Quoting: BeamboomWhat sound architecture do you use for these kind of mainstream applications then? And do most game also support other architectures?

Everytime I try Pulseaudio it simply doesn't work, always some audio problems, on whatever computer I try it. Uninstalling it always solves the problem. It also serves no usefull purpose, ALSA itself does the job just fine.

I also use a Soundblaster Audigy in my main desktop, which supports hardware mixing, which allthough rare anno 2016 in computers, I still consider a very convenient feature that ensures audio alway just works optimally. Pulseaudio abstracts all features of your soundcard away, which you don't want with an advanced sound card. Again, ALSA alone does the job, and all that what you need/want.

Unless game developers get confused of course and support the wrong stuff, but that's really rare. In fact, there are still more applications that support ALSA natively than that support Pulseaudio natively.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I think the Nvidia driver thing is related to two things: Nvidia is known for working very well together with game developers, and that is abolsutely a strength of them and this has led to many usefull improvements in their drivers. That Nvidia puts a lot of effort in their Linux drivers is a simple fact.

The second point, however, is that Nvidia drivers are known to be very forgiving for OpenGL standard violations. This results into the situation that games appear to run fine on Nvidia drivers, while problems occur when you start to run on AMD or Intel hardware. For the end user, the Nvidia driver appears to work correctly and the blame is falsely on other manufacturers, while it is actually the too forgiving Nvidia driver that is the reason a game does not run on other hardware.

I think this topic has however a bit focused too much on the AMD situation. It is a clear problem with Feral ports, but even for Nvidia and Intel gamers, life isn't as good as it should be due to performance issues. While there are reports of games that run well, I just keep reading reports of games that run better on Wine than the Linux port... not something we should be happy with. IndirectX apparently has a lot of overhead involved, much more than other known translation layers. This is just as much a quality issue as the AMD incompatibilities.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

One reason I can think of why Mac users buy games like this is that they have poor generally poor gaming hardware, unable to run run games of any serious graphical weight. Those are usually the more expensive games. The result is, that Mac gamers need to spend their money over a much smaller amount of games, and they end up with Indy games like this, which run on about anything.

Another reason I can think of is that on Mac there are a higher number of users who are not technical at all, and own their Mac mainly for their profession. In their spare time, they would not go for games with deep learning curves, but for more for the casual stuff.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: edddeduckferalHere is a list of our games and their status on AMD graphics cards.

Hi Edwin,

Thanks a lot for your lengthy post! I hope the discussion didn't become too hot for you, things quickly heat up. Please see criticism as a good thing, as an ingredient to make things better. And it wouldn't be worth having this discussion if the games wouldn't be any good, so you are doing a good job in this regard.

It is a also a very good thing that you make your games work with the open source drivers. Because open source drivers are installed by Linux distributions by default, this improves the out-of-the-box Linux experience. On the other hand, as I explained in this thread, there are major points with the open source drivers, making 'just use the open source driver' not a practical solution in many situations.

Now to your list:

Officially Supported
===============
XCOM 1 - Supported on launch with Catalyst. Known driver issue on some AMD cards (r600?) using Mesa.
Empire Total War - Supported on launch with Catalyst. (Works using Mesa 11.2)
Medieval Total War - Officially supported with Mesa
Tomb Raider - Officially supported with Mesa 11.2
Life Is Strange - Officially supported with Mesa 11.2

Runs (unsupported) on latest stable Mesa
===============================
GRID Autosport - Works using 11.2 but not officially supported as Mesa was missing features/had issues on launch.
XCOM 2 - Works using 11.2 but not officially supported as Mesa was missing features/had issues on launch.
Company Of Heroes 2 - Works using 11.2 but not officially supported as Mesa was missing features/had issues on launch.

For these games we plan on announcing official support using Mesa once we can confirm all the issues have been resolved and we are happy with the quality of the games on AMD hardware.

Runs (unsupported) on latest git Mesa
============================
Shadow Of Mordor - Works using 12.1git but not officially supported as Mesa isn't stable yet.
Alien Isolation - Works using 12.1git but not officially supported as Mesa isn't stable yet.
F1 2015 - Works using 12.1git but not officially supported as Mesa isn't stable yet.

The situation is not as optimistic as you describe here, exactly because the difference between VLIW/Terascale and GCN cards. I.e. r600g versus radeonsi. As pointed out, there is a big difference in driver quality between R600g and Radeonsi. I'm quite confident that of the above list, few games work fine with r600g. Of course the quick & dirty solution is to remove VLIW cards from the official list of supported cards in the system requirements, as you do. The end result is that there is big mountain of cards that do have the graphics performance to run these games and are not supported.

