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We already knew that Total War: WARHAMMER was coming to Linux, but we didn’t know when as it seemed like it was forgotten about. Now we know it’s being ported by Feral Interactive!

This is good news, as I’ve been pretty happy with Feral’s porting work and their support of their products has been top notch. Pleased to see them get more porting work to continue pushing our platform.

Hopefully I will be able to do my usual thing of giving it a run over before release, if not, I will try to after release.

No exact word on the release yet, but it's slated for this Autumn/Fall!

From the press release:
Quote“This is the stuff of dreams,” said David Stephen, Managing Director of Feral Interactive, “The extraordinary gameplay of Total War matched with the fantastical universe of Warhammer is a match made in gaming heaven. We’re incredibly excited to bring Total War: WARHAMMER to Mac and Linux.”


It's also now showing up on SteamDB, so maybe it will be a pretty quick turnaround from announcement to release. It also means it was likely hidden for quite some time, meaning there could be other ports from Feral and other developers being hidden from popping up on SteamDB, exciting!

Also, Feral are showing off their wonderful humour again from the SteamDB depot page:
image

About the game
The Old World echoes to the clamour of ceaseless battle. The only constant is WAR!

A fantasy strategy game of legendary proportions, Total War: WARHAMMER combines an addictive turn-based campaign of epic empire-building with explosive, colossal, real-time battles, all set in the vivid and incredible world of Warhammer Fantasy Battles.

Command four wholly different races: the Empire, the Dwarfs, the Vampire Counts and the Greenskins, each with their own unique characters, battlefield units and play style.

Lead your forces to war as one of eight Legendary Lords from the Warhammer Fantasy Battles World, arming them with fabled weapons, armour and deadly battle magic; hard-won in individual quest chains. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Zelox Aug 4, 2016
Quoting: rustybroomhandleThey have updated it on their "upcoming" radar, but interestingly it's neither of the two items in the "very soon" zone.

Ooh, now when I look it even says total war:warhammer. And ye the very soon is still the same.
And Im glad its feral who does this port. They always does there ports very solid.
I wonder what kinde of black magic they are using :P.


Last edited by Zelox on 4 August 2016 at 10:16 am UTC
dmantione Aug 4, 2016
QuoteI am not and AMD user, nor have I ever claimed to be any time I've reported on them. I do not own any AMD GPU to test on.

Also, it's usually issues with AMD's drivers, like Catalyst being too unstable and Mesa not having higher enough OpenGL. Can't blame Feral for that.

As for performance: I will take 20 ports with lower performance over 5 ports that had to be rewritten from the core to properly support OpenGL that took 10x longer to come out. Feral are boosting up our game numbers significantly with bigger names.

Let's not have this turn into a flame fest.

Well, I do feel the need to flame a bit. The more I read about this stuff, like:

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-drivers/amd-linux/873193-amd-gpu-pro-16-20-3-beta-linux-driver-released/page8

.. the more convinced I become the problem is at Feral and nowhere else.

Catalyst is not unstable, its stable for years, it is OpenGL 4.5 compliant and in some respects more so than Nvidia drivers, shares code with the Windows OpenGL driver, which can run the latest games like Doom 2016 without much trouble.

Of course nothing is black and white, and I'm sure AMD drivers have their issues, like any driver. AMD should fix them, and they will. But there is simply no other vendor who does a more shitty job of supporting AMD like Feral. They really have a serious quality problem.


Last edited by dmantione on 4 August 2016 at 10:17 am UTC
Ehvis Aug 4, 2016
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Also interesting is that this one was added to the "soon" section of the radar. Still leaving two games "before" it in the very soon section. I think most expected the mars hint to be about this one, but that was apparently not the case.
linux_gamer Aug 4, 2016
Feral won't let us down! <3
dmantione Aug 4, 2016
QuoteThey've been great about supporting AMD through Mesa and have even been active in helping Mesa devs deal with bugs and incompatabilities. All their latest ports have worked just great for me. What else else do you want? AMD has abandoned Catalyst/Crimson in favor of Mesa/AMDGPU and their own added AMDGPUPRO drivers.

