Feral Interactive have released an absolute whopper—Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is now actually available for Linux. This is a seriously good game! Initial port report now included.
Warning: AMD and Intel cards are NOT supported. If you wish to play the game using an AMD graphics card, you should update your graphics driver to version Catalyst 15.7 or higher. You should be able to run the game without experiencing stability issues or graphical glitches, but you may still experience poor performance.
As a big fan of the Tolkien universe this pleases me beyond words, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to have a game of this calibre on Linux.
Shadow of Mordor is an open world, action RPG with some excellent graphics. It has easy to manage combat with several fun abilities, parkour climbing (think Assassin's Creed) and a very interesting boss system.
The “Nemesis” system is the real killer in this game, as you have Uruk captains that command a bunch of soldiers, and defeating them can give you special upgrades. However, if they defeat you, they will get a lot stronger. This makes dying more interesting to the point of making you be careful about who you go after.
You can also have random events that happen between captains, as there’s a lot of in-fighting in the Uruk camps. You can chose to take part in these events, and favour one captain over another. There’s lots of fun little quests like that, and it’s part of what makes me love the game.
We will be giving it the full review, and no doubt the GOL Cast treatment on this one as it’s such a big (and extremely satisfying) title. Just give us some time to pump some hours into it to get a real feel for how it is.
We are downloading it now, please wait for the port report to be done. Feral kindly gave me a key, so we just need my internet to go into overdrive.
The early port report
Intel i5 4670k, Nvidia 970, 16GB RAM, 1080p resolution
Performance on Ultra was quite smooth, ranging from 40-70FPS, but sadly after a while it did crash to the desktop. Booting it up again gave me an error message that suggested I revert to lower settings. This is expected, as Ultra needs a lot of VRAM, and more than the Nvidia 970 has. I guess I need to invest in something even better...
Trying it on one notch below at Very High was fine performance wise, but I still encountered a crash bug. I was killed by a captain, and afterwards it refused to show me the captain screen where they move about and level up, so I had to force quit it. I have not since been able to reproduce it.
FPS wise on Very High settings it gave me a minimum of 46FPS and I saw it top off at 100FPS when not being able to see much going on, but the average is around 50-60FPS. It’s very much playable for the 970 on Very High, and that has me rather happy, as it looks fantastic.
What I do find very interesting, is that the game will seamlessly switch the on-screen prompts between gamepad and keyboard depending on what you last pressed. I’ve never seen that before, and it’s really quite a nifty little feature.
The game isn’t kidding about full controller support either, as my Logitech F310 has been utterly flawless. It’s incredibly responsive, and I couldn’t imagine playing it with the mouse.
For a brand new AAA game on Linux, to have only one real crash bug in two hours of testing is pretty incredible. The wait was worth it for sure!
Intel i5 4670k, Nvidia 560ti, 16GB RAM, 1080p resolution - For lower end users.
On very high settings the game was giving me an average of 20FPS, so it wasn’t playable at all.
On High settings it was between 27-36FPS, even with it dropping below 30FPS it was still surprisingly playable, not perfect, but still reasonable for such a demanding game. I know people will argue with me on it, but if the FPS counter was off, I wouldn’t be able to tell personally. It did crash once while alt+tabbed to the desktop, so that could be a window manager or driver issue.
On Medium settings there wasn’t much difference at all to high settings. It stayed around 30FPS a bit longer than on high settings, but it never went lower or higher than it did on High.
I would say it’s perfectly playable on Medium/High on a 560ti, so that should give the lower end guys something to go by performance wise. It’s worth noting that Mordor is only supported on Nvidia 6xx and up, so this lower card I tested is below their minimum requirements.
On Low settings the game went between 41-60FPS, with it mainly being around 50FPS. I honestly think the game still looks visually pleasing on Low settings, and it's a perfectly playable FPS for a rather old card now.
About the game (From Steam)
Fight through Mordor and uncover the truth of the spirit that compels you, discover the origins of the Rings of Power, build your legend and ultimately confront the evil of Sauron in this new chronicle of Middle-earth.
System Requirements
OS: Ubuntu 14.04.2 64-bit / SteamOS
Processor: 2.6 GHz
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: 1GB NVIDIA 640 or better with driver version 352.21 or later
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 47 GB available space
RECOMMENDED:
OS: Ubuntu 14.04.2 64-bit / SteamOS
Processor: 3.4 GHz Intel
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: 4GB NVIDIA 9xx series card or better with driver version 352.21 or later
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 47 GB available space
Check out Shadow of Mordor on Steam now.
You can also get it directly from the Feral Interactive store, and support their porting directly.
If you pick it up, be sure to come back and tell us how it runs for you and include your system specifications so we can get a rough idea.
You have my sword Feral, and my axe. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Warning: AMD and Intel cards are NOT supported. If you wish to play the game using an AMD graphics card, you should update your graphics driver to version Catalyst 15.7 or higher. You should be able to run the game without experiencing stability issues or graphical glitches, but you may still experience poor performance.
As a big fan of the Tolkien universe this pleases me beyond words, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to have a game of this calibre on Linux.