So what if you have a new GCN card? Well, RadeonSI is great, being worked on and gets even better. If you have the luxury to have installed a bleeding edge Linux distribution, life is good if you work with the Mesa drivers. The fun ends if you want to use Vulkan or OpenCL, because then you install GPU PRO and you are suddenly in the same situation as owners of VLIW cards: Feral games stop working. A more practical issue is if you don't run a bleeding edge Linux distirbution and do not have the latest Mesa. Solvable, but annoying nevertheless.

Let's return to the question "does Feral support AMD"? I think the answer can only be "partially". Because a big pile of otherwise suitable cards are unsupported, you need to refrain from using Vulkan and/or OpenCL, and you need a bleeding edge Meda installation.

I must state I'm still puzzled by the "why" of this all. The list of games that doesn't work with Catalyst or GPU-PRO is really impressive. I'm sure there are bugs in those drivers and I have read other developers complain about AMD bugs. Still, no other developer managed to release such an impressive list of games that has issues with Catalyst and/or GPU-PRO.

We provide builds and log issues with drivers for all our close source vendor partners, we also log public viewable bugs against the open source Mesa drivers this includes making sure they have steam keys etc. Every game we port to Mac/Linux we'll log a handful of graphics driver bugs across all the vendors.

For example here is an issue we found with CoH2 and Mesa that we logged and provided Steam keys to help get implemented. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94835 [External Link]

Here is a patch one of our developers submitted to Mesa to fix a bug we uncovered during development of our first ever Linux game (XCOM 1) - https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79115 [External Link]

Those are a couple of examples that are on the public Mesa drivers however similar bugs are logged and fixed across all the different closed source drivers in a similar manner. Supporting different cards and drivers is not always easy but we always aim to support as many drivers and cards as feasible as it makes sense as the more hardware we support the more users can play our games.

Again, a really good job that do you this!

We understand if someone happens to have hardware that missed the supported list for some reason they'll be upset but I hope the above illustrates we do put a lot of effort into supporting as much as we can and that this is a constant ongoing progress.

Hmmmm.... It is more than just personal issues with games. I can accept that I need to buy new hardware or re-install my computer, no problem with that, it happens to anyone once in a while that his hardware or software is outdated. But what motivates me just as much to speak out on this is the simple observation that this bad situation is really hurting Linux gaming in general.

If gamers, if they bought a game, need to upgrade to bleeding edge software, switch between two different drivers on a per-game bases, or cannot use hardware at all that is perfectly reasonable to use, this really hurts Linux gaming and will help keeping our market share in the Steam Hardware Survey under 1% for a while. Like it or not, AMD is an important player in the market.

And then there is the topic of Steam Machines. What if Dell release an AMD based Steam Machine during the next months as they announced. Non-experience Linux users buing Feral games that won't work out-of-the-box. I sincerely hope this matter can be resolved before that happens. Even if only partially it would already help a lot.

Right now we're focusing on Mesa as the primary driver on AMD but we are also following the AMDGPUPRO drivers as they mature. One of the reasons for this is based on our usage information more people use Mesa on AMD than proprietary drivers. Here is the latest Gaming on Linux survey, you can view the details in the link at the top of this page.

That's good, but get sometimes the feeling that excuses are being searched for a reason why it is not supported. Catalyst not supported because it is "abandoned" and GPU-PRO not supported because it is beta. The last Catalyst driver was released in november as is the stable version of the driver. AMD has indeed announced that they do not intend to release more Catalyst drivers, but that doesn't mean Catalyst is suddently unusable. GPU-PRO is simply the next version of the driver. The kernel part was replaced by an open source driver, and good so, because the kernel part of Catalyst was major pain, OpenGL wise, not much has changed between Catalyst and GPU-PRO. Therefore I don't see what exactly makes GPU-PRO so special in this regard and why it is necessary until it matures.

At least... unless I buy the story that Catalyst totally unuasble, a big bug nest and AMD is going to fix them all before GPU-PRO is stable. But I highly doubt the situation is this black and white.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: EikeHere's one of their statements about AMD drivers and their games:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/feral-about-amd-driver-support.6326

I am aware of that. Let there be no doubt that everyone should fix their own bugs. If the bug is on AMD's side, then AMD has to fix it. However, I read more and more reports about problems on Feral side. I gave you one link, there are a few more. If you look at Feral, they never get specific what is wrong on AMD's side. They just point the finger.

