Total War: WARHAMMER is still coming to Linux, being ported by Feral Interactive

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.

Here's one of their statements about AMD drivers and their games:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/feral-about-amd-driver-support.6326

any news on other warhammer ports in the future? (wharhammer 40k Dawn of war 2 perhaps?)

Nice. Just got this included with a new MSI motherboard purchase.

Here's one of their statements about AMD drivers and their games:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/feral-about-amd-driver-support.6326

I am aware of that. Let there be no doubt that everyone should fix their own bugs. If the bug is on AMD's side, then AMD has to fix it. However, I read more and more reports about problems on Feral side. I gave you one link, there are a few more. If you look at Feral, they never get specific what is wrong on AMD's side. They just point the finger.

When Bioshock Infinite was released, it didn't work on VLIW architecture cards. Bugs happen, nobody is perfect. Virtual Programming wrote:

We listed below Radeon HD 7xxx series as unsupported, because there is currently a bug in Catalyst with ARB_texture_compression_rgtc support on Terascale hardware. This causes textures in this format to fail to render, which is what you are seeing.

(from http://steamcommunity.com/app/8870/discussions/0/618456760257729941/)

See the difference?

AMD fixed the bug in Catalyst 15.7, very likely because different developer attitude.

any news on other warhammer ports in the future? (wharhammer 40k Dawn of war 2 perhaps?)

Last thing we know.

@dmantione, okay we get what you think by now, let's cool it. I am personally fedup of pro-AMD/anti-Feral comments filling up every time we get Feral port news. AMD has issues and not good enough driver support often, I consider that a fact and if you don't you need to pull the wool from your eyes. AMD drivers constantly have issues with too many games to say it's not an issue with AMD.

On top of that, Feral haven't even released what specs it will support, AMD might even be supported.

So, lets get back on topic of yay new port shall we.


Last edited by Liam Dawe on 4 August 2016 at 11:44 am UTC

Here is a list of our games and their status on AMD graphics cards.

Officially Supported
===============
XCOM 1 - Supported on launch with Catalyst. Known driver issue on some AMD cards (r600?) using Mesa.
Empire Total War - Supported on launch with Catalyst. (Works using Mesa 11.2)
Medieval Total War - Officially supported with Mesa
Tomb Raider - Officially supported with Mesa 11.2
Life Is Strange - Officially supported with Mesa 11.2

Runs (unsupported) on latest stable Mesa
===============================
GRID Autosport - Works using 11.2 but not officially supported as Mesa was missing features/had issues on launch.
XCOM 2 - Works using 11.2 but not officially supported as Mesa was missing features/had issues on launch.
Company Of Heroes 2 - Works using 11.2 but not officially supported as Mesa was missing features/had issues on launch.

For these games we plan on announcing official support using Mesa once we can confirm all the issues have been resolved and we are happy with the quality of the games on AMD hardware.

Runs (unsupported) on latest git Mesa
============================
Shadow Of Mordor - Works using 12.1git but not officially supported as Mesa isn't stable yet.
Alien Isolation - Works using 12.1git but not officially supported as Mesa isn't stable yet.
F1 2015 - Works using 12.1git but not officially supported as Mesa isn't stable yet.

We provide builds and log issues with drivers for all our close source vendor partners, we also log public viewable bugs against the open source Mesa drivers this includes making sure they have steam keys etc. Every game we port to Mac/Linux we'll log a handful of graphics driver bugs across all the vendors.

For example here is an issue we found with CoH2 and Mesa that we logged and provided Steam keys to help get implemented. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94835

Here is a patch one of our developers submitted to Mesa to fix a bug we uncovered during development of our first ever Linux game (XCOM 1) - https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79115

Those are a couple of examples that are on the public Mesa drivers however similar bugs are logged and fixed across all the different closed source drivers in a similar manner. Supporting different cards and drivers is not always easy but we always aim to support as many drivers and cards as feasible as it makes sense as the more hardware we support the more users can play our games.

We understand if someone happens to have hardware that missed the supported list for some reason they'll be upset but I hope the above illustrates we do put a lot of effort into supporting as much as we can and that this is a constant ongoing progress.

Right now we're focusing on Mesa as the primary driver on AMD but we are also following the AMDGPUPRO drivers as they mature. One of the reasons for this is based on our usage information more people use Mesa on AMD than proprietary drivers. Here is the latest Gaming on Linux survey, you can view the details in the link at the top of this page.




Last edited by edddeduck_feral on 4 August 2016 at 11:54 am UTC

Woohooo another "port" for around 200 people :D

AMD has issues and not good enough driver support often, I consider that a fact and if you don't you need to pull the wool from your eyes. AMD drivers constantly have issues with too many games to say it's not an issue with AMD.

