Feral about AMD driver support

Reading through the Feral Interactive Facebook page, I stumbled upon this post, which is the most elaborate about the topic by Feral I know of about AMD support.

QuoteWe can also pass your query on to our devs in the hope one of them has a moment to answer, and we were lucky enough to snag a bored one on his lunch break. So here goes:

At Feral we target three different vendors on two different platforms so we have experience working on six different possible card and driver combinations (not counting the OpenSource AMD drivers which would make seven). This means we spend a lot of time working on code that is portable and can support specific options to work around around limitations on all the various hardware and software combinations when various setups are detected.

When asked, we've always been open about our support for different vendors and the reasons behind the support or lack of it. With recent games we have taken a large leap forward in the complexity of the title, meaning even on minimum settings features available in OpenGL 4.1 or in some cases 4.3 are requirements to be able to even load on the minimum settings.

This has meant we have been pushing the newer and less tested areas of the drivers to the maximum and unfortunately this means that in some cases we find either missing features (in the case of the MESA drivers) or some driver issues that need to be addressed which has been the case on AMD.

The actual issues we find are always interlinked and not as simple as X doesn’t work, but usually more subtle. E.g. in this specific instance of this spec this feature doesn’t work as intended, or when running feature X and feature Y at the same time then side effect Z will happen, so it’s not something simple that can be listed in bullet points. We are and always have been committed to supporting all vendors devices when possible and that goal has not changed.

However, as the MESA driver fix list is open and you seem to be interested in the technical side of things, here's an example of an issue we found in drivers that has been fixed but prevented a game we are working on from rendering correctly: Link

The source of the quote can be found under the question of Steffen Wnkr on this page: https://www.facebook.com/feralinteractive/photos/a.752000158157823.1073741829.118120444879134/1079022688788900/?type=3 Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.