AMD have stopped updating their Catalyst driver (just a few months ago), because they have a new driver, indeed AMD GPU PRO, which doesn't work with Feral games either, and forces them to make disclaimers for SteamOS, because of course, Valve uses the best driver for SteamOS.

There are two pain points here. The first pain point is VLIW-architecture cards, which are handled by the r600g Mesa driver and if you are talking about abandoning, the r600g driver feels much more abandoned than the Catalyst driver. R600g is slow, buggy, feature incomplete and noisy, because it has no proper power management. Catalyst performs, for AMD standards, okay, is stable, OpenGL 4.5 feature complete and has proper power management.

For GCN-architecture cards, the pain point is that you need AMD GPUPRO for Vulkan support. And of course as Linux gamer you want to enjoy this great new innovation in Linux gaming, and you install GPUPRO. Great driver, great performance, but no Feral game will work then.

You cannot change drivers like you change clothes. Changing drivers is serious reconfigruation work that you don't want to do on an individual game basis.

Supporting Catalyst or GPU PRO is probably one and the same thing, because it is the same OpenGL implementation. If Feral would support GPU PRO and not Catalyst, they would have a point regarding "abandoned". But since they don't, they fail to run on one of the major OpenGL implementations in the industry, and that is a quality issue.


Last edited by dmantione on 4 August 2016 at 10:36 am UTC
lucifertdark Aug 4, 2016
This is one I am going to buy as soon as it hits Linux, I've been a Warhammer fan for longer than I really want to think about as it makes me feel old. ;)
burnall Aug 4, 2016
Wish they used Vulkan this time to improve performance.
Ehvis Aug 4, 2016
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Quoting: burnallWish they used Vulkan this time to improve performance.

I did see a DX12 branch. That could be a nice source for a Vulkan port. Since this one has been in the works for a while, I doubt it will happen though.
BTRE Aug 4, 2016
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Quoting: dmantioneAMD have stopped updating their Catalyst driver (just a few months ago), because they have a new driver, indeed AMD GPU PRO, which doesn't work with Feral games either, and forces them to make disclaimers for SteamOS, because of course, Valve uses the best driver for SteamOS.

[...]

Supporting Catalyst or GPU PRO is probably one and the same thing, because it is the same OpenGL implementation. If Feral would support GPU PRO and not Catalyst, they would have a point regarding "abandoned". But since they don't, they fail to run on one of the major OpenGL implementations in the industry, and that is a quality issue.
I have a card that runs RadeonSI. All their games work for me. I have seen on the GOL IRC people claim that their games also work with R600g and AMDGPU. Life is Strange, their latest port, works with Mesa > 11.2 as per the store page. AMD contributes [directly to Mesa](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/mesa-patches-greatly-improve-bioshock-infinite-performance-for-the-radeonsi-amd-driver.7768) and their strategy going forward for Linux depends on the open stack and contributions in the kernel.

Feral supports what they can and have responded to users here, on Reddit and wherever else about their issues with Mesa so, once again, what else do you want? That is the official support from both them and AMD. I can run everything from Life is Strange, to XCOM 2 to GRID and they have worked to make sure each of those games work well with Mesa. AMDGPU-PRO is very much a work in progress, and still isn't ready for mass adoption: so much so that the recent 4.7 kernel has added support for a lot more cards but many more are still missing. Once AMDGPU-PRO is mature, I'm sure you can expect them to dedicate resources to ensure compatability.


Last edited by BTRE on 4 August 2016 at 10:57 am UTC
dmantione Aug 4, 2016
There is nothing beta about the OpenGL implementation in AMDGPU-PRO, so if they intend to support that, there is nothing that stops them doing that right now. Unless they depend on very recent bug-fixes, that will automatically bring Catalyst support on the table as well.

So if I answer your question what I want: Support (or fixes?) for AMDGPU-PRO.


Last edited by dmantione on 4 August 2016 at 11:02 am UTC
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