Thanks to the about page on Virtual Programming's official store, we have found out that they are the mystery external porter of Arma 3 that should see a Linux release.
On the about page it says this:
QuoteThe company is responsible for bringing many exciting titles to the Mac and Linux during the past several years, including: Bioshock Infinite (Linux), SpecOps The Line (Mac and Linux), Dirt Showdown (Mac and Linux), Arma 3 (Mac and Linux) and many others.
Facts done, now some thoughts
I have mixed feelings about Virtual Programming ports in general, but I really do want to like them. The problem is even after fixing up their porting technology to perform well, I get crash bugs in all of their games. Performance is one thing, stability is another. BioShock Infinite has crashed for me on every play-through for just one example, and I can't currently bring myself to load it up again and lose progress. I did report the issue here back in April, and no progress since then.
I was also okay with it being older games, when the developer maybe didn't have the time or resources to port it themselves, but this is a game that is still being worked on. The main problem is how graphically intensive the game is, and not to put down the stellar work Virtual Programming has done in bringing performance up a lot in their eON porting tech (really good improvements!), we need all the performance we can squeeze on a rather heavy game like Arma 3. There is an overhead on their wrapper, that is undeniable.
What are your thoughts? Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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LinuxGamesTV 2 Aug 2015
Valve shows how to do it. Valve indeed put a wrapper, but sitting in the Engine and then Valve turn it into a native port.
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Valve shows how to do it. Valve indeed put a wrapper, but sitting in the Engine and then Valve turn it into a native port.Yes, eON, Togl, Indirectx and native...whatever the method used to port them, just port them.
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Arma3 is a verry CPU-limited game as it is right now, using a wrapper will only make it worse, be prepared to get cpu-bottlenecked on haswell i7's
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Mountain Man 2 Aug 2015
While I think it's a nice idea to bring older games to SteamOS (especially when some of those games are already in my library), I would like to see more effort put into the future so that it's just a given that every new release is available for the "Big Three" (Linux, OSX, and Windows).
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I haven't played it personally, not my cup of tea, but it is pretty much legendary as to how baddly CPU bottlenecked it is. Somebody thought it would be a great idea to make a multi-player oriented game with huge open spaces run on a single core. What could go wrong? So, be prepared to a crappy performance no matter who does the port.
Last edited by mao_dze_dun on 2 Aug 2015 at 10:19 pm UTC
Last edited by mao_dze_dun on 2 Aug 2015 at 10:19 pm UTC
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Vp ports will always sell worse than a native ones. This is due to a bad performanse in general, harder to resolve bugs and demand for a better and expensivier hardware from clients. Yes it's easier, cheaper and faster to port, but on long term it's not worth.
I would't be suprised if Arma 3 will be a total fail on linux/steamos.
I would't be suprised if Arma 3 will be a total fail on linux/steamos.
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supermonkey77 2 Aug 2015
Edit..... I now feel a smidge sheepish. Made a mistake regarding openGL. Did a bit more research and realised my statement was a bit off
Last edited by supermonkey77 on 3 Aug 2015 at 9:25 am UTC
Last edited by supermonkey77 on 3 Aug 2015 at 9:25 am UTC
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Mountain Man 2 Aug 2015
The problem isn't OpenGL, the problem is trying to port a DirectX game to OpenGL. Games coded for OpenGL in the first place tend to have identical performance across platforms.
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StianTheDark 3 Aug 2015
The point where we blame OpenGL is when we have run out of defence ;) OpenGL is infact (when ran on Windows) identical to DirectX performance.
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I have no problem with VP and their ports. Bioshock and The Witcher 2 ran extremely well on my system and I have only mid-range specs. Not one crash nor one freeze.
After a rocky start, they are doing a great job and we should support them rather than complain about this or that.
After a rocky start, they are doing a great job and we should support them rather than complain about this or that.
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rustybroomhandle 3 Aug 2015
Just chiming in to say that I have three games now that use this wrapper, and all of them look/run great on my system. There are obviously people that do have issues with it, but there's Steam refunds for that now.
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The point where we blame OpenGL is when we have run out of defence ;) OpenGL is infact (when ran on Windows) identical to DirectX performance.You made me curious so I ran Unigine Valley on both Windows & Linux.
Ultra, 1920x1080, AA 4X
Results by score, min/avg/max FPS :
W DX11 = 3222, 30, 77, 148
W DX 9 = 2916. 29, 69,165
W GL = 2905, 32, 69, 124
L GL = 2743, 35, 65, 109
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Mountain Man 4 Aug 2015
So what does that prove? That OpenGL and Linux are inferior, or that Unigine is optimzed for DirectX and Windows?The point where we blame OpenGL is when we have run out of defence ;) OpenGL is infact (when ran on Windows) identical to DirectX performance.You made me curious so I ran Unigine Valley on both Windows & Linux.
Ultra, 1920x1080, AA 4X
Results by score, min/avg/max FPS :
W DX11 = 3222, 30, 77, 148
W DX 9 = 2916. 29, 69,165
W GL = 2905, 32, 69, 124
L GL = 2743, 35, 65, 109
On the other hand, X-Plane 10 which doesn't contain a single line of DirectX or other proprietary, platform specific code runs identically regardless of platform. In fact, in some test cases, it actually runs slightly faster in Linux
Last edited by Mountain Man on 4 Aug 2015 at 9:55 am UTC
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So what does that prove? That OpenGL and Linux are inferior, or that Unigine is optimzed for DirectX and Windows?The point where we blame OpenGL is when we have run out of defence ;) OpenGL is infact (when ran on Windows) identical to DirectX performance.You made me curious so I ran Unigine Valley on both Windows & Linux.
Ultra, 1920x1080, AA 4X
Results by score, min/avg/max FPS :
W DX11 = 3222, 30, 77, 148
W DX 9 = 2916. 29, 69,165
W GL = 2905, 32, 69, 124
L GL = 2743, 35, 65, 109
On the other hand, X-Plane 10 which doesn't contain a single line of DirectX or other proprietary, platform specific code runs identically regardless of platform. In fact, in some test cases, it actually runs slightly faster in Linux
It wasn't meant to prove anything. Does it need to prove anything?
Is only what I said, I was curious, made some benchmarks and posted the results for anyone curious like me.
Do you have a problem with that?
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Still curious about OpenGL performance on both systems, so now that I resurrected the Windows install I made a comparison benchmark:
View video on youtube.com
Last edited by dubigrasu on 6 Aug 2015 at 2:09 pm UTC
View video on youtube.com
Last edited by dubigrasu on 6 Aug 2015 at 2:09 pm UTC
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