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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I have an update. Feral emailed me and had me test a beta for them. It works. I ran quick benchmarks since i am in a DR test all week. I got avg 39.9fps @ 4k and avg 45fps at 2k. It could be better, but better than i thought it would be. I let them know my results and hopefully they will be able to tweak it a little and make it slightly faster. But hopefully by this weekend, i can actually play it.
This is with amd [email protected] and Nvidia GTX Titan.
BTW... Feral's Customer Service is top notch. I will be getting more from them in the future.
Last edited by doctorx on 3 August 2015 at 7:28 pm UTC
This is with amd [email protected] and Nvidia GTX Titan.
BTW... Feral's Customer Service is top notch. I will be getting more from them in the future.
Last edited by doctorx on 3 August 2015 at 7:28 pm UTC
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grabbed this the other day but had to wait for that huge download to start playing. got the base game plus dlc from season pass. been playing this the last couple of days and it's been totally worth it. one of my favorite games of all time.
i'm running manjaro on kernel 4.1.3 intel i5-3570K, GTX 780ti (352.30 drivers) , 16GB DDR3 and SSD.
on ultra settings i was benchmarking around 30 to 50fps but it crashed at the end of the benchmark, so i don't know the true average. on very high settings I average 72.33 fps. So that works and looks great.
Last edited by neowiz73 on 3 August 2015 at 8:00 pm UTC
i'm running manjaro on kernel 4.1.3 intel i5-3570K, GTX 780ti (352.30 drivers) , 16GB DDR3 and SSD.
on ultra settings i was benchmarking around 30 to 50fps but it crashed at the end of the benchmark, so i don't know the true average. on very high settings I average 72.33 fps. So that works and looks great.
Last edited by neowiz73 on 3 August 2015 at 8:00 pm UTC
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coryrj19951 Aug 3, 2015
Well on Mint 17 (AMD R9 270x) I seem to have eliminated crashes and sped it up, I dont know how much, but it is much smoother and I am running at my full resolution of 1600 x 900. By using the ShadowOfMordor.sh or just the binary to start the game to use my own system libs. No FPS counter because it isn't using steam to launch it though (Steam sill has to be running in the background for the game to work though)
While using Steam's libs I was crashing almost every time I played, about after I guess 20 minutes. Using my libs I haven't seen a crash yet, going for about 1.5 hours.
Great game and thanks Feral ^_^
EDIT: Hey! Theres a benchmark
, Running it with:
Steam Libs: Avg: 26, Max: 47, Min: 16
Mint Libs: Avg: 29, Max: 49, Min: 18
Ran a few times of each
Not as much as what I thought, but still less crashy for me, and I can still run at a higher resolution, so still a little better anyway.
Last edited by coryrj19951 on 3 August 2015 at 10:35 pm UTC
While using Steam's libs I was crashing almost every time I played, about after I guess 20 minutes. Using my libs I haven't seen a crash yet, going for about 1.5 hours.
Great game and thanks Feral ^_^
EDIT: Hey! Theres a benchmark
, Running it with:Steam Libs: Avg: 26, Max: 47, Min: 16
Mint Libs: Avg: 29, Max: 49, Min: 18
Ran a few times of each
Not as much as what I thought, but still less crashy for me, and I can still run at a higher resolution, so still a little better anyway.
Last edited by coryrj19951 on 3 August 2015 at 10:35 pm UTC
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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 ;-)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 ...
Ok so I did some testings and found a spot in the game where theses slowdowns are always happening, this allowed me to check my hdd led which is not blinking at all during the slowdowns, it looks therefore that this is not an hard drive loading issue... I also took a video of the slowdowns which are occurring whatever the settings (slowest or very high) ... View video on youtube.com
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As you can see here, the performance of SoM on linux compared to windows version is not good
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=mordor-win10-linux&num=3
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=mordor-win10-linux&num=3
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As you can see here, the performance of SoM on linux compared to windows version is not goodThose results are way too low for Linux. I'm getting better results than Michael with inferior hardware.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=mordor-win10-linux&num=3
I think Penguin Recording's video is more closer to the reality:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89G9qHrjS4A
Last edited by dubigrasu on 4 August 2015 at 9:55 pm UTC
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Ok so I did some testings and found a spot in the game where theses slowdowns are always happening, this allowed me to check my hdd led which is not blinking at all during the slowdowns, it looks therefore that this is not an hard drive loading issue... I also took a video of the slowdowns which are occurring whatever the settings (slowest or very high) ... View video on youtube.com
Right, I don't think it's a hard drive issue. I ran the game on Windows for several months using the same hard drive that my Linux install is using. The game probably just needs some more optimization. Let's hope it's not that OpenGL is just inferior or something like that.
