This is using CryEngine right? At 1:35 you can see a Crysis stile weapon customization. I like it.

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Liam, can you look at the CPU usage of the game during the benchmark? Just leave the the system monitor (or whatever is called in the DE you use) open in the background to see if more than one CPU core is heavily used.

I am thinking this jump in performance is because VP is finally using multithreading in their ports, allowing a much better use of the CPUs cores by the games.

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Well, if they manage to fix their other ports, I take back all the bad things I said about them. But only if they fix then all.

If their ports got the games to run at 70/80 % of the Windows performance without any crashes, I think is a good work.

EDIT: did find one benchmark with a GTX970, here are some GPUs to compare:

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ARMA game series was always on the heavy side in native Windows. A eON port will have atrocious performance in Linux.

I have 3 games ported by VP. 2 of them I bought after the Linux port. The Witcher 2 have the best performance for me. It never crash and it is near the performance in Windows. Spec Ops have FPS problems and crash all the time, after 15 or 20 min. Bioshock 3 is the same.

So I'm not a fan of them, and get nervous every time a newish famous AAA game get to be ported by them. If they only used to port old games, that never have the chance to see a Linux release, it would be very nice, because the today hardware have the power to give us smooth 60 FPS even with a wrapper. But a game that is already heavy running natively in Windows, getting ported to Linux by a wrapper, is only bad news to me and the players trying SteamOS in the future. They will come spectating something at least as good as the performance they got in Windows. But will get the opposite of it and will run back to Windows as fast as they can.

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It was launched today. The system requirements look surprising low.

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I am trying the demo, looks good. But the default gamepad mapping is strange to me. Anybody think the same? And the view is rotating more faster to the left, like the axis is not reaching the full course.

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As a gaming platform, Windows have its annoyances. The updates are painfully slow, and can interrupt you in the middle of a game. The USB accessories (mouse, keyboard, joypad) take a long time to install if you change the port. And the startup (at the point you can open a program, like Windows Explorer or Firefox) with a good anti-virus software take more than one minute if you don't use a SSD. It is even worse if you tune Steam to autostart.

Linux is so much better in these regards, but it will not be enough if people using modest hardware find out that the games they play in Windows are unplayable in Linux with the same hardware.

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Quoting: GuestAndroid Assault Cactus is indeed awesome and once they finally release controller support for Linux it will be a great "console" experience as wel

The controller support is working. I just played it with the Xbox 360 controller. The Unity 5 upgrade got some controllers not working but you can play it with a joypad right now.

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I bought it and here are my thoughts:

- The controller work if you use a XB360 controller. In the Unity article i already said something about the problematic backend responsible for input. My A4Tech mouse get recognized as a joypad (/dev/input/js0) in the position 1. This is a problem as this game don't allow you to change player 1 and 2 controllers.

- The game looks incomplete to me. You can't drift, and you can't defend yourself against enemy's missiles. That's standard features in big kart games, like Mario or Sonic titles. Also, the characters don't appear to have any different characteristics between them apart from looks. Where is the faster ones, the heavies, etc?

I think this maybe is the first game in Steam that I will ask for a refund.

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I think the performance depends too much in the developer fine tuning the game in Linux. For example, Android Assault Cactus (the standard in how a Early Access should be in Steam) is a Unity game and the performance is very good.

But another big problem in Unity is the control backend, witch is very bad and relies too much in the developer doing hacks to get things done. AAC for example, got issues with controls when they upgraded to Unity 5 some time ago. To me, a good engine should handle the very basic thing as controls in a way that the developers shouldn't have to worry about it.

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