Looks like Shadow of Mordor has bad graphical bugs with Nvidia 364.12

oops :P yeah I've been using 364.12 myself. haven't seen anything like that yet though. maybe they should just upgrade it to vulkan :P
it would be interesting to test out.

Well, If they decide to change to Vulkan, possibly they will need to rewrite entire program because of the API architectural difference (opengl4 stands against dx11 as vulkan stands against dx12) and imho this is work for the original developers and not for Feral (which probably doesn't have permission to change so much source code) since Vulkan also works in Windows and overall costs will be less, basically two (or more) platforms at the price of one.

Probably this bug is a buffer allocation conflict and not so hard to fix since character renders comes apart from world and objects render.

I ran into this Shadow of Mordor rendering bug on nVidia 364 drivers just last night in Ubuntu 15.10, also! Glad to see it made the news here on GoL, so it's not just me that is having some arcane problem only happening with my Linux PC. Which probably means all I'll have to do to fix it is wait for a patch from Feral - which sounds better than having to roll back my nVidia driver.


Last edited by Halifax on 29 March 2016 at 4:30 am UTC

supporting only closed source drivers, is of course better than nothing, but is should never considered a job well done that does not need fix.

This example demonstrate why.

On mine radeon with open source drivers has the same problem. Ghostly body :P

So... what now? ¿^^

That’s exactly the point: testing on non-nvidia drivers could have shown this application bug. (I say "could" because maybe there were other genuine non-nvidia drivers issues that prevented playing…)

That is a theory but it's incorrect, let me provide a little detail for you all. :-) We support Intel, AMD and Nvidia on Mac & Linux OpenGL whenever possible and during development all cards and platforms get tested (so we know what can be supported and what can't). When we come up against bugs and issues we make sure they are logged with the driver teams be that open or closed source.

For Mordor we shipped with AMD, Intel and Nvidia support on Mac and only Nvidia support on Linux due to some driver issues we uncovered during development and testing of the game on our various machines.

In summary:

AMD/Intel Mesa - Was missing a huge number of features when the game was in development, the list of features missing now is much smaller but the missing items are still critical ones that cause floating heads, missing weather etc due to lack of compute & tessellation shaders. Some of these no longer occur with the latest Mesa drivers (due to Tessellation being added) but come key items like weather and killer bees won't render without compute.

AMD Closed - This game was the first game to heavily use OpenGL 4.3+ for key features that cannot be disabled, we found a number of issues with the drivers during development that needed to be fixed before we could support the game. We worked with AMD prior to release and the drivers have improved a lot since then however there are still some issues left open on specific setups however many modern setups now run the game without graphical or stability issues.

The issue that was uncovered in the new Nvidia driver was a minor bug that existed briefly on our Linux build around the time of the Mordor release that was benign (i.e. it exhibited no symptoms or errors in the game) but was not technically to spec. This is separate to the bug seen on AMD Mesa which is caused by some OpenGL features being missing from the Mesa driver on Mordor's release.

Now the issue is no longer benign due to driver updates we have a patch in progress to fix the issue, Nvidia told us about it prior to the driver launch and we started on a patching the game which is in progress right now, if people with these drivers who are effected contact Feral support we can keep them updated on the status of this patch.

Thanks again to everyone who bought Mordor on Linux you're all awesome :D


Last edited by edddeduck_feral on 29 March 2016 at 8:29 am UTC

"Heads up"

HAH. :|

supporting only closed source drivers, is of course better than nothing, but is should never considered a job well done that does not need fix.

This example demonstrate why.

It didn't run all that well on closed source drivers anyway. I found the framerate drops made it unplayable.

Sorry to hear that :( most people found the game ran great (based on the feedback we gained) although as with all software some people did seem to have some issues.

We solved the majority of initial issues via support did you ever contact Feral's support so we could look into your exact issue?

Finally to everyone reading this post please note feedback is really key to making our games better so if you have a problem please make sure you contact our support via email as that allows us to get more detail (and ask follow up questions) that allow us to improve our games and in some cases the graphics drivers for Linux as well. This leads to better games and better drivers for everyone :)


Last edited by edddeduck_feral on 29 March 2016 at 8:33 am UTC

Will check that today. Looks cool, and I have 364.12 driver installed at the moment.

We'll see if it will be fixed. If it's an application bug, I'm pretty sure Feral will act. At the moment, it runs perfectly fine on the majority of machines. Well, except for SteamOS and Archlinux which seem to be the only distributions shipping the new drivers :D.

We'll see if it will be fixed. If it's an application bug, I'm pretty sure Feral will act.

