Quoting: Ehvis

Quoting: oldrocker99I get the 0 byte W: DoW download bug every time I open Steam, too.

I just realised that I had four "updates" of 0 bytes yesterday. If this is what is meant here, then it's not just Feral games. I'll have to check later to see if keep coming back.

Only one thing triggers that for me on other games; I have my games library shared across multiple distros, and if I update a game on one and then go to the other, it has to check that it's up to date - and it'll end up downloading nothing. Of the well over 1000 games in my library, DoW2 is literally the only game that downloads 0kb every single time regardless.

That was just an example of an issue I've had with Feral ports, because it's an issue heaps of people have surely noticed. I've pointed out a number of other issues I've encountered over the year, such as the update to Shadow of Mordor that broke Ubuntu 14.04 just the other day (where you need to copy the Feral game libraries from DoW2 to get it working again).

Like I said previously, receiving frequent updates is great, but I'd rather not receive them if they're not going to get the same level of QA.

It's not just Feral at fault here either. A few days ago there was a big update to Slayaway Camp that broke Steam Cloud on GNU/Linux and made me lose my saves - unless I manually went in and created some hard links on the filesystem to work around the mess. It was otherwise a really neat update - but I'd rather not have had the update at all given the hassles it caused.

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Quoting: jith_feralHello, have you got in touch with Feral Support about the download issue? If not, please email [email protected] and we'll do our best to look into it, but it may be an issue with Steam and therefore out of our control.

Yes. Well, there's a big thread about it on the Steam community forums where someone from Feral have responded and said they are looking into it with Valve's help, but it's been silent for quite some time now.

Quoting: jith_feralWe've had feedback about the warnings, so based on that we've added an option to hide the warnings forever in newer versions of our game launcher. This new game launcher may make it into some of our older games.

That's really good news. Thank you!

Quoting: jith_feralWe do update the specs for games if we've tested and confirmed that performance is up to our standards (e.g. XCOM 2 recently gained AMD support [External Link]

That's great, but it seems to be the exception rather than the norm, at least in my experience. I've seen comments from Feral in the Steam forums that basically say the game works fine if you use the proprietary drivers, but not if using an old Mesa version as provided by some distros by default, so maybe you could just say that in the requirements?

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Feral Interactive's done well this year and I agree that much of our love for them is related to their positive interactions with the community. Having said that, I personally feel that some of their releases could use a bit more testing at times (I'm still suffering the 0byte DoW2 download bug every time I open Steam). More importantly, I'm often put off by the sheer number of titles they release that claim to only work on Nvidia, and the (usually completely pointless) warnings that have to be clicked past on many of their games when running on AMD drivers - drivers that more often than not work flawlessly. It detracts from the overall experience. Do they really have to show them every. single. time?

A stable Mesa release should appear this year with OpenGL shader caching, at which point I sincerely hope Feral switches off all such warnings and updates their game requirement pages. I'll be watching to see if this happens and factoring Feral's reaction (or lack thereof) to such releases when voting on Favourite Linux game porter of 2017.

However 2017 should be a great year. Already with Mesa 17.0.0-rc2 my Fury X is running far more stable than ever before. I anticipate Wine will have a large number of D3D11 titles running well, and AMD cards should have almost all of the features games want from free software drivers including FreeSync, Audio over HDMI/DP and a more competitive (perhaps even superior?) Vulkan implementation by way of RADV. Speaking of Vulkan, I eagerly look forward to games making use of multiple GPUs, and hope to see at least a couple of titles that make full use of available hardware. We already know Feral Interactive is set to release Vulkan ports in the near future.

Things that I don't expect will happen in 2017? Well, I'm not holding my breath on AMD living up to their promises about freeing up source code for their proprietary Vulkan implementation (not that it seems we need it at this point). We probably won't see GoG release GNU/Linux builds of their Galaxy client, which will surely eventually be cancelled and turn into vaporware when they work up the guts to make the announcement. I can't see anybody using VR on GNU/Linux with free software drivers this year, at least not as a supported experience by game developers. I doubt Telltale are going to start releasing GNU/Linux ports this year either, despite previously expressing interest.

