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That's not an error, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition is now out for SteamOS/Linux and I am downloading it as I type this. This is truly a knock-out year for Linux gamers and it's only May!
Warning: Radeon graphics cards are not supported, Intel integrated graphics chipsets are also not supported. This commenter points out why. Interesting to see AMD fix their drivers so quickly, I hope more bigger games come out forcing all graphics vendors to improve.
One thing I mentioned before is the coming of "SteamOS" rather than Linux, it is becoming more frequent quickly and I am actually okay with that. Linux has been a scary word for developers for too long, but no more!
There have been hints at this happening for months and I am extremely pleased to see it turn out well for us.
Be warned it's a hefty 15.8GB download, so prepare for a wee bit of a wait. Grab a beer a relax while watching that download bar, or just play something else...
About
The player is Geralt of Rivia, a professional monster slayer, a witcher. Entangled in the political turmoil that engulfed Temeria, Geralt helped quell the rebellion of the Order of the Flaming Rose. Soon after, he saved King Foltest’s life when the monarch was attacked by a witcher-like assassin. He continues to protect the king, serving as his bodyguard as Foltest strives to bring peace to his kingdom. The Order’s last bastions have yielded to the royal army, yet one more task remains - the Baroness La Valette announced her secession from the realm, and her fortress must be taken. A month after the attempted assassination, Foltest’s armies stand at the gates of La Valette Castle, preparing for a final assault. Still at Foltest’s side, Geralt is among them, unable to begin his personal quest to discover the mysterious assassin’s origin and identity…
Thanks to the new, ultra-modern REDengine, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings features both beautiful graphics and sophisticated in-game mechanics, drawing players into the most lively and believable world ever created in a video game.
Defining new standards for realistic, non-linear game narration, The Witcher 2 spins a mature, thought-provoking tale to produce one of the most complex and unique RPGs ever released on consoles. In addition to its epic story, the game features a complex combat system that uniquely combines dynamic action and tactical depth.
The great thing is that it's also 80% off to celebrate! Get it on Steam now, seriously go get it right now.
Check out the trailer if you haven't seen it before:
Direct Link
For those who own a boxed copy of it, with GOG.com supporting Linux this year I suggest you go here and reedem your backup copy on GOG. While you won't get a Linux copy yet I imagine in future you would.
You can also thank the developers directly on their official forums post on it.
UPDATE
It's no wonder people are experiencing poor performance issues, it looks like it uses a wrapper called "eON" from Virtual Programming who did the Mac port. This porting technology is new to Linux, so perfect performance isn't going to happen right away.
Personally I am displeased by this as the performance on the lowest setting for me isn't great and my rig is pretty damned powerful. I am actually glad I didn't pay full price as it's unplayable. I don't mean to be too harsh about it (I don't like to sugar coat things either), but when there's so many people claiming the same thing then something is up, but this "eON" tech is new to Linux, so there's always room for improvement.
If you scan around the files, you will note these:
eONprecompiledShaders32.dat
witcher2.vpfs
VPFS_registry.vpfsdb
Pretty obvious it uses their eON tech. It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't run so terribly, I've said before that I am glad our purchases count for Linux rather than Windows, but for newer games it just doesn't feel right somehow.
What do you think to this information?
UPDATE 2
A developer from the porting house who worked on this has done a few posts in the Steam forum topic on it. You can see one such post here, there's also a funny one here where the developer is sadly making rather uninformed statments:
jaycee1980Remember the binary Nvidia and AMD Catalyst drivers only tend to support newer hardware.
I wish developers would research a little more before saying such things, as it doesn't do their reputation any-good.
Both teams need to do some damage control I think and get down to fixing issues ASAP. Two things to check is if Vertical Sync and UberSamping are both off as both are known to cause problems, but sadly for me I still cannot play on the lowest possible settings.
Not the best of launches.
So I have tried the port and honestly I'm very disappointed. Rig:
i5 2500k @ stock speed (I do have the intel pstate driver enabled though)
RAM: 8GB Corsair XMS
GPU: GTX 660 with 2GB VRAM (nvidia blob version 331.20)(also, vsync is disabled in the driver options)
OS: Ubuntu 12.04 64bit with kernel 3.11 (via Canonical's periodic hardware enablement stack)
Monitor res: 1440x900
The only option I found to be better but now what I consider playable is the medium option with some tweaks (for texture quality mostly) and vsync off... meh. On Windows this game is smooth as butter on very high settings.
I've tried with both OpenGL 2.1 and 3.2 but to be able to compare it more fairly against CrossOver I'll limit it to 2.1. I also made sure that the games are on the same patch level by downloading the patches for the GoG version and applying them (3.1; 3.2;3.3 and 3.4)
With the settings shown in the screenshot, running the game with CrossOver simply feels smoother and better. I can't tell you the exact fps because I don't know of any in-game way to show that info.