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Seems as if it could be playable on my i7 with nvidia 760
Totally. It's playable on my i5 with nvidia 660.
I will go with medium settings, which seems fine according to the benchmarks, and see how far I'll come with it.
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Mohandevir Aug 6, 2015
You are right Dubigrasu. With the GTX 750, Phoronix gets an average of 18fps at High. I get 29.5 fps.
Personnal experience, I tried driver 352 from xorg-edger and got an avg of 29.8fps vs driver 346 (29.5 fps). The bad part is the lowest that drops to 11 fps (352) instead of 15 fps (346). Had a couple of slowdowns and I decided to revert back to 346 and purge Xorg-edger.
I even experienced slowdowns during the startup animations (Feral and WB logo).
Pretty weird behaviors...
Edit: Man I love this game! It's my #1 game. Stole the top spot from The Witcher 2.
Last edited by Mohandevir on 6 August 2015 at 12:55 pm UTC
Personnal experience, I tried driver 352 from xorg-edger and got an avg of 29.8fps vs driver 346 (29.5 fps). The bad part is the lowest that drops to 11 fps (352) instead of 15 fps (346). Had a couple of slowdowns and I decided to revert back to 346 and purge Xorg-edger.
I even experienced slowdowns during the startup animations (Feral and WB logo).
Pretty weird behaviors...
Edit: Man I love this game! It's my #1 game. Stole the top spot from The Witcher 2.
Last edited by Mohandevir on 6 August 2015 at 12:55 pm UTC
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Just to write comment no. 200 - Few days ago I bought the game on Feral store but I guess I won't be able to even play it because my spec is below minimum and according to Liam's and Samsai's benchmarks game won't be fluent on Low settings.
My spec - NVidia 540m, i5 2410m, 10GB RAM, Ubuntu 14.10.
If I manage to download the game and run it I will share my score.
I wish you (actually all of us :) ) that Witcher 3 will be ported to Linux. This will be #1 game for sure.
Last edited by wojtek88 on 6 August 2015 at 2:12 pm UTC
My spec - NVidia 540m, i5 2410m, 10GB RAM, Ubuntu 14.10.
If I manage to download the game and run it I will share my score.
Man I love this game! It's my #1 game. Stole the top spot from The Witcher 2.
I wish you (actually all of us :) ) that Witcher 3 will be ported to Linux. This will be #1 game for sure.
Last edited by wojtek88 on 6 August 2015 at 2:12 pm UTC
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Just to write comment no. 200
Just wanted to mention the same. 200 comments, over 20.000 reads - is this a record, Liam?
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You are right Dubigrasu. With the GTX 750, Phoronix gets an average of 18fps at High. I get 29.5 fps.Yeah, those results seemed weird to me, so I had to see test it myself:
View video on youtube.com
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What's with the healthy green glow and shorter trousers on the Uruk in the Windows benchmark? Most likely no real effect on the benchmark result but I guess if I was into Uruk legs or preferred them Hulk-coloured, I'd be a bit unhappy with the unequal treatment. Just look at the guys standing at the left and right edges in this grab from dubigrasu's video:
All kidding aside, I'd guess the clothing part is randomly picked from a couple of different models/textures, and the skin colour has to do with differences in shaders (lighting?). Maybe (a slight variation of) the smurf-effect Feral hinted at with older nvidia drivers?
EDIT: linked to larger image
Last edited by tuubi on 7 August 2015 at 4:04 pm UTC
All kidding aside, I'd guess the clothing part is randomly picked from a couple of different models/textures, and the skin colour has to do with differences in shaders (lighting?). Maybe (a slight variation of) the smurf-effect Feral hinted at with older nvidia drivers?
EDIT: linked to larger image
Last edited by tuubi on 7 August 2015 at 4:04 pm UTC
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What's with the healthy green glow and shorter trousers on the Uruk in the Windows benchmark? Most likely no real effect on the benchmark result but I guess if I was into Uruk legs or preferred them Hulk-coloured, I'd be a bit unhappy with the unequal treatment. Just look at the guys standing at the left and right edges in this grab from dubigrasu's video.There are slight differences every time you run the benchmark on both Windows and Linux. The settings in the video were at High on both systems, and you get those Uruk legs on Windows too.
I noticed that when trying to synchronize them, is sometimes the shorter pants, sometimes objects and most of the time barrel explosions and their debris trajectory are different.
No effect on results yes, I ran the benchmarks usually six times (or more when needed) and discarded highest and lowest results.
On the Linux side I tried multiple drivers; 352.09/352.30/355.06 with no visible difference.
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