Did you miss edddeduck's posts? They "have a patch in progress to fix the issue". So I guess it's a safe bet they'll act. :)

Yep, I did mention we have a patch in progress that fixes the issue. :-)

Edwin


Last edited by edddeduck_feral on 29 March 2016 at 9:09 am UTC

Edwin, I will just say that I will buy Shadow Of Mordor (has been eyeing it for some time now) just because of community support and communication like this. Thanks. Keep being awesome.

Edwin, I will just say that I will buy Shadow Of Mordor (has been eyeing it for some time now) just because of community support and communication like this. Thanks. Keep being awesome.

Thanks :)

oops :P yeah I've been using 364.12 myself. haven't seen anything like that yet though. maybe they should just upgrade it to vulkan :P
it would be interesting to test out.

Well, If they decide to change to Vulkan, possibly they will need to rewrite entire program because of the API architectural difference (opengl4 stands against dx11 as vulkan stands against dx12) and imho this is work for the original developers and not for Feral (which probably doesn't have permission to change so much source code) since Vulkan also works in Windows and overall costs will be less, basically two (or more) platforms at the price of one.

Probably this bug is a buffer allocation conflict and not so hard to fix since character renders comes apart from world and objects render.

I was only joking, thus the :P emote, I understand it would require the source code to make these changes to the original game engine. Which would require Monolith Productions to do so, which I of course *highly doubt* would ever happen.
But it would be nice to see for a rare occasion a few devs get a wild hair up their rear end to do something fun and unexpected.

Can someone try this? I'm not at home:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/241930/discussions/0/385428943467348986/?tscn=1459256286#c385429254950534634

That is a theory but it's incorrect

Well reading your post you said the same thing I did so I don’t see how it’s incorrect: there were other issues in the non-nvidia drivers so they couldn’t be used to detect that specific bug. Maybe I didn’t express myself clearly. No big deal anyway :).

I was replying to you and the OP you originally replied to.

I thought you were implying that testing AMD (open/closed) drivers would have helped expose this bug in some way and by that you were also implying we didn't test on them during development and that we should have.

Given we did test in them (a lot!) during development the overall premise was false.

Your point about the bug being hidden or untestable was true however it was the overall implications I wanted to clarify as that concerns the effort we spend on AMD/Intel support.

Glad you're in agreement that this made no difference at all given we always develop and test on multiple drivers! :-)

Hope that clears everything up. :-)


Last edited by edddeduck_feral on 29 March 2016 at 6:13 pm UTC

Can someone try this? I'm not at home:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/241930/discussions/0/385428943467348986/?tscn=1459256286#c385429254950534634

This workaround fix the problem:

In Launch Options add this :

__GL_ShaderPortabilityWarnings=0 %command%

Can someone try this? I'm not at home:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/241930/discussions/0/385428943467348986/?tscn=1459256286#c385429254950534634

This workaround fix the problem:

In Launch Options add this :

__GL_ShaderPortabilityWarnings=0 %command%

I'd contact Feral support for the patch info so you can get a real patch details but that workaround in the meantime should work just fine.

Edwin, I will just say that I will buy Shadow Of Mordor (has been eyeing it for some time now) just because of community support and communication like this. Thanks. Keep being awesome.

Thanks :)

I totally bought Mordor due to the Feral port to Linux - I've learned to trust Feral ports. Trust me when I say this, many of us here want to see you get a LOT more business - I just hope there's enough of us for that to matter :-)

Edwin, I will just say that I will buy Shadow Of Mordor (has been eyeing it for some time now) just because of community support and communication like this. Thanks. Keep being awesome.

Thanks :)

I totally bought Mordor due to the Feral port to Linux - I've learned to trust Feral ports. Trust me when I say this, many of us here want to see you get a LOT more business - I just hope there's enough of us for that to matter :-)

Then we just need good folks like you and others to buy their ports when they arrive, and not before :)

I'd like to add for anyone still following this, that
"force_glsl_extensions_warn=true MESA_EXTENSION_OVERRIDE=GL_ARB_arrays_of_arrays __GL_ShaderPortabilityWarnings=0 %command%"
in the steam launch options box works for me, but
"__GL_ShaderPortabilityWarnings=0 %command%"
unfortunately did not.
Anyone know if Feral are any closer to an official patch? It's been awhile.

All they've said is that an update including a fix is in the works. No mention of a release date, but if you have problems you can request access to the beta.

Just searched for this. I've just decided to be properly bleeding edge and use 367 for my 970. And the floating head exists now :( Also loads of missing textures - it's like some of the ground is kind of glass and seethrough...

I'll see if I can get access to this beta patch I guess by just emailing them?