Things I'm on the fence about? The LEDs on my Fury X GPUs still don't work since AMD replaced Catalyst (fglrx) with AMDGPU Pro. I don't understand how AMD can push people with their most expensive consumer GPUs through an "upgrade" path that drops such an obvious feature. I'd like to think AMD will sort this issue out at some point this year, but I've yet to see any indication AMD are interested in fixing it. It will certainly make me think twice about purchasing high-end cards from them in future unless the support is already 100%.

I'd love to see Bethesda, Ubisoft or EA test the waters with a GNU/Linux release or two this year. To be fair, Ubisoft already did in late 2015 with Grow Home, but then for 2016 decided not to bother porting the sequel Grow Up (yet, at least). Too bad they didn't try porting a more well known title, and too bad they released the GNU/Linux port so long after Windows, so not exactly a fair test.

Bethesda is in the best position to start adding GNU/Linux ports. Surely Bethesda took note of how much interest there was in running Doom under Wine - many months after the game was released, no less. Further, unlike EA (with Origin) and Ubisoft (with Uplay), Bethesda don't have a store client. That's one big road block they don't have to contend with. Lastly, Bethesda is the most likely of the three to release a Vulkan-only game, which presumably means less QA work for them to deal with. If they released a game with GNU/Linux support this year, I wouldn't be too surprised (but would be very happy).

Despite my general pessimism, it still looks like 2017 has quite a lot going for it.

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On my Fury X with the latest patch at Ultra details at 2560x1440 (because that's how I game), I get the following:

Debian Stretch, Mesa 17-rc2 results:
Average FPS: 55.06
Max FPS: 131.56
Min FPS: 8.85

Ubuntu 16.04.1, AMDGPU Pro 16.60 results:
Average FPS: 34.42
Max FPS: 84.70
Min FPS: 4.18

Ubuntu 14.04.5, Catalyst 15.302-151217a results:
/mnt/gaming/steam/steamapps/common/ShadowOfMordor/bin/ShadowOfMordor: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6: version `CXXABI_1.3.8' not found (required by /mnt/gaming/steam/steamapps/common/ShadowOfMordor/bin/../lib/x86_64/libicui18n.so.51)
/mnt/gaming/steam/steamapps/common/ShadowOfMordor/bin/ShadowOfMordor: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6: version `CXXABI_1.3.8' not found (required by /mnt/gaming/steam/steamapps/common/ShadowOfMordor/bin/../lib/x86_64/libicuuc.so.51)

Yuck! The requirements list 14.04.2 as the minimum OS requirement, so there's no reason this shouldn't work. Fortunately Feral haven't broken the libraries they ship with Dawn of War 2 (yet), so we can just use those.

/mnt/gaming/steam/steamapps/common/ShadowOfMordor/lib/x86_64/
cp ../../../Dawn\ of\ War\ 2/lib/x86_64/libicu* .

This works, except the graphics are all corrupted on Ultra rendering the game now unplayable (which I'm sure never used to be the case) so we have to select Very High. We then get the results:

Average FPS: 28.39
Max FPS: 114.70
Min FPS: 8.09

In short, anyone using proprietary drivers should switch, and while it's really nice to see Feral update their games, it seems their QA for these updates are somewhat lacking.

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I'm glad to see Wine used to wrap more older games like this, but I get really annoyed when GPL and LGPL licenses are treated like an Expat license. It's great to see people using free software projects. It's not good to see someone take the hard work of other people and not respect licensing terms. It's a case of copyright infringement.

In this particular instance, I think it *should* be reasonably straightforward for the company to come into compliance.

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X-Blades is now out of beta.

Additionally, World War II: Panzer Claws was just released for GNU/Linux, by the same publisher.

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Can't say I've noticed any of the faults described (haven't played any of those games in the last few weeks, although I intend to get back into Dirt Showdown later), but I'm always happy to see a focus on fixing crashes.

Quoting: GuestAt this rate, in a month or two it would not surprise me to have AMD/NVIDIA driver parity, at least regarding supported features, working stable version of Vulkan, etc.

