Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition arrives on Linux on November 5th

Finally ! I've held off purchase to support Feral :)

As I said, the discourse surrounding this all is fine, I made a pretty clear point about it ;). I'll leave the "confrontational" comments at the door, so we can just move past that and get back to the topic.

As for Proton, I've never said anywhere it's the "only way forward". I did say in an article it can help break the cycle, however there are many different ways forwards. In fact, I've given multiple reasons why Proton also concerns me at the same time multiple times too.

Look, I know this is a touchy subject, and maybe I should just shut up about it too. But others have strongly held opinions that are just as valid as yours are. Personally, I will be buying this from Feral, and held off on buying the Windows port. AFAIC, if you're not going to support Linux developers, why bother using Linux at all??

I never said anyone's opinion wasn't valid :). I'm glad people held off on buying it, to support Feral when it arrives. Feral have been good for the Linux gaming ecosystem and I love their games.

Let us not forget Stadia and the behemoth behind it, which being Linux based (I know it is not the same given there are many aspects of it we ignore) is an incentive for native ports rather than translation layers, which would only add bloat and unnecessary overhead. While not an instant translation to Linux desktop games, lets hope some do make it to it. See the case of Stardock which ported (and did not release) Ashes of the Singularity due to Stadia (did not release for various reasons from what they said in the Steam thread).

Proton has done LOTS for games that are likely to never see a native port. Stadia may bring more awareness and broader use of Vulkan, now at least I hope Valve will lobby devs into bringing those games developed with this in mind to Linux desktop, yes wishful thinking. At the very least, moving away from the lock-in of DirectX means better support, even if through translation.

I celebrate Feral for still making the effort to bring native ports, though I reckon, monetary incentives for them may come from Mac/iOS rather than Linux.

At long last! I was starting to believe Feral was retiring from linux development.

Will buy this for sure. Been waiting on it for a looooooong time!

I've also been waiting for it and will buy it as soon as it's available.

Maybe I'm too old to be needing the greatest and newest games. I appreciate what's already there and as I don't spend that much time gaming anymore I might never fully finish my (rather medium sized) backlog. That's okay for me as long as once in a while there are some gems like this one released to brighten up the day.

I guess my normal version of the game I bought and played on Windows before finally switching over, doesn't get a basic edition of the game that is Linux compatible?

Would be nice if it did, but no harm if it doesn't. But I won't buy the game twice though.

I guess my normal version of the game I bought and played on Windows before finally switching over, doesn't get a basic edition of the game that is Linux compatible?

Would be nice if it did, but no harm if it doesn't. But I won't buy the game twice though.

If guess it will. Let's see...

I've also been waiting for it and will buy it as soon as it's available.

Maybe I'm too old to be needing the greatest and newest games. I appreciate what's already there and as I don't spend that much time gaming anymore I might never fully finish my (rather medium sized) backlog. That's okay for me as long as once in a while there are some gems like this one released to brighten up the day.

As I don't have much time for playing anymore, I can also still satisfy my gaming needs with native ports (and whitelisted Proton games). For the same reason, I'm keeping my backlog of bought games small (half a dozen games or so). But the reason for writing...: How many games is "rather medium sized"? :-D

I wish they focused on porting better games. Sure, Tomb Raider is better than Total War by a long shot, but Mad Max was much better. I still haven’t started playing the previous Tomb Raider because the first one was ok but had a lot of annoying moments.

I think Mad Max was the only big game I abandoned on Linux. It just felt so grindy and cumbersome at some point. ("Now you need to raise/lower the IDontCare level yet another time...")

An obvious purchase, if nothing else than to support the one single porting company of AAA releases we have left.

Going to be interesting to compare Feral's pre-baked Vulkan wrapper to DXVK.

Going to be interesting to compare Feral's pre-baked Vulkan wrapper to DXVK.

Just to keep expectations in check (and I think we all know people will be trying to compare the two come release day!), several points to keep in mind:
* Rise of the Tomb Raider I couldn't run through wine at all. I know there's been a bit of hassle from others trying to run Shadow of the Tomb Raider, so it seems a bit hit & miss. Worth considering that.
* Again based on Rise, some machines might perform much better with Feral's work. Or not. I say this based on machines with 6 cores (which I have) or more getting a much smoother experience.
* Support. Ok, that doesn't affect performance, but I'd take a few fps hit for the safety of support for the game.
* Features. At this point we don't know if anything is changed (texture formats, extra or missing graphical details, that kind of thing) which can impact results one way or another. Apples to apples comparisons may therefore be difficult.
* Feral have their game mode launcher. It'll be worth making sure anything wine based runs the same way.

