One thing to consider: Switchable graphics support is basically broken with the proprietary nVidia driver. One is therefore either required to restart X11 whenever one wants to switch graphics chip between the dedicated and the integrated one, or one has to use the open source drivers.
That's why I'd very much prefer an AMD graphics chip: Good performance with open source drivers, and working switchable graphics support...

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestYes, all games should have key binding settings. Unfortunately even those who have them usually do it wrong:
- they only support ASCII characters (good bye "éèà«»", all keys conveniently placed under my left hand on my bépo keyboard), instead of unicode.
- they do not update tutorial messages to take into account the user key bindings.
- the key binding settings GUI refuses to assign a key if it’s already assigned to another action, instead of simply swapping the keys or deleting the other assignment.
- they do not automatically reassign the keys to the current keyboard layout.

Unfortunately it seems all developers have to write their key binding code from scratch so we see the same mistakes again and again…

Those things are typically engine-limitations, there is not much game developers can do (except for writing their own input-handling instead of using functionality already present in the engine). For instance, in Unity there is no way I would know of for the game code to determine which key is bound to which input event, what makes it pretty much impossible to display correct key bindings in tutorials.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: NaibThis sort of thing needs to finally be resolved by AMD be it via fixing the die (shame for those with ryzen...), fixing ucode, patches to kernel.

CPUs will always have some architectural bottlenecks, so fixing such issues on-die will not be an option (as fixing this issue will cause others...). µcode will not help, as it's a scheduling issue, and µcode has nothing to do with scheduling.
The right place to "fix" this issue is the task scheduler of the OS, and I would be strongly surprised if we wouldn't see patches from AMD that address such issues soon.

Edit: As far as I know there are (were?) the same issues on windows. People were even suggesting to treat Ryzen as NUMA due to the relatively long access times for cache on the other CCX.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Performance wasn't that good in the beta. Certainly playable, but there were occasional stutters that got worse over time.
Glad to see that it has been updated, as I liked the game. Maybe I'm going to install it today again.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: GuestHow exactly did they build it for Linux without a Linux machine to compile it on? I'm confused by that. Seems like if it was wine wrapped (i dont know if it is) they would still need Linux to make it, or could it be possible to do that on a Mac?

I know its probably a stupid question but I don't know much about the process of porting.

You could easily set up a Linux cross compiler on Windows (okay, not that easily, but it's certainly doable, just look at the CLFS [External Link] book), but in this case not even that is required, as the game is afaik using the Unity Engine.
Unity games consist of an engine binary together with (more or less) platform independent game code (C# or JavaScript - either way it's compiled to bytecode CIL-code [External Link] and then run by a Java-VM Common Language Runtime [External Link] - in this case, Mono [External Link].
So, in principle, all the developer has to do is to click "Build" in the Unity Editor and select Linux as target platform. That would be the ideal case of course, and in reality there will very likely be issues, as often some platform specific things sneak into the code if one does not regularly test on all target platforms...

View this comment - View article - View full comments

From the comments on Steam it seems that some shows are censored too, so customers not only have to deal with Flash and sub-par encoding quality, they also don't get to see the full episodes...

View this comment - View article - View full comments

AMD is not really complicated. Actually it's as easy as this:
If you need either OpenCL 2.0 or OpenGL compatibility contexts (if you don't know what those are, you don't need them), use the proprietary drivers. In any other case stick to the open source drivers.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: CreakThe increased FPS is simply because there is less stuttering due to shader compilation in between two frames. The number shown is an average after a few minutes of gameplay. Mainly you won't see an increase, but you will feel that the games stutter less (from the second time you launch them)

Mesa did cache those shaders also previously, but in RAM, meaning the slightly increased frame-time was only occurring once per game-session per shader. With the new patches those shaders are being cached on disk, and mesa does no longer recompile them every time the game is restarted.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

The same question, about open-sourcing their proprietary GPU firmware, of course also applies to Intel [External Link].

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Yep, Optimus is a huge PITA, but sadly there are very few (none?) high-quality laptops with dedicated AMD graphics available, and Intel Iris Pro is quite expensive.
I'm hoping for the Zen-based APUs to improve the situation...

View this comment - View article - View full comments