Eventhough Vulkan is in very early stage we can be very happy about it because of many reasons. For my example, on my Asus optimus laptop Dota2 doesn't run well in OpenGL at all, completely unplayable and unstable and same goes for majority of games that I've tried with OpenGL. Bringing Dota2 to Vulkan made it suddenly completely playable at 80fps on pretty demanding settings actually. Reason is that OpenGL drivers are probably not well optimized for my particular laptop GPU (GT 650m) and Vulkan drivers are so generic and low-level that Valve actually did the optimization job instead of Nvidia, so it's possible to overcome the bad driver optimisation problems here.

On the GTX 970 on desktop the performance is quite the same on GL and Vulkan which means that the bottlenecks are either GPU/CPU themselves or the thing that they've mentioned above: Games with currently supporting Vulkan have some sort of "vulkan wrapper" for the games that have been originally written for other APIs.

Vulkan is a bit of a challenge for game engine developers but for end-developers and end-users it is a thing to be VERY excited about not only on Linux but on Windows, android and perhaps new OSes in the future that could support it.

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Quoting: Mountain Man

I’ve seen gameplay performance go much higher than the Max FPS the benchmark gave me.

That's typical. Benchmarks are supposed to present a "worst case scenario" in terms of performance, at least if they're designed correctly. Ideally, if your system performs well in a benchmark then it should, in theory, have zero problems with the actual game.

That's quite strange, on Shadow of mordor for me it has 40 min fps and it's actually quite worse in game, on some moments it clearly falls in the 20s, benchmarks are not always to be trusted completely but they do give you brief overview if it is even worth trying to run the game.

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Nice job on benchmarking Liam, I actually changed my mind for buying this game when I saw the benchmarks. I would love to play it but having like less than 60fps average and minimum around 40 on my GTX 970 on LOWEST settings doesn't really sound promising performance wise, and it is quite expensive as well. I know that it runs on Windows with aproximately same average but minimum is pretty identical to average whereas it falls quite low here. Of course THIS IS NOT FERAL's FAULT, Probably will wait and upgrade my hardware before buying this one, seems like GTX970 is getting a bit dated :P :) Or if the Vulkan will be supported at some point I hope that it will show some performance gains in order to push those min FPS above 50 because then it would be completely enjoyable.

Still nice to see Feral doing so many ports, will make sure to support them with their other older games that I still need to buy!

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Quoting: pete910

Quoting: GBeeHmm, time to get that GTX 1070/1080 then ...

Speaking as someone that has a 1080, go for a 980/ti and save some £££/$$$

Not quite good choice for the future :) They might not be perfect now but they will definitely get improved, it has a lot more potential for performance especially when Vulkan comes into play...

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Quoting: orochikyo"Make of it what you will. I'm not going to put the blame anywhere, as no one really knows apart from Valve, and apparently I'm always wrong according to a few people who think they know better."

Without access to Steam player database, your statements are just an opinion as those "who think they know better" are opinions too. You sound kinda butthurt at that moment, like you like to blame Valve and everyone should be agree with that, there are no one to blame but the same linux distros developers that makes things more complicated that it supposed to be.
The day you dont have to use the damn terminal to install stuff that it supposed to be installed by default, that day youll see Linux numbers to raise slowly instead of staying the same.

I do install Ubuntu, Lubuntu and Mint on my customer computers, saying them that I cant install Windows without a license, most of them are happy with the results, but I know without me installing the stuff they need, Linux are just a bothersome, knowing you have to introduce a complicated command on terminal that actually without internet help you will never know about it, only to make mesa drivers with intel cards on lubuntu or ubuntu, or damn Mint now showing resolutions for 1640x1050 or other resolutions.
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with its lan options greyed out, then suddenly wifi icon dissapearing...
A regular Linux user will not install SteamOS, a windows user will not too, Steamboxes arent appealing for console players, etc.
So, while the terminal keeps being the most used tool to fix and download most of the stuff on any linux distro, linux will remain being a niche, there is a reason why M$ wanted to kill it with windows ME, a reason that actually any Mac OS doesnt have a terminal since 10 years ago.

I agree distro developers could make a standardized packages that would be installed the same on all the distros, but trust me when I say that a lot of people who use Windows don't know how to do stuff as well but they are familiar with the way of searching for answers... they would need a help from the internet to tell them ok download this and this and run it as an administrator and install, watch out not to install any bloatware with that... Same is on ubuntu you practically gain a few commands that you literally copy from google into the terminal to add repos, install apps, uninstall them so basically the only thing "repelling" here is the terminal interface which people are so afraid of. It is not necessarily harder to do, in my opinion it's way faster and more efficient than in Windows... but the concept is better, you update all your software directly from repositories without having to manually update every app so if you set up a customer's machine you can literally just run update manager and update their complete system along with applications.

Up to this day it is bad that all the tutorials on google begin with Open terminal and type sudo gedit /etc... it would be better to just tell users navigate to etc folder find this and this and open in text editor for editing parameters. That would be much more user friendly and we who know the command line could still use a shortcut to open that with 1 simple command. But eventhough there is some learning curve I think that these days Linux is not that hard to use even for a newcomer. A lot of things are solved on google already.

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Quoting: kyriosWhile talking about stats, according to Net Applications, the market share of Linux on Desktop remains above 2% for 5 months now [External Link]

Speaking about that, we must take into account that total number of PCs in the world is probably rising more than it ever has, every person in the family in the western world probably owns their own PC at least a laptop and if we take into account that number of Windows PC is increasing, number of Linux PCs has been increasing at the higher rate since we've gained some marketshare (more than ever actually, now we are actually at about stable 2% which is not a small number, considering that there are 3+ billions of working PCs out there...)

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Statistics don't matter, as long as we have Ferap & similar guys we have nothing to worry about :P

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I've just played this game for the first time and I'm truly impressed with how far the feral has come with their porting. I'm running it on GTX 970 on High preset and it works incredibly smooth, didn't check the framerate but if there were any slowdowns bellow 50fps I would probably notice that. I'm definitely going to buy every game that comes out from them in the future, they are amazing.

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Quoting: AnxiousInfusionI guess we can say WINE is spiritually the new DOSbox. There is an entire horde of games from between ~1999 to ~2007 that could use these faux-ports. Like you say, I don't really care how they get to my display so long as the installation and runtime is seamless.

Performance is also not an issue because most of us already have graphics cards and hardware that runs DX9 and bellow games with ease eventhough it's not completely native. And for people who buy steam machines they would never know what and how the game runs anyway... So actually wrapping all of the old cool titles with Wine and connecting it with Steam would be one of the huge steps towards making SteamOS really Viable platform for the future.

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I really like to see such an old games coming to Linux with Wine versions... For example if we had all titles like that to be plug and play and running through a controller it wouldn't really matter whether it is fully native or a Wine wrapper... In fact I think that these practices are great ideas for old games that we would not get otherwise. I'd actually like to see more of that from multiple companies :) to "port" all the games with dx9 and bellow like that, that would expand library a bunch

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