You can sign up to get a daily email of our articles, see the Mailing List page.
Latest Comments by lejimster
DXVK, a Vulkan-based compatibility layer for Direct3D 11 for use with Wine
26 March 2018 at 9:19 am UTC Likes: 1

Still quite buggy at this stage, but some games do perform well already.

I like my Blizzard games, and it seems to be more fluid using DXVK than gallium-nine on Diablo III... But there are some visual bugs that need fixing.

I tried Quantum Break also which launches but is pretty slow in game right now 10-20 fps.

I've thought about trying this with Dying Light as I can't get the native Linux version to launch.

One thing to mention is you really need to be using the latest mesa-git and radv-git drivers if you're an AMD user, I was getting some weird glitches on the stable branch.

Vulkan can now run on Mac as MoltenVK is now open source
26 February 2018 at 6:04 pm UTC Likes: 6

When Vulkan was originally announced I was really happy to see it come to Apple and Linux. With Apple Mac having a larger market share (gamer wise) as of right now, it seemed a great thing. Then they had to go their own way with Metal. I just don't understand the thinking, they have made it harder to bring more games to their platform and potentially set Vulkan adoption back at the same time.

So this is a good development, and I hope porters/developers just target Vulkan from now on and ignore Metal as much as possible. I wonder what Feral think of this, since they have been working on bringing titles to Apple with Metal support.

Rise of the Tomb Raider announced for Linux, port from Feral Interactive
13 February 2018 at 1:44 pm UTC

I wonder if they're going to use DX11 > Vulkan or if they're going to use the DX12 > Vulkan method. I'd love it if the Vulkan port ended up being faster than DX12.

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem (previously Umbra) will not have a Linux version during alpha or beta
25 January 2018 at 12:50 pm UTC

Looks a lot like Diablo 3. Hopefully it's a good game and they can bring it to Linux without too much effort.

Intel hires former-AMD Radeon Chief, Raja Koduri, Intel planning high-end discrete graphics solutions
9 November 2017 at 6:01 pm UTC Likes: 2

This was obviously part of the deal with Intel to license IP and create a product together. If anyone thinks this is going to mean we see discrete Intel GPU's any time soon, I doubt it. 4-5 years minimum, depending on the staff they have in place. I think we are overestimating what Raja in a management position can really do, he needs the right set of engineers with him to build a good GPU. Have intel got these engineers right now? I don't know.

AMD RX Vega GPUs released along with a new AMDGPU-PRO Driver
14 August 2017 at 4:30 pm UTC

Still can't see these cards even for pre-order in the UK.
*Scratch that, they've finally started appearing. Just not coming up on google shopping the last time I checked.* I'm thinking of picking up the 56 with a custom cooler if it isn't ridiculously overpriced. I think there is quite a bit more to come with optimisations and features to be enabled.

Wine 2.13 has been released with a few noteworthy changes, including fixes for The Witcher 3
24 July 2017 at 10:04 am UTC

Quoting: Comandante Ñoñardo
Quoting: chancho_zombie
Quoting: Comandante Ñoñardo
Quoting: ShmerlDX9 games actually mostly have very good support already. You probably meant DX11 ones?

Is Alan Wake 100% playable?
Last time I tried, I had problems with the audio in the cutscenes..

I've finished Alan Wake, it works, the audio problem I think is fixable by setting pulse to 44100 khz.
But liam is right, some games need to improve, last one I've played was Batman Arkham Origins while it was playable the performance was halved, on windows I got 120fps and on wine was 60fps, sometimes diping to 1fps. And that's with gallium drivers.

when I wrote "audio problems" I mean the lack of audio in the cutscenes... I think wine cannot demux properly the .bik files.

The thing was worse in Darksiders the last time I tried it; no cutscenes at all.

Hmmm, I don't remember the cutscenes not working audio wise on either game. I think I had to install a package for wine to play the videos that was it.

For me darksiders works flawlessly on gallium-nine, there is some weird lighting glitch on Alan wake that put me off. Might be just an AMD bug tho.

Another look at some absolutely nuts Linux games in the Steam Summer Sale
30 June 2017 at 9:47 pm UTC Likes: 1

Looking at that Valve collection makes me want another Half Life and another Left 4 Dead.

EVERSPACE seems to be having more issues with Unreal Engine again with Linux support
29 June 2017 at 1:20 pm UTC

I agree with others, Epic are really behind with OpenGL and Vulkan, they need to put some serious work into it and get it working properly. Seems like there focus is elsewhere right now, but they're hurting other developers by not getting this fixed up.

The Mesa OpenGL threaded dispatch code seems to now use a whitelist, improving some games performance
26 June 2017 at 4:12 pm UTC

Quoting: PeciskI know OGL guys are very wary about using whitelists, but I think in these kind of performance tweaks it is ok to go for that - as long it doesn't turn messy and is well documented.

Seems to me, a lot of open source guys are purists and don't want any hacks, workarounds, whitelists for specific games as they see it as setting a bad precedent and think the game developers should fix these problems on their side.

While I tend to agree with them in one sense, it is the responsibility of the developers/porters to do it properly. In reality most of them will never do this and so if we let the purists have their own way, gaming on AMD hardware would be stuck back in the stone age.

Personally I'm happy to see all this work being done, it means finally I can play these games Windows and nvidia users have had no trouble with for years.