There might be one thing though. The guy from VP mentioned that they don't use real fullscreen windows so, in some DEs that use compositing this may hamper them. Kwin can turn the compositor on/off any time, but Unity and Gnome (from what I've read) use something called "un-redirected fullscreen windows" which help with performance in games and other 3D applications.
Don't you have Ubersampling turned ON? I'm not sure if Linux version of the game has this option at all - I haven't had time to download this game yet. This option can destroy any configuration.
Quoting: liamdawe@scaine, Again i disagree, people can compare apples to oranges all they like, but in the end my views still stand.
This is more like cooking a pizza with a lightbulb, the tools ALWAYS matter when the tool isn't up for the job. The point is a lightbulb isn't meant to cook a pizza. In the same way that a Windows game isn't meant to be run on Linux, it's meant to be ported in-code.
All metaphors will fail in the end, Liam, but honestly, a lightbulb didn't cook my Witcher 2 experience. eON clearly works really, really well in certain configurations and the fact is, I got that great experience.
So my point stands. Stop focussing on WHY things are bad. You shouldn't care about the why. And if you were a bit less geeky (like myself) you wouldn't care. All you'd focus on is that you had a bad experience while many others are having a great experience.
Let me put it another way. The Witcher 2 shot into the top sellers on Steam. Probably tens of thousands of sales. Do you think there's a thread out there with hundreds of comments of "OMG, this is awesome on my PC!"? Nah, those guys are busy playing the damn game. We're only hearing the negative here.
So there's a really good chance that we're only hearing about a tiny percentage of disgruntled folk here. CD Projekt RED have support a platform that they've generally had very big reservations about and no, they didn't test properly. But we're only one day after general release and I think improvements will come.
They should be applauded for taking a risk. Not shot down for some obscure technical detail regarding the way they provided support.
Will have to agree to disagree on this as the toolkit IS the source of my and others issues.
Will it be better to play Witcher 2 under Wine than "natively"?
Quoting: Anonymous> It's no wonder people are experiencing poor performance issues, it looks like it uses a wrapper called "eON" from Virtual Programming who did the Mac port.
Will it be better to play Witcher 2 under Wine than "natively"?
Probably. The best solution is to get a build of wine with the CSMT patch. The PlayOnLinux/Mac project does provide one.
If you have a wimpy machine, don't bother.
System specs:
Linux Mint 16 KDE 64-bit
i7-2600k @ 4.5GHz
8GB RAM
Nvidia GTX 570 (driver version 319.60)
Display resolution 1920x1200
The 'native' port is extremely stuttery even at reduced settings :/ However the Windows version (tested on Windows 7 and on Linux using CrossOver) runs quite smoothly with settings almost maxed out.
Lordpkappa May 23, 2014
I7 3770
8 Gb ram
GTX 770 4 Gb
My opinion so far:
Unfortunately they doesen't chose to convert the entire engine, but to use a mix of wrapper and dedicated code for GL extension. This is a cross between native code and one emulated by the system, which offers so performance not comparable with the Windows counterpart with the same system.
Personally, I am happy to see The Witcher 2 on Linux, I still have to explore the performance offered, and so i defile me on this aspect until I get useful data.
I can not deny that i'm little 'disappointed as many others user.
I think that in the future there will be fewer and fewer problems, it's the disadvantage of a new gaming platform.
I'll try to get the most out of my Hw to have a good experience and I will focus on that rather than thinking about how it would be nice to have a real native port, but the Mac has had the same treatment.
I hope in the same time a massive Cdproject support to improve the performance as much as possible.
Quoting: GuestI tried to get confirmation somewhere about the Witcher 3, but could only find references to multiple backends. That doesn't actually rule out any sort of middleware for it. TW3 does, however, make use of DX11 - and good luck with any sort of wrapper to opengl from that. I would think, from a technical viewpoint, that they should do a proper OpenGL backend (anything else would be insane), but we'll just have to wait and see.
At the very least, this debacle shows interest in the title for Linux, and it shows that they should do a proper job of it, no matter what path they take. I think it's fairly obvious that devs have to take SteamOS fairly seriously now, so if all they do is learn from this....then I suppose it's worth it in the end.
I agree. Chances of getting a native OpenGL 4 backend for the Witcher 3 (and Cyberpunk 2077) are better than for the Witcher 2. Because those are their current projects and also because CD Projekt Red plan to start licensing their newest REDengine (used in the Witcher 3 and CP 2077) to others. So it's in their direct interest to make it performing better while supporting most platforms. Let's wait and see.
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