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We know how some of you feel about wrappers, but that's an old argument now. The game is here, and the developers are still working on improving it. The Witcher 2 had a new beta a few days ago, and we took a look at just how much of an improvement it is.
I have to say this, but I am shocked at this new beta. The improvement is actually quite staggering! Testing around the same area on 1080p with high settings gives me ~20FPS more and it's astonishing how far Virtual Programming's eON has come.
The announcement (scroll down a bit) is copied below:
You can get into the new beta by selecting it from right click on the game -> properties, beta tab, and selecting it from the drop-down.
One issue to note is that there is a bit of micro-stutter at times, but unless you're trying hard to notice is, you probably won't. It doesn't happen often it seems either in my testing.
This has quite literally changed my views on it, and has made me actually think about properly playing it for the first time ever. Honestly, I would now be surprised if I got much more FPS on Windows now.
You can see screens below of the new beta first, and the old stable last with the FPS counter in the corner showing the improvement at the same place, and it will shock you too:
Once they fix up any remaining issues with the new beta and pop it to the stable branch, we may even recommend people try it out, and we certainly recommend you try the beta if you already own it, wow.
It will be very interesting to see how their next port is received now. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I have to say this, but I am shocked at this new beta. The improvement is actually quite staggering! Testing around the same area on 1080p with high settings gives me ~20FPS more and it's astonishing how far Virtual Programming's eON has come.
The announcement (scroll down a bit) is copied below:
Quote24 Jan 2015 20:50 GMT
Latest Beta - BuildID 503099
A bit of a refresh here. We've worked more on our Direct3D 9 engine since the last beta, so everything we've done there has gone into this patch. Hopefully, that means better performance too!
We've also resolved the constant crashing on exit, removed our dependancy on libcurl, and we now ship a new CrashReporter which, while still using libcurl, should work with a variety of different versions as shipped by the many distro's out there.
We've also added a fix for the crashing caused on kernel 3.17.7 and later, even though the kernel maintainers have already agreed to amend the patch that caused the problem - it is better if our behaviour avoids the issue in the first place :)
Test and let us know how things are...
You can get into the new beta by selecting it from right click on the game -> properties, beta tab, and selecting it from the drop-down.
One issue to note is that there is a bit of micro-stutter at times, but unless you're trying hard to notice is, you probably won't. It doesn't happen often it seems either in my testing.
This has quite literally changed my views on it, and has made me actually think about properly playing it for the first time ever. Honestly, I would now be surprised if I got much more FPS on Windows now.
You can see screens below of the new beta first, and the old stable last with the FPS counter in the corner showing the improvement at the same place, and it will shock you too:
Once they fix up any remaining issues with the new beta and pop it to the stable branch, we may even recommend people try it out, and we certainly recommend you try the beta if you already own it, wow.
It will be very interesting to see how their next port is received now. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Just did a quick try of the new beta, and it was almost unplayable (on i7-4790k at 4.6 GHz and GTX770 4GB). The framerate was good, the stuttering is just really bad.Try enabling gl threaded optimizations as discussed previously in this thread. Seems to solve the problem for me.
I hope you reported the stuttering on their github, otherwise they can't fix what they don't know about.I will, as soon as I find the time for some more testing. Then again, maybe someone like ricki42 will beat me to it, as I don't seem to be the only one affected.
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I wish I did to compare, but sadly I don't have Windows. Hopefully someone else can check.
but, what you could you could at least issue apologies to eON based how you were throwing everything at them at the start. you claimed how eON having port is the worst thing ever since they never fix problems. as it looks it is one company that is really fixated on that. most companies would stop as soon as users were satisfied. eON just keeps fixing and improving.
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nice - please test on, and let us know your results on github
https://github.com/KillaW0lf04/The-Witcher-2-Issues/issues/1
- that is where the developers are watching!
https://github.com/KillaW0lf04/The-Witcher-2-Issues/issues/1
- that is where the developers are watching!
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Speaking of actually playing, does anyone know a good and concise walk-through of the first Witcher's plot? Or if it runs well on WINE? Witcher 2 looks great, but I'm pretty lost in this world.
It runs very well in Wine. Don't ruin it by watching plot videos. Play the game itself!
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Honestly, I finished the Witcher 2 on High Spec settings on Linux.
With the beta patch, I can now max everything except Ubersampling (which, I think I'll never ever enable :p)
With the beta patch, I can now max everything except Ubersampling (which, I think I'll never ever enable :p)
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FutureSuture 28 Jan 2015
Nice! I can't wait to try out the beta. And here's the thing: I really don't care how games are ported from Windows to Linux as long as they are. I just have a problem with games being buggy and unplayable like the first release of The Witcher 2 for Linux. But as Dying Light shows: Native Ports aren't immune to being bad ports. It just so happens, that Aspyr and Feral have been doing really good work with their ports and some others just didn't. But it seems some of them are getting there.
And we shouldn't forget: All Linux ports are done for the release of SteamOS / Steam Machines. So from their point of view they still have time to deliver.
Indeed @pmk1c, the Dying Light port has put things firmly into perspective for me, wrappers aren't bad by default, and Virtual Programming are now starting to really prove themselves.To be fair, Dying Light has shown to have absolutely terrible performance on Windows as well. That, plus it is not even a port as Chrome Engine 6 supports Linux natively and the game released for both Linux and Windows on the same day. What Dying Light appears to be is an extremely buggy game that happens to also be on Linux, whereas The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is a game that works great on Windows but was wrapped up quite poorly for Linux. The two are not really comparable in my eyes.
Considering how terrible Dying Light is...well now, things are a bit different around here.
