Mesa 18.1 is out with the shader cache on for Intel

Please, can someone tell me if "OpenGL 3.1 with ARB_compatibility on nv50, nvc0, r600, radeonsi, softpipe, llvmpipe, svga" means that I can finally play Rage or Wolfenstein: The New Order with Wine and Mesa?
Take a look here: https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43176

I very recently switched from Nvidia to Amd to get better desktop performance, so I'm a little clueless. Will I get those updates when using the edge and hwe packages under Ubuntu ? Is there a relevant ppa to add ? (kde neon)

I'm not sure about kde neon, but I'm on kubuntu myself. Using the padoka PPA has always given me up-to-date mesa with no issues :)

mesa is a life saver for intel and amd users however i still stand by what i always said older games are still going to run bad in mesa due to being mostly optimized for nvidia gpus

I have not experienced any performance issues with older games whatsoever.

mesa is a life saver for intel and amd users however i still stand by what i always said older games are still going to run bad in mesa due to being mostly optimized for nvidia gpus

Olders games like...? The big titles started to come Linux since SteamOS born (and this is quite recent), so there aren't very old titles that I can think on (out of the ones that runs on wine).

Phoronix AMD vs NVIDIA results (latest)

AMD is doing fine, the RX580 is one of the best buys while results for Vega can be somewhat varied. Hopefully AMD figure out a 1080ti killer at low TDP (250W?) sometime. Honestly the world is moving onto 4k and anything less then a 1080ti is asking for trouble....


Last edited by TheRiddick on 20 May 2018 at 1:52 am UTC

stuff that came before feral started getting involved with the mesa driver remember their was a time when mesa was not even supported and games requirements were nvidia only

mesa is a life saver for intel and amd users however i still stand by what i always said older games are still going to run bad in mesa due to being mostly optimized for nvidia gpus

Olders games like...? The big titles started to come Linux since SteamOS born (and this is quite recent), so there aren't very old titles that I can think on (out of the ones that runs on wine).

I'm very interested in what specific feral games you are talking about. The oldest feral game that I own is Tomb Raider, which works flawlessly.

Note: There are a few games that are known to have issues on mesa, but those are exceptions and - to what I know - more often than not the cause of bad programming.


Last edited by nox on 20 May 2018 at 8:19 am UTC

Anyone that knows what have happened to the PadokaPPA? The stable one have not had any new builds for 4 weeks now and is stuck on 18.0.1 which breaks e.g Dying Light.

But what I still fail to grasp after decades of being an Nvidia fanboy is ; do mesa versions and drivers thus kernels versions have to be synchronized ? What happens when using a recent MESA with an old kernel and vice versa ?

They do not have to be synchronized to what I know :)

Deus ex mankind divided
Alien isolation
Grid autosport
Middle earth shadow of mordor

I've played most of these, all of them with no issues. Alien isolation is the one I haven't played as it's just not my kind of game, so not sure about the status there.

I agree that feral should official support more, but all the examples you've given so far should work well with mesa on decent hardware (AMD). Intel is a bit of a different story as they simply don't have much when it comes to gaming hardware.


Last edited by nox on 20 May 2018 at 10:36 am UTC

Deus ex mankind divided
Alien isolation
Grid autosport
Middle earth shadow of mordor

Those are a few that say on the steam page intel and amd are not supported so if amd and intel do work on those games now then feral has failed to communicate that

stuff that came before feral started getting involved with the mesa driver remember their was a time when mesa was not even supported and games requirements were nvidia only

mesa is a life saver for intel and amd users however i still stand by what i always said older games are still going to run bad in mesa due to being mostly optimized for nvidia gpus

Olders games like...? The big titles started to come Linux since SteamOS born (and this is quite recent), so there aren't very old titles that I can think on (out of the ones that runs on wine).

I'm very interested in what specific feral games you are talking about. The oldest feral game that I own is Tomb Raider, which works flawlessly.

Note: There are a few games that are known to have issues on mesa, but those are exceptions and - to what I know - more often than not the cause of bad programming.

All those work fine with mesa with AMD, Expecting intel's IGP to run them well is a little unfair. Lets be honest, Intel make good CPU's but plain suck at the graphics side of things.

There is currently one game that has issue for me with mesa (I have a fairly good library too) and that is Dying light !

It refuses to work with mesa on anything other than Ubuntu for some weird reason

Am not sure where you are getting the notion of older tiles(Pre steam?) don't run well with mesa either. Doom/UT99-2004/ETQW ect all run fine for me.

It refuses to work with mesa on anything other than Ubuntu for some weird reason

On Ubuntu 18.04 it's broken as well. They need to update their broken game, but I don't think that's likely.

about older games i was referring to games that were made before mesa was a viable driver alternative for linux ports

Again, which ones? I'd love to know which ones are broken or doesn't work well.


Last edited by nox on 20 May 2018 at 12:13 pm UTC

it's getting better but theirs always going to be that one game that is just not working or devs can't get working due to a limitation of the driver

Thank you for the list :)

Now, which "limitations of the driver" are you referring to?

