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Latest Comments by gurv
Civilization VI released for Linux, video and port report (updated)
9 Feb 2017 at 9:16 pm UTC

Quoting: apocalyptechDidn't Civ5/BE have the slowly-dropping-FPS thing as well? I seem to recall that things would get slower the further you are in the campaign (not that it ever got awful, really).
It's most likely because there's a lot more going on screen in the late game.
So that means a lot more draw calls to strangle even more that lone cpu core that's doing all the opengl stuff.

Btw it's entirely possible to do real multi-threading in OpenGL (AZDO), it's just that it's not supported everywhere (never will be on Mac, Mesa still misses bindless textures) and that it seems convoluted to implement to say the least.
I can't recall anyone actually using it in a real shipping application.
And now that Vulkan is here, it's probably never going to take off.

GDC sounds like it will be fun this year with AMD, NVIDIA, Khronos, Unity & Croteam all talking Vulkan
8 Feb 2017 at 7:59 pm UTC Likes: 1

One major blocker that I've not seen mentioned is shading language.
Studios have thousands of existing shaders written in HLSL (DirectX shading language) that won't work with Vulkan (which uses SPIR-V).
There is an open source project (sponsored by Valve or Google, can't remember) that aims to provide a HLSL to SPIR-V compiler but it was still not feature complete last I checked.

More performance improvements are on the way for Deus Ex and Tomb Raider on Mesa
30 Jan 2017 at 10:34 pm UTC

Yeah poor performance seems the obvious reason why DE:MD did poorly (at least on PC, don't know about consoles).
Even if the game is really great, it has to run decently on the average gamer's hardware...

A new radeonsi (Mesa) patch should fix issues in many games for AMD GPU owners
21 Jan 2017 at 1:28 pm UTC Likes: 2

Great news, thanks for reporting!

RadeonSI just keeps getting better and better!
So thank you / merci Samuel and Valve.
And thank you to all people involved on amdgpu/radeonsi/dc-dal/radv...

My shiny new MSI RX 470 should be arriving next week, so I'll be able to test all that :)

Some thoughts on switching from Ubuntu to Antergos for Linux gaming
18 Jan 2017 at 9:11 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Luke_NukemHow is KDE so far for you? I almost always experience crashes in it. And the absurd amount of configuration available meant I was getting sidetracked trying to find the prefect config instead of working (same reason I ditched tilers). Which is why I use Gnome and apps built for it - they get out of my way and give only what is needed.
I couldn't agree more.
Tested KDE2 years ago, thought it was bloated with useless configuration options everywhere.
Tried KDE4 a year ago, thought it was still bloated with useless configuration options *while* lacking basic features (for example, pressing the "calculator" key, didn't bring up the calculator application, had to configure the shortcut...). I was also completely pissed off by the fact that KDE doesn't follow standard key shortcuts conventions, like Ctrl+pageUp/pageDown.
After that I'm definitely convinced KDE is not for me.

I'm personally very happy with Linux Mint Cinnamon. Very sleek and stable experience for me.
You don't need that many PPAs to comfortably game with it (at least with a nvidia GPU).
I just use two of them : wine-staging and nvidia driver.
The only problem I've had with pulseaudio is on the PC hooked to the TV via a DVI->HDMI cable (and yes DVI supports sound too!). I had to manually force the output in pulseaudio config files. I also sometimes have sound lag but only on this PC and only with Hearthstone under Wine. Killing pulseaudio is enough to make it work perfectly ever after.

Another Steam Beta Client update released, allows moving game location
18 Jan 2017 at 8:12 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: staticx27Ha! Option comes two days after I deleted 100 gigs worth of games from my SSD and redownloaded it all to my HHD. I like to keep multiplayer games on my SSD for faster loading and single player games on HHD cause who cares about loading times, then.
It's a shame so few people know it but it's actually very simple to move games from one steam library to another (be it on the same os or another or even on another computer entirely).
You just have to move the steamlibrary/common/gamedirectory and the steamlibrary/appmanifest_xxxx.acf to their new location (where xxx is the steam id of the game. if you don't know it just grep "game name" steamlibrary/*.acf.

For example :
mv ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Victor\ Vran /mnt/ssd/steam/common/

grep -i "victor" ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/*.acf
/home/zzzz/.steam/steam/steamapps/appmanifest_345180.acf: "name" "Victor Vran"
/home/zzzz/.steam/steam/steamapps/appmanifest_345180.acf: "installdir" "Victor Vran"

mv ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/appmanifest_345180.acf /mnt/ssd/steam/

Done ^^
Note: do it preferably with Steam closed.

NVIDIA 378.09 beta driver released, adds OpenGL threaded optimizations by default and more
18 Jan 2017 at 8:00 pm UTC Likes: 1

Wow enabling glthread by default is a bold move.
They got to be confident in their detection algorithm because this feature can seriously degrade performance in some cases (and boost in others ofc).

Here’s some interesting answers from Gabe Newell and Valve from the reddit AMA
18 Jan 2017 at 1:06 am UTC Likes: 3

Yeah, disappointing. It's as if they don't care anymore about Linux/SteamOS.

I'm a bit worried by Valve's current mindset tbh, they seem to be caught up in the VR craze (which I think it's painfully obvious that it has no future in gaming due to price, cumbersome, nausea, isolation from friends/family, you name it).

Meanwhile, Microsoft is progressing on its unified console/pc ecosystem.
It would be really ironic that Microsoft delivers on the Steam machine concept before Valve ever does.

Exclusive: Civilization VI now fully confirmed to be coming for SteamOS & Linux and soon too
9 Jan 2017 at 10:47 pm UTC

Amazing news, thanks Aspyr! Obviously going to buy it.
I too am interested in what the problem was with the Linux version.

Valve are looking to gather a list of games that don't work with radeonsi
9 Jan 2017 at 10:22 pm UTC

Quoting: jsa1983Any chance offending games may be reported through other channels other than tweeter?

Steam forum? Mail?

I've got a few of them:

- Crookz
- Grand ages: Medieval
- Dying Light (compatibility profile)
- Dead Island (except for the Ryder campaign, which surprisely works fine)
Apparently it's a problem of GL version detection (core vs compat) for Crookz : http://steamcommunity.com/app/310490/discussions/0/492378806383914128/ [External Link]
From reading that discussion I suppose the game works fine with the mesa compat override.
(env MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=3.3COMPAT %command%)