Former Valve engineer Rich Geldreich has written up a blog post about the state of Linux Gaming. It's an interesting read that's for sure.
When talking about recent bigger game ports:
QuoteSadly, it's pretty clear that if you run these games on Linux your experience isn't going to be as good, and you'll be getting less "gaming value" vs. Windows. We're not talking about a bunch of little indy titles, these are big releases: Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, Borderlands 2, Tropico 5, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Sid Meier's Civilization V. My take is the devs doing these ports just aren't doing their best to optimize these releases for Linux and/or OpenGL.
Emphasis mine, and I don't agree with him on this. Obviously neither he, nor I have any proof either way that they are/aren't doing their best to optimise, but Aspyr & Feral making a living out of porting games to OpenGL, so why wouldn't they be trying to fix performance issues?
The performance has some way to go sure, but is that really the fault of Aspyr & Feral, or do the drivers still have ways to go to improve their performance? Who knows, I sure don't it goes way over my head at that point.
He does however note how hard it is to get performance on Linux equal to Windows:
QuoteI know it's possible for Linux ports to equal or outperform their Windows counterparts, but it's hard. At Valve we had all the driver devs at our beck and call and it was still very difficult to get the Source engine's perf. and stability to where it needed to be relative to Windows. (And this was with a ~8 year old engine - it must be even harder with more modern engines.) These devs are probably glad to just release anything at all given how alien it can be for Windows/Xbox devs to develop, debug, and ship stuff under Linux+OpenGL.
At least he is pointing out that fact that it's not easy to get decent OpenGL performance to match games on Windows, so he's not completely blasting Feral and Aspyr.
I agree with what he's saying about the Intel drivers 100%:
QuoteThe entire Intel driver situation remains in a ridiculous state. I know Intel means well and all but really, they can do better. (Are they afraid of pissing off MS? Or is this just big corp dysfunctionalism?) Valve is still paying LunarG to find and fix silly perf bugs in Intel's slow open source driver. Surely this can't be a sustainable way of developing a working driver?
No, it's not. Intel ideally needs to be doing this sort of work themselves to find bottlenecks and fix general performance issues in their own Linux drivers. I see this as a stopgap measure while Linux still isn't a focus for many people, and Intel included. This again goes into our marketshare issues, if we had a higher share then Intel would probably be doing it themselves.
His last point is a screen-shot of a slashdot comment where someone is basically saying that SteamOS is done, and that we will never get our hands on the Steam Controller. Their reasoning is that Microsoft snapped and allowed Alienware to create a Windows machine that boots to a Steam UI, and not Windows directly.
I agree that was a bit of a shocker, and I thought it wouldn't do SteamOS any good, but I think SteamOS hasn't even had a chance to have a go at it yet. SteamOS was delayed because Valve decided to revamp the controller again to get it right, so I think we should wait for it to be out before signalling its death.
Read his full blog post here.
What are your thoughts on it? Rich is good at stirring up the hornet's nest that's for sure, but just because he is a former Valve engineer doesn't mean he's going to be right on everything. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Quoting: AstroSo, they port Xcom to 64 bits, your current distro is 32 bits (in a 64 bits able hardware), and you want them to stop porting games to the linux platform just because you dont want to reinstall your distro?Quoting: BeamboomThis right here is what I talk about in my post above. Ferals work on Xcom is the exact opposite of garbage, it's one of the best ports to Linux so far, and to sit an spew out stuff like this on forums on the net... We're just in no position whatsoever to do so!A lot of people contact me after reading my comments about Feral. We talk and I recommend them contact Feral and ask them don't port any more games on linux. So, I don't need to argue with you here. Sorry, nothing personal. What I need is just leaving my comments and do what I do.
I really want to understand your point, but when I try I fail. Maybe you should contact steam support for a refund, that would make more sense, but I guess it's not possible due to you should had read the requirements of the game before buy it.
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Many benchmarks have shown than the nvidia driver runs similar on both OS, so to think than the ports are not optimized as good as possible (or opengl is not that good) makes sense. I mean, if those are not the reason, and the nvidia driver is supposed to have similar performance on both OS? what else could it be? the kernel? (I dont think so). Just saying.
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Cyba.Cowboy Nov 10, 2014
Quoting: GuestThe lab shuttered was the Operating System Research Centre. Nothing to do with their driver teams.
AMD employs people to work on the FOSS drivers. And they continue with their closed source efforts. And they're trying to combine the two.
Try again.
Regardless, their drivers are garbage and offer little - if any - performance benefits over Intel's embedded offerings...
I won't be buying a laptop with AMD graphics again, it's NVIDIA or nothing.
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I think it won't matter much in the future, since games / engines will go in the direction of Azdo for not getting too much API overhead - and that's supported for DX12 and OGL4.
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Quoting: AstroQuoting: BeamboomThis right here is what I talk about in my post above. Ferals work on Xcom is the exact opposite of garbage, it's one of the best ports to Linux so far, and to sit an spew out stuff like this on forums on the net... We're just in no position whatsoever to do so!A lot of people contact me after reading my comments about Feral. We talk and I recommend them contact Feral and ask them don't port any more games on linux. So, I don't need to argue with you here. Sorry, nothing personal. What I need is just leaving my comments and do what I do.