I'm sorry, but if you had stopped your sentence at "mesa is still not perfect" I would have let it be, but you clearly know of limitations that makes it hard to support mesa. As I lack technical knowledge about the inner workings of any driver I'm very interested in knowing exactly what limitation you are talking about :)

Just a little information though about mesa and compatibility: The bug reports I've followed in the past half a year has mostly been about game bugs, not driver bugs. In certain cases mesa could add workarounds.


EDIT:
Aragami works fine on Manjaro with mesa 18.0.4


Last edited by nox on 20 May 2018 at 12:48 pm UTC

All those work fine with mesa with AMD, Expecting intel's IGP to run them well is a little unfair. Lets be honest, Intel make good CPU's but plain suck at the graphics side of things.

There is currently one game that has issue for me with mesa (I have a fairly good library too) and that is Dying light !

It refuses to work with mesa on anything other than Ubuntu for some weird reason

It has been working for me since Mesa 17.3 (I ended the game months ago).

On my launch options I have this: MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.5 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=450 %command%

Check if that helps you!

personally for me i have experienced issues with three games under mesa

aragami (probably a unity problem but crashes every distro i have tried)

the last tinker city of colors (devs said it might be a unity texture issue)

mark of the ninja (broken off center display)


keep in mind that i don't buy a crap ton of games so i can't speak for all games

mesa is still not perfect for gaming on linux

it's getting better but theirs always going to be that one game that is just not working or devs can't get working due to a limitation of the driver

I think that the release of Rise of the TR proves you're wrong. With this game I saw more issues with nvidia driver than with Mesa. In fact, one of the most incredible things of the open source driver was that Feral committed a bug fix on the driver. This means that publishers don't have to wait for AMD or Nvidia to fix their drivers.

All those work fine with mesa with AMD, Expecting intel's IGP to run them well is a little unfair. Lets be honest, Intel make good CPU's but plain suck at the graphics side of things.

There is currently one game that has issue for me with mesa (I have a fairly good library too) and that is Dying light !

It refuses to work with mesa on anything other than Ubuntu for some weird reason

It has been working for me since Mesa 17.3 (I ended the game months ago).

On my launch options I have this: MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.5 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=450 %command%

Check if that helps you!

Don't work for those not on *buntu distros. But thanks for the suggestion

mesa is a life saver for intel and amd users however i still stand by what i always said older games are still going to run bad in mesa due to being mostly optimized for nvidia gpus

I have not experienced any performance issues with older games whatsoever.

Same here. Old games work fine with Vega 56.

yes a recent game at a time when mesa is actually good vs games that were made when mesa was not so good totally proved wrong ;)

Well I think it does, as I was answering to his last statement: "it's getting better but theirs always going to be that one game that is just not working or devs can't get working due to a limitation of the driver"

Also, the count of "old" games that are unplayable with Mesa is near zero...


Last edited by x_wing on 23 May 2018 at 11:01 am UTC

All those work fine with mesa with AMD, Expecting intel's IGP to run them well is a little unfair. Lets be honest, Intel make good CPU's but plain suck at the graphics side of things.

There is currently one game that has issue for me with mesa (I have a fairly good library too) and that is Dying light !

It refuses to work with mesa on anything other than Ubuntu for some weird reason

It has been working for me since Mesa 17.3 (I ended the game months ago).

On my launch options I have this: MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.5 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=450 %command%

Check if that helps you!

Don't work for those not on *buntu distros. But thanks for the suggestion

Well, I currently have Kubuntu 16.04 (with padoka ppa) and is working for me :P (I've updated my kernel up to 4.13 when I played it, but the problem was at Mesa level due to a non standard usage of the API -AFAIK-)

playable and playable without texture corruptions and other issues caused by running a game in a mesa environment are two very different things

yes a recent game at a time when mesa is actually good vs games that were made when mesa was not so good totally proved wrong ;)

Well I think it does, as I was answering to his last statement: "it's getting better but theirs always going to be that one game that is just not working or devs can't get working due to a limitation of the driver"

Also, the count of "old" games that are unplayable with Mesa is near zero...

So, what games are you experiencing texture corruptions in?

I don't understand what your goal is, to be honest. Yes, mesa used to be much worse than Nvidia, but at this point they are mostly caught up. The main field they've been slightly slower at has been vulkan, but that is quickly being fixed as well.

Maybe it's time for you to check out how mesa is today, and not how it was 2+ years ago?

playable and playable without texture corruptions and other issues caused by running a game in a mesa environment are two very different things

What nox said, give us some examples. The games I usually play on my system doesn't have texture corruption, so it's difficult for me to answer something that I don't experiment.

I have been using Mesa with AMDGPU drivers for more than two years by now (R9 380 and R9 580), I experienced game crash or hangs (and most of the times was a game fault) but I don't recall having texture corruption.

playable and playable without texture corruptions and other issues caused by running a game in a mesa environment are two very different things

What nox said, give us some examples. The games I usually play on my system doesn't have texture corruption, so it's difficult for me to answer something that I don't experiment.

I have been using Mesa with AMDGPU drivers for more than two years by now (R9 380 and R9 580), I experienced game crash or hangs (and most of the times was a game fault) but I don't recall having texture corruption.

Last game I was having that was Insugency/dying light and Day of infamy but ironically on the gtx1080. Was one of the reasons that finally made me jump back to AMD/Mesa