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Speaking of actually playing, does anyone know a good and concise walk-through of the first Witcher's plot? Or if it runs well on WINE?It runs ok in Wine but you might have to restart the game several times until there is no graphical bug (half-transparent characters and stuff). The trick is to look at the crows on the main menu; if they are there it’s working, if not you need to restart.
Hmmm I read about this issue but never had this problem (it might be an Nvidia issue?). I ran a recent version of Wine using Play On Linux (1.7 something) with CSMT and MESA, and it ran flawlessly without a hitch.
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on fedora 21 its still a no go, the game crashes before it starts, the crash report does'nt work, the option menu freezes and requires a reboot to get rid of.
this is the 4th time i downloaded the game in a year's time , only to get dissapointed within 2 minutes of completing the download.
kinda fed up with it, really annoying
this is the 4th time i downloaded the game in a year's time , only to get dissapointed within 2 minutes of completing the download.
kinda fed up with it, really annoying
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Just did a quick try of the new beta, and it was almost unplayable (on i7-4790k at 4.6 GHz and GTX770 4GB). The framerate was good, the stuttering is just really bad.Try enabling gl threaded optimizations as discussed previously in this thread. Seems to solve the problem for me.
That definitely helped, the mouse input is fine now. Turning v-sync on also helped, it's still stuttering a bit, but not so bad.
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This is incredibly good news, and Virtual Programming has made tremendous progress. I know my issues lie elsewhere (NVidia...) but as an owner of GTX660 SLI, I can't quite move my Witcher 2 installation to my Gentoo OS yet. In Windows 7 with ultra settings and uber-sampling, I maintain 45-55 fps avg. With uber-sampling off, it shoots to 100fps. Co'mon now, NVidia (and OpenGL).
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This is incredibly good news, and Virtual Programming has made tremendous progress. I know my issues lie elsewhere (NVidia...) but as an owner of GTX660 SLI, I can't quite move my Witcher 2 installation to my Gentoo OS yet. In Windows 7 with ultra settings and uber-sampling, I maintain 45-55 fps avg. With uber-sampling off, it shoots to 100fps. Co'mon now, NVidia (and OpenGL).
What FPS do you get on Gentoo then?
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They've really come a long way with that wrapper - the new release is a surprise, thought they'd given up. I might have to start this game again. I was really enjoying it, but the threat of randomly crashing just killed it for me. For now I'm kinda burned out on RPGs after playing DA:Inquisition.
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So I indeed had to restart a couple times, but other than that Witcher 1 runs very well, and I'm really enjoying it. However, I do wish it was a shorter game; I wanna get to the pretty sequel with the refined mechanics :D
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Last time I tried I only hit 20fps, let's see in the eve' how this is after the patch.
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View video on youtube.com
At times in some busy areas it briefly drops to around 50 FPS, but most of the time goes around 100 FPS.
At times in some busy areas it briefly drops to around 50 FPS, but most of the time goes around 100 FPS.
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How can I determine if I use correct version of the Witcher 2? I've already had linux_public_beta selected in betas tab, there is no other beta that I can select and there was no big update downloaded by steam. Is there somewhere any information about game version?
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How can I determine if I use correct version of the Witcher 2? I've already had linux_public_beta selected in betas tab, there is no other beta that I can select and there was no big update downloaded by steam. Is there somewhere any information about game version?
In the properties, there's a build number: RMB, properties, local files. Mine shows: 503570.
The last but one update was a very small one with big impact, by the way. So perhaps, the last one was as well.
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oldrocker99 3 Feb 2015
I was as dismayed as the next guy at the first release of VP's eON wrapper, but VP has worked diligently to improve it, to the point where the game ran very well indeed with their last patch. If they've improved it since then, HUZZAH!
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I have Witcher 2 build 503570, but I see a lot of crashes. If I turn the settings to "high", I'm able to start the game, and start loading a save, but it seems once the save loads (the spinning snake at the bottom right stops), I never leave the load screen, and the loading music plays indefinitely.
I put the settings on medium, and it worked, but I got the stuttering every few seconds and it's very noticeable and extremely annoying. From the posts I've read here, I think people are seeing varying amounts of stuttering. The amount of stuttering I see and how bad the stutters are would make the game unplayable for most if not all people I think.
I set the launch options in steam to "__GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1 %command%", the game starts up but now I can't even load my saves even on medium settings (same exact symptoms as above).
However, maybe my issues are in fact driver related. I have GTX 980 and nvidia drivers 346.35. Is anyone else having trouble with a Maxwell based GPU and/or the same (or close) driver revision?
My specs aren't exactly low end, so the stutter isn't related to my hardware. Here's my specs for reference:
i7 5960x
GTX 980
32GB ram
Kernel 3.18.5
I'm going to try an older kernel when I have some time, maybe the kernel related issue (something related to the LDT, right?) hasn't been entirely fixed (neither in the game nor on the kernel side).
I put the settings on medium, and it worked, but I got the stuttering every few seconds and it's very noticeable and extremely annoying. From the posts I've read here, I think people are seeing varying amounts of stuttering. The amount of stuttering I see and how bad the stutters are would make the game unplayable for most if not all people I think.
I set the launch options in steam to "__GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1 %command%", the game starts up but now I can't even load my saves even on medium settings (same exact symptoms as above).
However, maybe my issues are in fact driver related. I have GTX 980 and nvidia drivers 346.35. Is anyone else having trouble with a Maxwell based GPU and/or the same (or close) driver revision?
My specs aren't exactly low end, so the stutter isn't related to my hardware. Here's my specs for reference:
i7 5960x
GTX 980
32GB ram
Kernel 3.18.5
I'm going to try an older kernel when I have some time, maybe the kernel related issue (something related to the LDT, right?) hasn't been entirely fixed (neither in the game nor on the kernel side).
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