Still bitter about the whole 32 bit thing huh? It's not Feral's fought that you're using an outdated system. I'm glad they didn't waste their resources on a few stubborn people like you and hopefully we will get more ports from them. :D
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linux_gamer Nov 10, 2014
QuoteDid anyone who owns an Nvidia card put this in the Steam Launch options for the game:
LD_PRELOAD="${LD_PRELOAD} libpthread.so.0 libGL.so.1" __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1 %command%
On my machine this isnt't working with 650M GT. Games do not start with " __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1 " As a graphics boost is welcome at any time, someone might know a solution.
OT: What have his parents thought when naming their child? Anyone who understands english and german will confirm, or?
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Quoting: edoMany benchmarks have shown than the nvidia driver runs similar on both OS, so to think than the ports are not optimized as good as possible (or opengl is not that good) makes sense. I mean, if those are not the reason, and the nvidia driver is supposed to have similar performance on both OS? what else could it be? the kernel? (I dont think so). Just saying.
DING DING DING. Exactly this. Big time developers of AAA's spend years making a video game and optimizing it(for windows) along the way. Then they hand it to a small porting dev who throws a 1/4 of their already low resources at it and spend maybe 6-8ish months on and they want to call that optimized? NOPE.
I watched a talk from R. Gordon (icculus) from one of the steam dev days this past weekend. He was speaking to a ton of win/console devs and It was basically about porting games to Linux/Mac and OpenGL. I already had a good idea how it went and I was pretty much spot on.
They yank out the dx renderer, shove in an OpenGL one or even put in a dx to ogl translation layer(yuck), yank out dxinput and shove in SDL(hopefully SDL2) Compile, get compile error, fix error, rinse & repeat until it actually finishes compiling. Then they use the sub par tools available for Linux to attempt debug it and to try and iron out most of the major kinks. It is one HUGE band-aid job. It is NO WONDER that all of these ports that are simply afterthoughts don't run as well as they should/could, and they WONT until the the games are built with Linux in mind from the get go.
Quoting: edoSo, they port Xcom to 64 bits, your current distro is 32 bits (in a 64 bits able hardware), and you want them to stop porting games to the linux platform just because you dont want to reinstall your distro?
I really want to understand your point, but when I try I fail. Maybe you should contact steam support for a refund, that would make more sense, but I guess it's not possible due to you should had read the requirements of the game before buy it.
I have to agree. If you are complaining about the lack of a 32bit build on Linux in the year 2014 and you are running a 32bit install on 64bit hardware.. I mean.. c'mon. Backup your home folder and reinstall. It should literally only take a few hours to be back up and running exactly as you were before but on a 64bit os. You have nobody to blame but yourself here. Sorry Astro.
Quoting: OZSeafordWell, I may have an above the average gaming rig, but I am playing through the Witcher 2 right now, and don't jhave any problems to report. The same can be said about Civ 5, Xcom, but I understand that people with more modest rigs are feeling the pain.
It is less about whether or not the games are playable. The witcher 2, borderlands, civ 5.. all of them are "playable" for me. If I am willing to play at sub par frame rates simply to play in Linux that is. All of those mentioned games run at or near twice the frame rate for me in win as they do in Linux. I have been playing the games that are not fast moving in Linux because frame rate is much less noticeable when the image doesn't move much or really quickly, and doesn't require cat like reflexes(and therefor the frame rate) to play. Wasteland 2, GoI, Anomaly WE, KSP.. I play those in Linux because as long as it is "smooth enough" they are enjoyable. The older titles that run well simply by brute force or because they were actually built with Linux in mind. I play those in Linux too. The modern FPS titles like Borderlands, Metro, Serious Sam 3 etc... Are basically all but unplayable with their <=30 fps even without vsync yet they run 60fps all day long with vsync in windows.. I'm still playing them there because that 60FPS frame rate and vsync is necessary for me to enjoy them.. and most other people as well.
I definitely have an above average rig with 3 monitors and multiple GPUs.. I enjoy my surround gaming setup A LOT and I'm not going to play on a single monitor just to play in Linux because the Linux Nvidia drivers don't utilize multiple GPUs properly and the games are horribly optimized.
NONE, of this is a stab at the wonderful devs and porting studios who have been bringing us games. I am just not delusional to the reality we are in right now. I think it WILL get better. The graphics drivers need work and it will take time to work out some of the major kinks.
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Quoting: BillNyeTheBlackGuyStill bitter about the whole 32 bit thing huh?Nope. Still cool with my 32 bit system. And more than that, I have a big list of games I want to play on my 32 bit system. I guess, it takes me at least 2 or 3 years to play all linux games I've already bought. So, no crying and no grieving about a few games I can't play natively on linux. If I wanted I'd play XCOM. There is no problem to use Wine for that.
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Well… after reading comments on here and Phoronix, I think it's safe to say my next GPU will be AMD again. They need the money and I need the savings anyway. How about that freesync and the new open source driver? At this tipping point, I'd kick myself if/when Mantle comes to Linux and for whatever reason Nvidia can't or won't implement it.
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