When Bioshock Infinite was released, it didn't work on VLIW architecture cards. Bugs happen, nobody is perfect. Virtual Programming wrote:

We listed below Radeon HD 7xxx series as unsupported, because there is currently a bug in Catalyst with ARB_texture_compression_rgtc support on Terascale hardware. This causes textures in this format to fail to render, which is what you are seeing.

(from http://steamcommunity.com/app/8870/discussions/0/618456760257729941/ [External Link])

See the difference?

AMD fixed the bug in Catalyst 15.7, very likely because different developer attitude.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

There is nothing beta about the OpenGL implementation in AMDGPU-PRO, so if they intend to support that, there is nothing that stops them doing that right now. Unless they depend on very recent bug-fixes, that will automatically bring Catalyst support on the table as well.

So if I answer your question what I want: Support (or fixes?) for AMDGPU-PRO.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

They've been great about supporting AMD through Mesa and have even been active in helping Mesa devs deal with bugs and incompatabilities. All their latest ports have worked just great for me. What else else do you want? AMD has abandoned Catalyst/Crimson in favor of Mesa/AMDGPU and their own added AMDGPUPRO drivers.

AMD have stopped updating their Catalyst driver (just a few months ago), because they have a new driver, indeed AMD GPU PRO, which doesn't work with Feral games either, and forces them to make disclaimers for SteamOS, because of course, Valve uses the best driver for SteamOS.

There are two pain points here. The first pain point is VLIW-architecture cards, which are handled by the r600g Mesa driver and if you are talking about abandoning, the r600g driver feels much more abandoned than the Catalyst driver. R600g is slow, buggy, feature incomplete and noisy, because it has no proper power management. Catalyst performs, for AMD standards, okay, is stable, OpenGL 4.5 feature complete and has proper power management.

For GCN-architecture cards, the pain point is that you need AMD GPUPRO for Vulkan support. And of course as Linux gamer you want to enjoy this great new innovation in Linux gaming, and you install GPUPRO. Great driver, great performance, but no Feral game will work then.

You cannot change drivers like you change clothes. Changing drivers is serious reconfigruation work that you don't want to do on an individual game basis.

Supporting Catalyst or GPU PRO is probably one and the same thing, because it is the same OpenGL implementation. If Feral would support GPU PRO and not Catalyst, they would have a point regarding "abandoned". But since they don't, they fail to run on one of the major OpenGL implementations in the industry, and that is a quality issue.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I am not and AMD user, nor have I ever claimed to be any time I've reported on them. I do not own any AMD GPU to test on.

Also, it's usually issues with AMD's drivers, like Catalyst being too unstable and Mesa not having higher enough OpenGL. Can't blame Feral for that.

As for performance: I will take 20 ports with lower performance over 5 ports that had to be rewritten from the core to properly support OpenGL that took 10x longer to come out. Feral are boosting up our game numbers significantly with bigger names.

Let's not have this turn into a flame fest.

Well, I do feel the need to flame a bit. The more I read about this stuff, like:

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-drivers/amd-linux/873193-amd-gpu-pro-16-20-3-beta-linux-driver-released/page8 [External Link]

.. the more convinced I become the problem is at Feral and nowhere else.

Catalyst is not unstable, its stable for years, it is OpenGL 4.5 compliant and in some respects more so than Nvidia drivers, shares code with the Windows OpenGL driver, which can run the latest games like Doom 2016 without much trouble.

Of course nothing is black and white, and I'm sure AMD drivers have their issues, like any driver. AMD should fix them, and they will. But there is simply no other vendor who does a more shitty job of supporting AMD like Feral. They really have a serious quality problem.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

This is good news, as I’ve been pretty happy with Feral’s porting work

You are? Performance issues and AMD incompatibilities are the rule rather than these exception with these guys.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Some examples of other websites that confirm this data:

https://clicky.com/marketshare/global/operating-systems/linux/ [External Link]

... shows a growth for Linux that is very similar to that shown by Netmarketshare.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp [External Link]

... shows Linux near the highest share ever.

https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php?year=2016&month=6 [External Link]

... did put Linux at 2.48% in June. Unfortunately we didn't make the list in July due to iOS 8 taking our spot.

The only major web statistics site known to me, that doesn't confirm the trend, is Statcounter. Statcounter's data suggests our market share is stable.

View this comment - View article - View full comments