The Talos Principle has a new stable build with more Vulkan optimizations

Unlike Wholly Mad Studios, Croteam are actually worth a purchase. So I'm excited for the new stuff as well. Even though SSHD probably doesn't really need Vulkan for performance. And I probably won't have time to play it. :D

I'm super excited about what Croteam does. I love the Serious Sam series since the good old LAN party times. I own most of their games and especially TTP is a masterpiece in my opinion.

Keep up the great work Croteam, you really deserve my respect and so my money!

Vulkan improvements. So, pointier ears?

I'm super excited about what Croteam does. I love the Serious Sam series since the good old LAN party times. I own most of their games and especially TTP is a masterpiece in my opinion.

Keep up the great work Croteam, you really deserve my respect and so my money!

Totally agree, Talos Principle easily became my most favorite puzzle game (not necessarily just among puzzle games), and the story and presentation are equally amazing. I am currently replaying Gehenna again, but the Vulkan is just too unstable for me, it randomly freezes the game and I have to kill it and the Xorg via SSH, because it becomes totally unresponsive (I am using publicbeta branch, which is now released in public branch, so I don't expect that this release contains anything different, but I will check the Vulkan out again nonetheless)


Last edited by Solitary on 14 Feb 2017 at 5:55 pm UTC

At start I didn't think Talos Principle will be a game for me. I bought it anyway, since it was the first game with Vulkan I could test.

And it became my favorite game by now.

Will try this week-end the new build with the new stable 378.13 driver... Vulkan was sweet during my last test, but my PC encountered a hard crash after less than 2min of gameplay. ^^

Will try this week-end the new build with the new stable 378.13 driver... Vulkan was sweet during my last test, but my PC encountered a hard crash after less than 2min of gameplay. ^^

In what way do you crash? I usually just freeze, 2 CPU cores get to a 100% usage by Talos and Xorg process, the time to crash seems random, it might be an hour or 5 minutes.

In what way do you crash? I usually just freeze, 2 CPU cores get to a 100% usage by Talos and Xorg process, the time to crash seems random, it might be an hour or 5 minutes.

Hard lock of the system with black screen, ctrl + alt + f1 was not responding... so hard reboot (which isn't a good idea, I've read that there is a more secure way to reboot the system... should note that somewhere for my next adventure in Vulkan's lands ^^). Well, that was just one experience with Vulkan so I can't say the crash is reproducible or whatever (I've reported it on Steam and it seems that I'm not the only one who was experiencing this kind of crash). :)

Good to hear. Talos on Vulkan is much faster than on OGL, but still not as fast as DX.

In what way do you crash? I usually just freeze, 2 CPU cores get to a 100% usage by Talos and Xorg process, the time to crash seems random, it might be an hour or 5 minutes.

Hard lock of the system with black screen, ctrl + alt + f1 was not responding... so hard reboot (which isn't a good idea, I've read that there is a more secure way to reboot the system... should note that somewhere for my next adventure in Vulkan's lands ^^). Well, that was just one experience with Vulkan so I can't say the crash is reproducible or whatever (I've reported it on Steam and it seems that I'm not the only one who was experiencing this kind of crash). :)

I think I experienced those black screen crashes, I don't know if they are the same, maybe they fixed those already, did you try SSH? Your machine actually might have still lived, because when I experience those freezes I can't jump into console either, I think it's because keyboard does not respond (classic numlock test), because Xorg is "busy", but SSH still works.

I think I experienced those black screen crashes, I don't know if they are the same, maybe they fixed those already, did you try SSH? Your machine actually might have still lived, because when I experience those freezes I can't jump into console either, I think it's because keyboard does not respond (classic numlock test), because Xorg is "busy", but SSH still works.

At that time I was not aware that it was possible to recover the system outside of ctrl + alt + f1 (my first crash of that kind since 6 years on GNU / Linux / Ubuntu probably ^^), and as the system was hard-locked I was not able to search online for a solution. ^^'

I used to have the black screen crashes, but haven't had them since the 375 driver.