Presumably you're talking about the free software drivers, and for those I'd say we're probably at least a couple of years away for driver parity, if we're lucky. There's still a couple of few OpenGL ES extensions, as well as ton of extensions that are not part of any OpenGL or OpenGL ES version listed on https://mesamatrix.net/ [External Link].

Then there's Vulkan support via Radv which is still under active development, with no help from AMD so far AFAICT. There's possibly even potential for AMD to hurt progress if they eventually decide to release a competing implementation, although given the huge delays, I wouldn't be surprised if AMD's promised free software Vulkan code drops mostly turn out to be vaporware.

Perhaps most importantly, Mesa has no compatibility profile support, and currently has no plans to implement them. That means Dying Light, some of Wine's current d3d11 translation layer implementation, Doom (on OpenGL), Wolfenstein: The New Order and The Old Blood, Rage, etc. won't work without hacks, or at all. These are extensions available on Nvidia and under Windows, so it's entirely possible more titles will continue to be released that expect them to be available, and I personally find this the most frustrating Mesa issue right now. Since compatibility profile support isn't even on Mesa's radar currently, this is why I expect it'll be at least a couple of years before we see anything close to driver parity with Nvidia.

Having said all of this, most users won't notice a Vulkan implementation that isn't 100% complete. Most users won't notice a few missing extensions, or (depending on the games they run) the absence of compatibility profiles. The obvious things missing are things like the LEDs on the Fury X GPUs not working, FreeSync missing (and the lack of any kind of GUI to enable it for when it hits), missing audio support for the RX 4XX GPUs, and of course some of the serious bugs (eg. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93652 [External Link].

Probably AMD will be diverting some focus to supporting their upcoming Vega GPU line-up for the immediate future, which might not help matters, so I don't even expect just those obvious things listed to be fixed in the next month or two (not even including time it takes for such improvements to be found in major distro releases). However I think there's here's a good chance that the obvious issues will be sorted sometime this year. I certainly have my fingers crossed, and am watching closely.

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I don't read Reddit, so wasn't aware of the accusations people were throwing around. I know a while back there were people here saying "I don't visit that other site" which I never quite understood, but I could easily imagine there would be some tension between fans of each site. I know Michael's articles can be sensationalist and even click-baity at times, but he does a great job of keeping people informed of matters which they otherwise would not be aware.

I do regularly read both websites, and while there is some clear overlap, they are both great news sources and have different focuses. Phoronix generally seems to focus more on benchmarks and various project developments - related not just to gaming, but virtualisation, networking, file systems, etc. All free software bleeding edge tech news, and only very light gaming-specific news (aside from benchmarks and a few things like major game releases). GamingOnLinux as the name implies, focuses more on game releases, game development, game reviews, game sales, graphics drivers, opinion pieces, etc. related to GNU/Linux.

Phoronix is more geared up towards technical talk about driver development and performance since Michael's got the whole OpenBencharking setup (and he's been in the game years longer), but Liam often spends a lot of time actually playing the games he writes about - something Michael admits he doesn't have time to do. I find it very useful to get both perspectives.

When I see an article about a new Mesa git commit published by both Phoronix and GamingOnLinux, to me that means the commit is exciting from both points of view and is especially interesting news. To automatically assume one site is ripping off the other feels like needlessly jumping to conclusions and being a bit narrow-minded. I can only suggest to Liam and Michael to not let such comments bother you. As the comment above says, "haters goanna hate". Everyone else thinks you're both doing a great job - the people that matter.

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Quoting: M@yeulC

Quoting: boltronicsI've got two Fury X GPUs. Been looking forward to this for quite a while. This news has made my month! :D

Meh. I don't mean to "cheer you down", but we also have to have games that support this feature. As far as I know, none does, as of yet (DOOM may, I am not sure, Ashes of The Singularity will probably if/when they do a Linux port). :)

(I'm jealous of your GPUs, btw :P )

I'm happy enough to use them with Vulkan titles under Wine to start out with. At least then we don't have the chicken and egg problem - game developers not supporting multiple GPUs on GNU/Linux because nobody on GNU/Linux has multiple GPUs. ;)

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I've got two Fury X GPUs. Been looking forward to this for quite a while. This news has made my month! :D

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