Quoting: dmantioneWhat 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.

Well, some developers explicitly list extensions that are required for the game to work. Look in the readme file in Shadow Warrior for example. If Feral would do that, it would simplify things for users, and they can adjust their expectations.

So I agree here. Feral should elaborate what they require, and what they think doesn't work with certain drivers.

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Quoting: dmantione

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.

This doesn't make sense really. Need to compile Mesa arises only if some feature is so recent, that it wasn't released in the stable Mesa yet. Since Mesa gained OpenGL 4.5 support last year, that was fairly common case, but it's not going to happen all the time. Besides a few non versioned OpenGL extensions, Mesa already implements OpenGL 4.5 proper. So further work will go into optimizations.

Vulkan can be in such situation though, until radv will reach completeness. But again, after rapid development, usually features aren't added so often. Therefore there is no point to complain. Either compile from source in such case, or wait for Mesa to catch up. I don't think Feral should be blamed for anything like that. On the contrary, their contribution to Mesa should be welcomed. And if they consider pro driver broken - so be it. Users should be switching to Mesa anyway (the only place where PRO is now useful for non legacy stuff is full Vulkan support).

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Torment: Tides of Numenera, and Gun (Wine).

Quoting: enzThe Witcher 2. I bought it a while ago on a sale because it was dirt-cheap and I had heard that they had resolved the performance issues with their wrapper, but I only recently found the time to play it. So far I like it: good performance, only a few occasional crashes (that might not even be related to Linux), and even if the gameplay is not perfect, the story, graphics and atmosphere are very enjoyable.

You should play the first one too then (Wine). The atmosphere there is even better IMHO.

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If Feral require using certain version of Mesa, they usually warn about that. Since Mesa is still actively gaining features, compiling it from source is an expected thing. Linux users shouldn't be scared of that. If you don't want to do it - then wait until the next stable Mesa version will come out with those features included. No one is forcing you to play games which depend on those features right now.

On a side note - I'm still waiting for any Feral Linux port to appear on GOG. I don't think any of them did so far. It's not in their hands of course, just pointing out the current situation.

And I wonder how exactly Feral operate. Are they approached by some studios / publishers to make a port, or it's Feral's initiative to propose such things and they actively look for studios to work with?

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The reason Nvidia has the majority is simple. Mesa wasn't competitive enough until recently. Now things are going to change a big deal, and downsides of Nvidia will start playing into the picture.

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Yeah, radv needs to catch up, but it's in rapid development now, so things look good. Would also be interesting to see what AMD will do with their current closed Vulkan driver.

But my personal favorite feature is GALLIUM_HUD. It's so easy to use, and nothing comes close to that with Nvidia blob. Mesa developers said, they plan a similar feature for radv.

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Quoting: TheRiddickLOL, I don't think many people care about open-source drivers to be honest. Most desktop users who buy these cards just want them to work and not care about the status symbol of having open-source drivers..

That's the problem right there. Nvidia doesn't work that well on Linux. Performance is good, true. But the rest is pretty bad. I.e. integration with kernel (KMS/DRM), desktop (like tearing free experience), Wayland support, lm-sensors support and so on, and so forth. With Mesa performance catching up, AMD is a clear winner for Linux users.

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Nvidia don't iterate that fast. So I doubt 1100 series will come out any time soon. On the Linux side of things, Nvidia will continue losing market share, until they'll open up their drivers, but it probably won't be enough of incentive, until they'll actually fall behind AMD there.

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If it's inspired by the likes of Proteus, then the actual game is about exploration.

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I wouldn't call unscientific, the idea that quite a lot of factors need to come together for life (at least in the way we know it) to exist.

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