UPDATED, See the bottom!
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.
Quoting: Lordpkappahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2HNIJlacO4Thank you for the video.
How it works in my system.
This just reinforces my point, that doesn't look fluent to me.
There are small frame drops all over the place, and seems you even dip below 30 fps at times (during the scene with the rushing soldiers).
Most of the time you have a good fps, but then it drops at occasions.
This is not ok imo, especially since lowering the quality does not even help, even on low I get these drops in FPS and small stuttering.
This game is running fine on my system with high settings.
Thanks to CD Projekt Red ^_^
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Arch Linux 64 bit
GeForce GTX 660 Ti 2 Go
Intel Core i7 860
G.Skill RipJaws Z 16 Go
In fact, because of this limitation, it will only help prove my point.
Lordpkappa May 25, 2014
Quoting: ZnurreQuoting: Lordpkappahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2HNIJlacO4Thank you for the video.
How it works in my system.
This just reinforces my point, that doesn't look fluent to me.
There are small frame drops all over the place, and seems you even dip below 30 fps at times (during the scene with the rushing soldiers).
Most of the time you have a good fps, but then it drops at occasions.
This is not ok imo, especially since lowering the quality does not even help, even on low I get these drops in FPS and small stuttering.
For the max dettail with v-sync enable i think it's a very good result. I play the game very very well, sure they could be better, and maybe for Linux Cdproject will bring 2-3 patches to stabilize the situation.
In more closed area like jail i archive 60 solid, i'll try to switch dettails in the same area and i remake a video.
$HOME/.local/cdprojektred/witcher2/GameDocuments/The Witcher/saves
Specs:
Linux Mint 16/17
GTX 690
i7 3930K
16GB RAM
Quoting: GNUzelTurns out the problem was that I had UberSampling, unbeknownst to me, enabled, causing my frame drops.
That's a common mistake. Actually if you'd play it in Wine, you'd see that the "ubersampling" setting is highlighted in red (to indicate that it's extremely demanding). It's recommended never to use it because it always kills performance (on Windows the same way) since it's a very wasteful brute force antialiasing. Some even argued that such misleading setting should never had been included in the first place.
May be in the Linux version that option wasn't highlighted, and many simply don't pay attention.
Quoting: ShmerlQuoting: GNUzelTurns out the problem was that I had UberSampling, unbeknownst to me, enabled, causing my frame drops.That's a common mistake. Actually if you'd play it in Wine, you'd see that the "ubersampling" setting is highlighted in red (to indicate that it's extremely demanding). It's recommended never to use it because it always kills performance (on Windows the same way) since it's a very wasteful brute force antialiasing. Some even argued that such misleading setting should never had been included in the first place.
May be in the Linux version that option wasn't highlighted, and many simply don't pay attention.
Quoting: ShmerlQuoting: GNUzelTurns out the problem was that I had UberSampling, unbeknownst to me, enabled, causing my frame drops.That's a common mistake. Actually if you'd play it in Wine, you'd see that the "ubersampling" setting is highlighted in red (to indicate that it's extremely demanding). It's recommended never to use it because it always kills performance (on Windows the same way) since it's a very wasteful brute force antialiasing. Some even argued that such misleading setting should never had been included in the first place.
May be in the Linux version that option wasn't highlighted, and many simply don't pay attention.
When I first ran it, I just clicked on the "Ultra" spec preset because 100% of the rest of the time, my computer could handle it but little did I know about UberSampling in The Witcher 2, so when I went to the "Advanced" options I saw UberSampling in red. Disabled it, ran the game with everything enabled- ran fine. Looked up UberSampling and saw almost all video cards, including 680 SLIs can't run it which made me feel better because my 690 was a beast of a card and I believe it still is. I don't think Linux uses the whole card though.
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