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Shadow of Mordor is an open world, action RPG with some excellent graphics. It has easy to manage combat with several fun abilities, parkour climbing (think Assassin's Creed) and a very interesting boss system.
The “Nemesis” system is the real killer in this game, as you have Uruk captains that command a bunch of soldiers, and defeating them can give you special upgrades. However, if they defeat you, they will get a lot stronger. This makes dying more interesting to the point of making you be careful about who you go after.
You can also have random events that happen between captains, as there’s a lot of in-fighting in the Uruk camps. You can chose to take part in these events, and favour one captain over another. There’s lots of fun little quests like that, and it’s part of what makes me love the game.
We will be giving it the full review, and no doubt the GOL Cast treatment on this one as it’s such a big (and extremely satisfying) title. Just give us some time to pump some hours into it to get a real feel for how it is.
We are downloading it now, please wait for the port report to be done. Feral kindly gave me a key, so we just need my internet to go into overdrive.
The early port report
Intel i5 4670k, Nvidia 970, 16GB RAM, 1080p resolution
Performance on Ultra was quite smooth, ranging from 40-70FPS, but sadly after a while it did crash to the desktop. Booting it up again gave me an error message that suggested I revert to lower settings. This is expected, as Ultra needs a lot of VRAM, and more than the Nvidia 970 has. I guess I need to invest in something even better...
Trying it on one notch below at Very High was fine performance wise, but I still encountered a crash bug. I was killed by a captain, and afterwards it refused to show me the captain screen where they move about and level up, so I had to force quit it. I have not since been able to reproduce it.
FPS wise on Very High settings it gave me a minimum of 46FPS and I saw it top off at 100FPS when not being able to see much going on, but the average is around 50-60FPS. It’s very much playable for the 970 on Very High, and that has me rather happy, as it looks fantastic.
What I do find very interesting, is that the game will seamlessly switch the on-screen prompts between gamepad and keyboard depending on what you last pressed. I’ve never seen that before, and it’s really quite a nifty little feature.
The game isn’t kidding about full controller support either, as my Logitech F310 has been utterly flawless. It’s incredibly responsive, and I couldn’t imagine playing it with the mouse.
For a brand new AAA game on Linux, to have only one real crash bug in two hours of testing is pretty incredible. The wait was worth it for sure!
Intel i5 4670k, Nvidia 560ti, 16GB RAM, 1080p resolution - For lower end users.
On very high settings the game was giving me an average of 20FPS, so it wasn’t playable at all.
On High settings it was between 27-36FPS, even with it dropping below 30FPS it was still surprisingly playable, not perfect, but still reasonable for such a demanding game. I know people will argue with me on it, but if the FPS counter was off, I wouldn’t be able to tell personally. It did crash once while alt+tabbed to the desktop, so that could be a window manager or driver issue.
On Medium settings there wasn’t much difference at all to high settings. It stayed around 30FPS a bit longer than on high settings, but it never went lower or higher than it did on High.
I would say it’s perfectly playable on Medium/High on a 560ti, so that should give the lower end guys something to go by performance wise. It’s worth noting that Mordor is only supported on Nvidia 6xx and up, so this lower card I tested is below their minimum requirements.
On Low settings the game went between 41-60FPS, with it mainly being around 50FPS. I honestly think the game still looks visually pleasing on Low settings, and it's a perfectly playable FPS for a rather old card now.
About the game (From Steam)
Fight through Mordor and uncover the truth of the spirit that compels you, discover the origins of the Rings of Power, build your legend and ultimately confront the evil of Sauron in this new chronicle of Middle-earth.
System Requirements
OS: Ubuntu 14.04.2 64-bit / SteamOS
Processor: 2.6 GHz
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: 1GB NVIDIA 640 or better with driver version 352.21 or later
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 47 GB available space
RECOMMENDED:
OS: Ubuntu 14.04.2 64-bit / SteamOS
Processor: 3.4 GHz Intel
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: 4GB NVIDIA 9xx series card or better with driver version 352.21 or later
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 47 GB available space
Check out Shadow of Mordor on Steam now.
You can also get it directly from the Feral Interactive store, and support their porting directly.
If you pick it up, be sure to come back and tell us how it runs for you and include your system specifications so we can get a rough idea.
You have my sword Feral, and my axe. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Quoting: ColoneilAnyone else also getting framerate drops sometime? I have a GTX 960 on steamos and getting an average of 60fps on high settings in the benchmark but for some reason sometimes the games really slow down for a few seconds ...
I've tried to pinpoint a particular setting that might be causing it, but I can't find one. It also seems to happen randomly. You can do the same action twice and might not get the same fps drop.
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Mohandevir Aug 3, 2015
My system is an i7-2600 with a GTX-750ti on Ubuntu 15.04 with driver 346.59.
Using the in-game performance test, I get the following results:
Low:
13.38/68.18 (42.56avg)
Middle:
14.40/54.35 (30.11avg)
High:
13.37/52.95 (29.58avg)
I've played for 2 hours without any problems.
Much better than I expected. I really enjoy this game. Thank you Feral!
