I did beta-test the game and the fact that there are no technical points mentioned is hopefully a sign that I did my job well. In my opinion it is fundamentally a good game that lack some polish to give it a great atmosphere when playing and needs some attention on making choices you make in the game more strategic. In the current state it is worth a few hours of your time, but won't keep you enthousiastic for weeks. I hope they still manage to improve it further.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

We also have to keep in mind that benchmarks are often run with fast CPUs. Vulkans brings more than just fps: It significantly decreases the load on the CPU, and therefore the system requirements on the CPU side. Feral games have high CPU requirements, in case of Mad Max lists 3.4 GHz as a minimum, which is really high. As the CPU load is now significantly lower with Vulkan, the game should run with a lower CPU.

And because the CPU in the average PC is a lot weaker than the CPU in the average benchmark, I expect the user benefit to be much more significant than the few fps difference that the benchmarks are showing us.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I am quite hopefull for that. The big hurdle for Cities Skylines was that it used Unity 4 combined with all the mods that would seriously break on such a major change. But they did it, CS is now on Unity 5 and since then they have upgrade a few times already. If they do Unity 5.5, why not 5.6 if it brings such a major benefit for one of their platforms?

However, nothing will help against workshop content with way too much triangles in it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

This is the big one we have been waiting for, as the vast majority of Linux games uses Unity as engine. Suddenly most new games can and will support Vulkan now and many existing ones can be economically updated. Vulkan is no longer the future, but the present!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Impressive results!

Is a goal to make IndirectX simulate DirectX on Vulkan instead of OpenGL? I.e. can the work be recycled for other projects? Or is Vulkan support a game-specific project?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Both downloading Windows drivers as well as adding PPA's is a bad thing for the user experience, both require that the user is computer literate. As far as I am concerned, and the fact that it is needed on Windows, should not mean that we can relax as Linux community. Drivers are unfortunately still one of the most prominent reasons why Linux is being held back for wider adoption, the more we can do to improve it the better. Distributions have done great things in this regards, but the balance between stability and new hardware support is a though one for distributions and there is a lot of work left.

Both the out-of-the-box experience, as the ease how slightly outdated systems can be updated, are areas of concern. PPA is not unacceptable, but a situation is preferred where it is not needed at all and distributions feed the right driver to users without them thinking about it. If security concerns are a reason to feed updates to users, why not hotfixes for the latest games/hardware?

Actually it concerns me a lot, especially because of RADV. We badly need Vulkan, but if RADV becomes necessary for a good gaming experience, there will be a long period where we need bleeding edge Mesa version on our systems, and unfortunately you then get the "compile your own kernel and Mesa" user experience of Linux. Not good to attract gamers.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: libgradevWell, this just isn't correct. I've got 4 screens, running just fine, here on the stock kernel.

That's interresting, is that on Polaris hardware? I would be interested to know how you did that, since running stock kernels would remove a lot of complexity.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

What do you expect, that version of Mesa wasn't fully ready for OpenGL 4.5 on AMD (radeonsi). All you complaints seem to ignore, that Mesa is actively developed. I'm not sure what problem you have with that. Looks like you are in a rush, and expect Mesa to move faster than it does.

Absolutely not. It might perhaps surprise you, but I am a big supporter of Mesa and open source support for AMD is an important reason for buying it. What I am stating though, is that life is not all that smooth at Mesa (not specifically AMD, I also have experiences on Intel) and there are darn good reasons to run the proprietary driver, for the simple case that you experience much more inconveniences with Mesa, than with the PRO driver. It is a simple reality that is difficult to deny.

All this upgrading work to bleeding edge versions with Mesa, that in itself considering the development model and current state of Mesa is completely understandable, is mostly needed because of one single vendor.

... which is still to be praised for contributing to Mesa, as this news post mentions again, let that be clear. But they are not there yet and can still do a lot better.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

To make Bioshock Infinite launch on Mesa 13.0.3 I need these Steam launch options:

MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=410 MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.5 %command%

Perhaps on different hardware this isn't needed, Mesa returns different version numbers on different hardware. Anyway, many users with various hardware need environment variables, it is part of life with Mesa. It is not that bad, but you do need to read forums etc. to get games working and contributes to the overall user experience.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: liamdaweRight, but showing my point from earlier again. If it doesn't run on the PRO driver, but will on Mesa...what does that say about the PRO driver?! Crap - that's what. Mesa get stuff fixed and implemented at a much quicker rate than the PRO driver.

You know better that it is not that simple. Generally, comparing drivers to games, games usually violate OpenGL standards more than drivers. Usually it doesn't have consequences, but sometimes it has. And it can mean driver incompatibilities. Now with AMD's OpenGL implementation being known to be much more strict on demanding OpenGL compliance than Nvidia...

Second, different OpenGL drivers simply behave different. No driver is holy. This article from Valve's Rich Geldreich is a good read on that:

http://richg42.blogspot.nl/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-quality.html [External Link]

Unfortunately it is not as simple as "develop on card x" and assume it will run on others. Unfortunately actual work is needed by the developer. And while I have no proof at all, my feeling I think this is the area where things are lacking, and not so much driver quality in general.

Edit: LiS has been supported on Mesa since 11.2, so what the heck are you going on about :D

... except if the particular Mesa driver for your hardware contains bugs that cause X to crash while running the game. Mesa 13.0.1 kindly provided by OpenSuSE as optional upgrade option wasn't enough. 13.0.3 is needed to get it stable. Been there done that, and succesfully completed this game in the end.

View this comment - View article - View full comments