Vulkan improvements. So, pointier ears?

That's next update, this one is less feels.

Now I got 30+ more FPS in average according to the built-in benchmark compared to earlier results. Neat. :D


Last edited by ttyborg on 14 Feb 2017 at 10:44 pm UTC

Crashes here too, sometimes to desktop and sometimes freezes hard enough to need ssh help, logs are full of

00:31:32 INF:  Trying to allocate device optimal memory pool of X MB for Y KB object... failed! (0 MB of VRAM already allocated)
00:31:32 ERR:  Vulkan: Out of memory! (CreateSurface, allocate memory)

leading to the crash. There's graphics corruption too.

It seems to work with GPU memory setting set to lowest, but it's not exactly a pleasant experience with that - autodetect selects the memory setting as "High" for the card (Geforce 960, 2GB) and OpenGL renderer works fine with that.

(The old version was exactly same so I don't have any regressions in this regard, but alas no improvement either)


Last edited by Juhaz on 14 Feb 2017 at 11:02 pm UTC

[quote=riusma]

Hard lock of the system with black screen, ctrl + alt + f1 was not responding... so hard reboot (which isn't a good idea, I've read that there is a more secure way to reboot the system... should note that somewhere for my next adventure in Vulkan's lands ^^)

Remember Alt + SysRq + REISUB (http://askubuntu.com/a/36717/31099)

To remember REISUB, you can either:

- Remember that it's BUSIER backwards
- Reboot Even If System Utterly Broken

This has been quite useful for me, especially when coding real-time kernel modules (and inevitably a bug freezing the whole system). It has also been useful when I was affected by a bug related to swap which made turning off super slow (minutes), so I could just turn off the computer safely and quickly.

Pay extra attention to the S (sync) and U (remount read-only) commands, as they are what really make the reboot safe.

[quote=ShabbyX]

Hard lock of the system with black screen, ctrl + alt + f1 was not responding... so hard reboot (which isn't a good idea, I've read that there is a more secure way to reboot the system... should note that somewhere for my next adventure in Vulkan's lands ^^)

Remember Alt + SysRq + REISUB (http://askubuntu.com/a/36717/31099)

To remember REISUB, you can either:

- Remember that it's BUSIER backwards
- Reboot Even If System Utterly Broken

This has been quite useful for me, especially when coding real-time kernel modules (and inevitably a bug freezing the whole system). It has also been useful when I was affected by a bug related to swap which made turning off super slow (minutes), so I could just turn off the computer safely and quickly.

Pay extra attention to the S (sync) and U (remount read-only) commands, as they are what really make the reboot safe.

Isn't it Ctrl+Alt+SysRq?

I personally used to remember it with "Raising Elephants Is Simply, Utterly, Boring"
Note that some SysRq must be activated before they work. And the kernel might be compiled without, IIRC.

I also like Ctrl+Alt+SysRq+ F

That calls the OOM killer, which will kill the process with the largest amount of memory. That's useful when a program makes the system unresponsive because of swapping.

Otherwise, I think a Ctrl+Alt+SysRq+R might give you back the ability to switch to a VT (that is, if your graphics card didn't completely lock-up).

Back on the topic, it's really nice to hear continued improvement on Vulkan games and drivers. I can't wait to have a Vulkan-capable graphics card \o/ (Vega, I'm waiting for you).

[quote=ShabbyX][quote=riusma]

To remember REISUB, you can either:

- Remember that it's BUSIER backwards
- Reboot Even If System Utterly Broken

I originally learned it wih "Raising Elephants Is Utterly Boring". :D

[quote=beniwtv][quote=ShabbyX]

To remember REISUB, you can either:

- Remember that it's BUSIER backwards
- Reboot Even If System Utterly Broken

I originally learned it wih "Raising Elephants Is Utterly Boring". :D

Read my comment, you forgot the "sync" part ^^

Isn't it Ctrl+Alt+SysRq?

Nope, ctrl is not needed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key