Last edited by Mohandevir on 3 August 2015 at 12:49 am UTC
Using the in-game performance test, I get the following results:
Low:
13.38/68.18 (42.56avg)
Middle:
14.40/54.35 (30.11avg)
High:
13.37/52.95 (29.58avg)
I've played for 2 hours without any problems.
Much better than I expected. I really enjoy this game. Thank you Feral!
Last edited by Mohandevir on 3 August 2015 at 12:49 am UTC
1 Likes, Who?
Quoting: melkemindQuoting: ColoneilAnyone else also getting framerate drops sometime? I have a GTX 960 on steamos and getting an average of 60fps on high settings in the benchmark but for some reason sometimes the games really slow down for a few seconds ...
I've tried to pinpoint a particular setting that might be causing it, but I can't find one. It also seems to happen randomly. You can do the same action twice and might not get the same fps drop.
Yep, seems random to me too. Maybe texture loading in the graphic card ram? I only have a 2Gb card and 4Gb is recommended, what about you? Any comment on this from the (still awesome) feral guys appreciated ;-)
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Quoting: ColoneilYep, seems random to me too. Maybe texture loading in the graphic card ram? I only have a 2Gb card and 4Gb is recommended, what about you? Any comment on this from the (still awesome) feral guys appreciated ;-)According to a random website, the official vmem requirement for the game at 1080p is 2 gigs for the Medium texture quality setting and 4 GiB for High. 6 GiB for Ultra when the hd texture pack is installed. No mention of the effect of other settings, but I got the impression that this is with at least reasonable AA.
Seems a bit memory hungry to me.
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metro2033fanboy Aug 3, 2015
Quoting: tuubiQuoting: ColoneilYep, seems random to me too. Maybe texture loading in the graphic card ram? I only have a 2Gb card and 4Gb is recommended, what about you? Any comment on this from the (still awesome) feral guys appreciated ;-)According to a random website, the official vmem requirement for the game at 1080p is 2 gigs for the Medium texture quality setting and 4 GiB for High. 6 GiB for Ultra when the hd texture pack is installed. No mention of the effect of other settings, but I got the impression that this is with at least reasonable AA.
Seems a bit memory hungry to me.
Next Gen game boy! next gen!!
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Quoting: tuubiAccording to a random website, the official vmem requirement for the game at 1080p is 2 gigs for the Medium texture quality setting and 4 GiB for High. 6 GiB for Ultra when the hd texture pack is installed. No mention of the effect of other settings, but I got the impression that this is with at least reasonable AA.
The game states these itself when changing texture quality (box on right side).
AFAIR it doesn't state a resolution, but I guess that only could be 1080p.
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coryrj19951 Aug 3, 2015
Woohoo! It finally finished downloading :D ! It runs mostly around 30 fps for me with jumps up to high 40's to low 50's with everything low. R9 270x 2GB. Hopefully they can get it a little better on AMD cards though, but perfectly playable for me ^_^
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Quoting: metro2033fanboyNext Gen game boy! next gen!!Funny being called a "boy" by someone with fanboy in his nick. ;) On the other hand it's refreshing to see you post something that doesn't end with "FTW" for a change.
Anyway, the term "next gen" obviously has very little meaning in PC gaming. There are plenty of mid- to high end video cards on the market with much less than 6GiB of memory. And I bet there will be for quite a while.
Quoting: eikeThe game states these itself when changing texture quality (box on right side).Thanks. Nice of the developers to have it visible in the UI. I had no idea as I don't own the game yet.
AFAIR it doesn't state a resolution, but I guess that only could be 1080p.
EDIT: answered eike as well
Last edited by tuubi on 3 August 2015 at 3:13 pm UTC
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This game is really great. I've played nearly 15 hours over the weekend and I'm loving every minute of it. I've got it running maxed (except motion blur, because yuck) at 1440p with the Ultra HD textures DLC and for the most part I can keep it VSYNCed at 60 FPS with my i7-4790K (@4.7 GHz) and Titan X and it runs smooth as butter. There are moments where it will stutter or freeze for a second, probably loading textures, but those moments are very rare (I've only noticed it a handful of times in the entire 15 or so hours I've played). I guess the ridiculous VRAM on my overpriced card finally paid off for something. :P
Last edited by Keyrock on 3 August 2015 at 4:17 pm UTC
Last edited by Keyrock on 3 August 2015 at 4:17 pm UTC
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Quoting: tuubiQuoting: ColoneilYep, seems random to me too. Maybe texture loading in the graphic card ram? I only have a 2Gb card and 4Gb is recommended, what about you? Any comment on this from the (still awesome) feral guys appreciated ;-)According to a random website, the official vmem requirement for the game at 1080p is 2 gigs for the Medium texture quality setting and 4 GiB for High. 6 GiB for Ultra when the hd texture pack is installed. No mention of the effect of other settings, but I got the impression that this is with at least reasonable AA.
Seems a bit memory hungry to me.
This is really weird, I tried the game with the lowest settings and still getting the slow downs. I'm starting to think of my hard drive being to slow when loading things ... ??? I will have to investigate tomorrow ...
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