dmantione, you said that RadeonPRO was need for 3 monitors. Your card do not have 3 outputs or you are trying to use DisplayPort daisy-chaining?

The AMDGPU driver without DAL simply does not support more than 2 monitors in any configuration, it does not matter how you connect them. If you install the PRO driver, you automatically get DAL, so this is by far the easiest way to solve that. Several people might need DAL for other reasons, such as HDMI audio or Freesync.

Instead of the PRO driver, you can also decide to patch your kernel yourself. I have done this, therefore I am able to use all my monitors with both the Mesa and PRO drivers. Although I switch between both, most of the time I boot with the PRO driver, for the majority of games it still gives the smoothest user experience.

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one could then say "They are (sadly for us) nearly the only one porting modern AAA games to Linux".

It is completely acceptable if a game requires a top notch bleeding edge feature and therefore temporarily doesn't run on a driver. What makes the discussion difficult is that we have little concrete information to confirm this (sorry to say again, Feral never elaborate) and then we have to base ourselves on statistics, with other games, and those statistics unfortunately do not confirm that demanding games.

Unreal 3 engine... I would not call this bleeding edge, right?
- Rocket League runs like a dream.
- Life is Strange doesn't run on the PRO driver at all, and on Mesa only once you have upgraded sufficiently far.

Coincidence? Very possible, it cannot be ruled out, but at some point you have to start to doubt the coincidence.

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Quoting: babai^^ Dude, don't buy their games if you don't like the missing support.

I am completely fine if that is your position. However, if Nvidia users that have no actual experience with this call me an idiot, I think I should be allowed to defend myself.

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Quoting: liamdaweThen don't buy their games if it's that much of a hassle for you?

It is a dilemma. As a Linux gamer you want to support the Linux gaming industry, but you don't want to support developers that do a poor porting job. I own 2 Feral titles and 7 Virtual Programming titles, so I can confirm it does influence my buying decisions.

You're complaining about things out of their control. They often support Mesa and only ever Stable versions, they have never once said you need to compile anything.

I fully agree with you one should not complain about things beyond the control of a developer. However... there are two things relevant here.

The first is that if the topic is brought up with Feral, for example in a game forum, the answer is always either "we don't support" or "we point the finger to AMD". In the latter case, I have seen several cases were this was completely unjustified and the error was on Feral side. I haven't yet seen a example where an error was indeed on the AMD side. Now, if Feral say AMD's driver has "problem x in OpenGL extension y" I shut up immedeately and complain to AMD. In that case I even play a role into getting it fixed, because I have contacts deep into AMD. But I never saw any example.

The second thing is that if AMD drivers are terrible shit, there should be lots of games that don't run on them and many developers that complain all around. Except for Feral games I only know only one single example: Civilization Beyond Earth. All other games that I know of run flawless on the PRO driver, and most run on the Mesa driver. I can accept that one game doesn't run, two, even three. But the majority of a catalogue of a developer? Simple statistics of Feral and the rest of the available games, tell that it is highly likely that at least part of the cause must be on the Feral side.

It should tell all you need to know if they can support Mesa but not the PRO driver. Shouldn't it? Mesa is open source, you have no clue what the PRO driver is doing and no one but AMD can fix it.

Here you assume again that all of the error on the AMD side. Now let's assume this is indeed the case, then I agree with you that working with Mesa and making the game work with that is the only thing that a developer has under his own influence. So, yes, on this point they are doing the right thing, although it is still the case that their games depend on very experimental Mesa versions.

Because there is a much more mature driver available, I still think they should be able to properly point out what is wrong with that driver and not resort to simple finger pointing.

Allthough I am an Opteron customer for AMD, the GPU people at AMD do respond to my e-mails and I am far less important for them than Feral. For an important Linux vendor like Feral, getting the right contacts at AMD to discuss driver issues should be no problem. And again, other porters have been able to get their problems fixed.

More and more of their games directly support Mesa as Mesa has continued to mature. This will likely be a thing of the past in a year or so as Mesa will be in fantastic shape by then.

I sincerely hope so and I do expect things will be better, but there also is risk of a scenario that games and other games will continue to demand the maximum from drivers (because with Mesa, multiple games still don't run out of the box) and that we will be compiling and patching source code for many years to come.

It is also a realistic scenario, that if Linux gaming really takes off, that the PRO driver will continue to be necessary for quick stability and performance fixes for games that we see on the Windows platform very often.

Anyway, not after a long argument on this. People always find something to whine about and it ends up in circles.

Well, without feedback on what is wrong, a developer has no information on what needs to improve. Criticism is not always fun, but it is not possible to make the world better, but without either. Long arguments should not go in circles though, they should be constructive. I am making all the efforts to point things out in a constructive way.

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I disagree. Downloading and compiling your own Mesa, patching your AMDGPU driver, I have done it all to play some of their games, is not a good user experience and not the user experience a game developer should aim for their customers. This is the user experience that Feral gives their AMD user at the moment, and yes, at this point it becomes their problem, because it is not a motivator to buy their games.

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No. I have both drivers installed with my RX460, where I can switch on reboot. Ignoring Feral games, the PRO driver has less user visible issues than the Mesa driver. I would very much like it to be otherwise, but in my experience three categories of issues reduce the experience with the Mesa driver:

- Bugs. For example, you got page faults while running Cities Skylines. This issue has meanwhile been fixed in Mesa, but bugs still plague Mesa users.
- User interventions. You need to set the right environment variables to run games. I.e. Bioshock Infinite.
- Unsupported OpenGL functionality.

Then there also the DAL story. While it has nothing to do with Mesa, but one way to get DAL working is to install the PRO driver. As without DAL you cannot connect 3 monitors, DAL is important for me.

Therefore, to get the best user experience, one still needs to install the PRO driver, I fear.

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Quoting: EikeDid we already here apologies from everybody that said that Feral doesn't do anything for supporting AMD?

On the contrary, that was with good reason. The AMD support for some of their games was simply unacceptable, and I would say still not up to the level desired. The PRO driver is still not supported by any of their games and upgrading tot the latest unreleased Git version of Mesa is not always the most practical solution for people to play a game.

Their work on Mesa however, is visible and very much appreciated.

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I think this monster indeed surpasses the requirements of even demanding games at the moment. Of course with 144 Hz monitors at 4K resolutions and ultra high game settings you can make any card sweat, but for anything realistic, this card is complete overkill for the current generation of games.

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I know that some people are opposed to VP's "ports", but personally I don't care what makes a game run as long as it FEELS like a native port

Exactly. I actually like VP's DirectX compatibility layer, it is compatible with any driver and has a lot less performance issues than other porting layers.

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I believe Desura was one of the first to add Linux as an equal platform next to Windows and MacOS, and was able to get a significant amount of enjoyable indie games on Linux. Steam cam later and was nothing less than a revolution, but there was something between Loki/LGP and Steam.

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