Almost all games of native Vulkan port vs DXVK that I've seen (and really there aren't many) give pros & cons to each. I would expect the same here.

In addition, Feral work on the shader system so it actually loads them all in too, which should result in smooth gameplay. Proton doesn't do that of course.

I guess my normal version of the game I bought and played on Windows before finally switching over, doesn't get a basic edition of the game that is Linux compatible?

Would be nice if it did, but no harm if it doesn't. But I won't buy the game twice though.

Usually the Linux version is added to all Steam packages, all previous Feral ports have so you shouldn't have an issue. Otherwise people switching from Windows to Linux would have to buy it again which is not what Steam is supposed to be about, unless the games have a specific Linux/Windows version separation with unique store pages (like Arma 2 for Mac/Linux

I'd have bought it anyway eventually to play it with Proton. That it runs natively and I can support Feral with it - the better. But I won't buy it in the near future. My gaming backlog is just too big for that.

Well bite me, I guess I have to spend some money on this :D Curse u Feral ;-)

The late release date may not be a coincidence. There may be a strong connection with the Stadia version of the game. I have written down my thoughts here:

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/forum/topic/4096

I've also been waiting for it and will buy it as soon as it's available.

Maybe I'm too old to be needing the greatest and newest games. I appreciate what's already there and as I don't spend that much time gaming anymore I might never fully finish my (rather medium sized) backlog. That's okay for me as long as once in a while there are some gems like this one released to brighten up the day.

As I don't have much time for playing anymore, I can also still satisfy my gaming needs with native ports (and whitelisted Proton games). For the same reason, I'm keeping my backlog of bought games small (half a dozen games or so). But the reason for writing...: How many games is "rather medium sized"? :-D

My "medium sized backlog" counts circa 15 titles, but perhaps I'll seriously play only half of them. I don't want to urge myself playing games just because I own a copy (= have a license...). By getting older that became more and more okay with me.

The late release date may not be a coincidence. There may be a strong connection with the Stadia version of the game. I have written down my thoughts here:

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/forum/topic/4096

I don't think so. My bet is that Feral really just waited for the Definite Edition. Note that this version will be released on other platforms as well on November 5th: https://tombraider.square-enix-games.com/en-us/news/shadow-of-the-tomb-raider-definitive-edition

Thus one might even consider this as a day one release ;)


Last edited by jens on 16 October 2019 at 7:46 pm UTC

Going to be interesting to compare Feral's pre-baked Vulkan wrapper to DXVK.

For starters, expect the Feral port to run smooth as butter right from the get-go. DXVK stutters a lot in this game because it has to compile so many shaders at draw time; Feral will just compile everything during the loading screen like they did with Rise. They can do that because they know what the game will do in advance, even if it's just a simple solution similar to DXVK's state cache.

Then, maybe (hopefully) they'll base their port on the D3D12 renderer which is much faster than the D3D11 one. Other than that, Wine itself also has significant overhead in SotTR for some reason, even with Fsync and all the Proton 4.11 improvements.

Feature-wise, expect to lose HBAO+. RTX and DLSS don't work on Proton anyway.

Saves may be incompatible with the Windows version of the game. This is basically the only gripe I have with Feral's games, it's annoying and seems somewhat unnecessary.


Last edited by YoRHa-2B on 17 October 2019 at 12:08 am UTC

Some random thoughts, and disclaimer: these are just ideas, I've no idea if any of this is actually the case. Just pondering really.

As an additional point about this game: it's been listed as coming to Stadia. Given that Feral have ported it to both Metal (presumably, or possibly MoltenVK I guess, though I doubt) and Vulkan, it's likely that Feral have also done the work for this game on Stadia.

Hmmm. Take it with a grain of salt but I read *somewhere* that this is not the case.
The Stadia version is not based on Feral's work.

Hmmm. Take it with a grain of salt but I read *somewhere* that this is not the case.
The Stadia version is not based on Feral's work.

I'd consider this very interesting (and surprising).
Can you find this *somewhere*?