Confirming that as a person who professionally tested many games on 5000 and 7000 series and 270X with Catalyst and opensource drivers. With Catalyst, running them was a joke with tens of Unity, Unreal, eON and other games (crashing on start, random crashes, weird texture glitches). Opensource drivers turned out to be more reliable and playable, but they still develop slower than NVIDIA vendor drivers for example.

On top of that, Feral haven't even released what specs it will support, AMD might even be supported.

Hopefully :) I think it happened with them that their ports were released as NVIDIA-exclusive only to add the AMD support later, I think it's reasonable considered the numbers and AMD behavior.

Also, peace @dmantione, I respect you a lot for your opinions and technical insight <3

@edddeduck_feral quality post as usual!


Last edited by hardpenguin on 4 August 2016 at 11:59 am UTC

Thankfully i’m not fan of Total War nor WH series, cause i don’t believe Feral make this port good. Even as NVIDIA card user, I can accept (barely) 20% - 30% performance drop but not 50% as it is with Tomb Raider. And I prefer 5 good ports than 20 poor. No offence Feral, but thanx, not this time ;)

If you look at Feral, they never get specific what is wrong on AMD's side. They just point the finger.

I see the difference. I always felt like this was meant as less finger-poniting, not more. But yes, it's nice to have concrete public information about problems. Might help others, too.

Thankfully i’m not fan of Total War nor WH series, cause i don’t believe Feral make this port good. Even as NVIDIA card user, I can accept (barely) 20% - 30% performance drop but not 50% as it is with Tomb Raider. And I prefer 5 good ports than 20 poor. No offence Feral, but thanx, not this time ;)

If you have an issue with a massive drop in performance I recommend you contact Feral support. It's most likely something on your setup or game settings that we can investigate.

Woah, that's awesome ! :-D
Any info about Denuevo DRM ? Will it be present in the Linux version ? (if I'm not mistaken, there isn't any game using it on Linux for now)

So happy Feral's doing this port - at least we know it'll get out the door! (Hi CA, how's Rome2 looking?). You guys Rock!


Last edited by FredO on 4 August 2016 at 12:57 pm UTC

They are still working on Warhammer 40k. At least based on the images on the sidebar in the last Feral newsletter...

I think Mad Max might be next though.

Thankfully i’m not fan of Total War nor WH series, cause i don’t believe Feral make this port good. Even as NVIDIA card user, I can accept (barely) 20% - 30% performance drop but not 50% as it is with Tomb Raider. And I prefer 5 good ports than 20 poor. No offence Feral, but thanx, not this time ;)

If you have an issue with a massive drop in performance I recommend you contact Feral support. It's most likely something on your setup or game settings that we can investigate.

Actually, there have been better Ports than Tomb Raider. I had issues as well, making it a "don't want to play" game (permanent short freezes etc.).

Compared to ports as Shadow of Mordor (good, had issues in the beginning too) which is now really just great.

@edddeduckferal
Ok, I'll do it, however i tried different in-game graphical options, with no success. Of course with my PC I don't expect smooth gameplay with 'ultra' or even 'high' settings, but 'normal' would be nice.
Maybe the best and final solution is to completely wipe out Windows partition and stop comparing :)

Ok, I must admit: 'Life Is Strange' works very well.


Last edited by seguleh on 4 August 2016 at 1:53 pm UTC

@edddeduckferal
Ok, I'll do it, however i tried different in-game graphical options, with no success. Of course with my PC I don't expect smooth gameplay with 'ultra' or even 'high' settings, but 'normal' would be nice.
Maybe the best and final solution is to completely wipe out Windows partition and stop comparing :)

Ok, I must admit: 'Life Is Strange' works very well.

I have given up comparing; I *know* that in all likelyhood I could run games better on my hardware under windows maybe with higher settings, but frankly I dont care that much so long as the game is mostly smooth; I wont deal with slideshows but if I can play a smooth experience on mid settings I am a happy camper.

As an AMD user (Carrizo based laptop) I can tell you that the AMDGPUPRO driver is not superior to the open source AMDGPU driver (I'm running padoka ppa so it's version 12.1). The only game that actually ran faster was Bioshock infinite, everything else ran the same, or regressed a bit, and a couple games wouldn't even launch.


Last edited by chimpy on 4 August 2016 at 3:07 pm UTC

This is good news, as I’ve been pretty happy with Feral’s porting work

You are? Performance issues and AMD incompatibilities are the rule rather than these exception with these guys.

Talk to AMD about their shitty drivers. That's not Feral's fault. Anybody who is serious about Linux gaming needs to get an Nvidia card. As for performance, some games run better than others (XCOM 2, for example, actually runs slightly better on Linux than it does on Windows; Tomb Raider runs slightly worse), but I've never seen any reason to complain since all of Feral's ports have been solid and stable with steady, playable framerates.