Virtual Programming might just redeem themselves and their Eon technology yet. A new beta (today) for The Witcher 2 has been put onto Steam, and with it some performance fixes.
In my own personal testing the input lag is almost gone now, and in general it doesn't feel so sluggish anymore, but I cannot give an exact FPS comparison with the last beta as GLXOSD seems to make the game instant crash now. If you do manage to benchmark it at all be sure to let us know if the FPS is any better for you.
Looks like the game might be playable by the end of the year.
The new patch contains this:
- Optimised shader compilation to link OpenGL programs in waves, instead of one by one, which makes it possible to speed it up using threaded shader compilation on some cards.
- Drawing of fullscreen quads optimised
- Optimized out some memory barrier commands from OpenGL command queue
- OpenGL rendering never lags more than one frame behind commands given by D3D, which should reduce mouse lag.
- Added better reporting of missing extensions in game log, to make it more visible when the game is slow due to OpenGL not supporting various features.
- Undid the regression of fullscreen monitor selection support - this should now work correctly again
- OpenAL used for sound instead of SDL, so it should improve sound drop-outs
You can see the full info on the unofficial github page they are using to publish the info.
Check out The Witcher 2 on Steam if you dare to dip your toes. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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oldrocker99 Aug 13, 2014
I'm impressed with the three devs who brought Witcher2, CIV V, and X-COM to Linux gamers in one 5 week period. While Virtual Programming certainly got slagged for using the eON wrapper (and there were also a lot of "RedPrejekt doesn't care about us at all" whines), they have taken the bugs seriously and have continued tuning their wrapper.
On my mid-level box, it runs smooth as silk. I do get the crash report every time I quit the game from the main menu, but at least it also came up when the game actually crashed. Still in Flotsam, just seeing the sights and killing assassins sent to murder a witcher(!) and trying to find some silver ore.
It should be mentioned that GOG is a division of RedProjekt itself, who commissioned Virtual Programming to create a wrapper, since it was too labor-intensive for a company deep into creating their next game to completely rewrite a four year old game. It always ran great with wine, anyway. The woeful developers of Eador, who released a game with a plain wine wrapper, with all the bugs of the game using wine, got tens of complaints, removed the wine wrapper version, and don't call it Linux-compatible any more. And the native Linux port of X-COM has its problems, which are actively being worked on by the devs. The native CIV V is, to all appearances, and from user reports, practically flawless.
The news I glean from this is that, while the dev community certainly knew that Linux users are hungry for games, they have certainly found that we want the games to work (and complain when they don't). However, we are grateful when a good port is released and effusively praise good ports (there's a "Thanks for the Linux port" thread on the CIV V Steam forum that is many pages) and are as persnickety as other platforms' users. In other words, we're gamers.
On my mid-level box, it runs smooth as silk. I do get the crash report every time I quit the game from the main menu, but at least it also came up when the game actually crashed. Still in Flotsam, just seeing the sights and killing assassins sent to murder a witcher(!) and trying to find some silver ore.
It should be mentioned that GOG is a division of RedProjekt itself, who commissioned Virtual Programming to create a wrapper, since it was too labor-intensive for a company deep into creating their next game to completely rewrite a four year old game. It always ran great with wine, anyway. The woeful developers of Eador, who released a game with a plain wine wrapper, with all the bugs of the game using wine, got tens of complaints, removed the wine wrapper version, and don't call it Linux-compatible any more. And the native Linux port of X-COM has its problems, which are actively being worked on by the devs. The native CIV V is, to all appearances, and from user reports, practically flawless.
The news I glean from this is that, while the dev community certainly knew that Linux users are hungry for games, they have certainly found that we want the games to work (and complain when they don't). However, we are grateful when a good port is released and effusively praise good ports (there's a "Thanks for the Linux port" thread on the CIV V Steam forum that is many pages) and are as persnickety as other platforms' users. In other words, we're gamers.
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thelimeydragon Aug 14, 2014
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Almost playable on my intel HD4400 800x600 all settings to minimum :D. Finger crossed for the "Major performance improvements are expected in the near future through the work of AMD and Intel driver developer teams." Anyway 4$ for a good game even very badly ported (Thanks eOn) is still a good deal, I'm just hopping that we will have a real portage for the third one ;)
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