivers, Fedora 21

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Quoting: tmtvlAs someone with an AMD card believe me, the OS driver isn't nearly as good as some people claim it is.
X-COM:EU/EW locks the GPU. Anything even remotely taxing will run like a car with cubic wheels.

EDIT: For who is curious: AMD Radeon HD 7770 Cape Verde.

I'm very much satisfied with my Radeon R9 270 and opensource drivers. It's absolutely stable for standard office work (except for occasional system resume failure), and most games which don't require OpenGL 4+ run just fine. Not all of them, but most of them. The performance is sufficient, I'd say 50-80% of the Windows driver. I've bought it because I wanted to have a hassle-free experience under Linux (e.g. I can boot a bleeding edge kernel or a Live image and I don't have to deal with binary blobs, everything just works, unlike Nvidia) and play some games too (with some limitations, they indeed run OK, and much faster than with Intel).

I'm also very happy with all the steps that AMD took in the last year or so - hiring more open source developers, announcing that they'll put all their efforts into a new opensource driver on Linux in the future and get rid of the proprietary one, steadily improving the existing driver. And the driver improved a lot, it's very noticeable. I'm running Fedora as a distro with fairly new and fresh software, and every release the graphics stack becomes better and better.

It's good news that Nouveau has been improving as well, and I'm very glad for it. But truth be told, I consider experiences from the article to be a small miracle. I've had my hands on quite a few Nvidia cards in the past years and the results were extremely mixed, sometimes you're lucky if just basic 2D works, and sometimes even that doesn't. It was totally unreliable. Since that time, I completely avoid Nvidia in any of my machines. Binary blobs are too much trouble for everyone (general users and power users alike, especially if they tend to work with bleeding edge software), and Nvidia's attitude prevents Nouveau from working reasonably well even for for basic use cases. I very much hope they change their mindset in the near future. Until then, I follow the Linus example :-)

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Just to warn people, it's a no-go on opensource AMD drivers (Radeon R9 270). It stutters every several seconds for at least a second. Yes, you read it correctly. Quite interestingly, their first beta version was much better, it stuttered only in the beginning, then it ran quite fine. But the current version is totally unplayable. Don't buy this if you intend to play using the radeon driver (I have no idea how it works with catalyst).

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Great interview, thanks.

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If you want to see what Deadnaut is about, I recommend watching this:
https://youtube.com/?#/watch?v=7V_kccpWywY

I very much like the concept. It brings back all those Aliens-like memories.

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Thriller story (movie): The Shining
Scariest moments in a game: Penumbra and Amnesia, just about at any moment :-)

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Runs on opensource amd drivers, which is great. Unfortunately the framerate drops every few seconds during fight, which makes it a choppy experience. Also I wonder whether vsync option works, because I seem to be stuck on 60 fps max.

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If you preview your comment, you can't submit it afterwards, invalid redirect.

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All the comments contain "0 likes" text on the bottom (mobile view). It looks like a part of the comment. I find it quite distracting. It would be nice to make it not blend into the comment text (make it obvious that's a UI, not text), and suppress it when the value is zero. And what about putting it into comment header, so that it does not make each comment two lines longer?

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Quoting: CheesenessI found time to chat with one of my developer friends earlier today who tells me that they see stats for purchases and playtime separately (each broken down by platform), and says that they see nothing which appears to be that "first 7 days of playtime" figure that determines which platform publisher gets paid for the sale.

That's interesting. I wonder why Defender's Quest developer was seeing something else. Or maybe he was simply mistaken how to interpret those numbers? It would be great to have more evidence.

Quoting: CheesenessPurchases are broken down into daily sales per platform. Given GranPC's comments in Reddit thread I linked to, the purchases aren't likely to be linked to play time since he can see purchases from platforms that the game he works on doesn't yet support. If the figures for this data were subject to the first week of playtime, that would result in historical records fluctuating (Valve might be sloppy with some things, but they're not that sloppy :D ).

I wouldn't consider it sloppiness, but a feature. It needs to work that way at least for the porting studios - the numbers for the last week always change a bit. Or, they are not advertised for the last week at all. It could work the same even for "standard sales view". But that's just an idea. If it didn't change at all, it would be even more important to buy from Linux, to keep the sale stats correct. However, what about Android etc sales? Tell me about sloppiness, if all those sales were counted as Windows...

Quoting: CheesenessPlaytime is apparently displayed as daily totals of peak simultaneous players per platform. It's unclear whether an individual user playing on multiple platforms will be counted multiple times (I'm going to imagine that that's the case though - it'd be a nightmare to calculate otherwise and would arguably be less meaningful).

That's great, developers have access to real numbers even from playtime. Which means it's even more important to not just buy from Linux, but actually play from Linux. The results are very visible.

Maybe you would consider writing a follow up article?

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