The Quality Of The Witcher 2 Linux Port Is Upsetting Many Gamers

[Redshirt001]

A hell of a lot better than under wine

Look, I've been playing the linux port for a day or two, and I've found that with almost everything enabled or on high (aside from motion blur since I don't like it, SSAO and Ubersampling) that the performance is at least adequate, and more importantly consistent. Under wine there are always performance spikes where the framerate goes down the toilet in certain parts. There are also graphical bits that don't work properly under wine, like shadows.

All this works just fine with the linux version, and my performance is nothing to sneeze at, even if I do hope it gets optimised in the future. It's better than under wine, and wine takes a long time to get things like The Witcher 2 right, if ever.

[tomtomme]

It's no worse than the OSX port, though that's really an aside.

The issue here is not about The Witcher 2. This is about the reality of developers porting games to Linux, an ostensibly new platform for most of these people. Linux has come to prominence as the potential future for PC gaming in only the past year -- many of these companies are just now starting to investigate Linux as an option.

What does this mean for us as Linux gamers?

It means that there are going to be a lot of shitty ports over the next year or so. We'll need to start to accept that -- we need to be respectful to developers who make the jump (the risk, one might argue) to release on Linux. We can't tell developers they're terrible, or their decisions are terrible, while they're trying to provide for the platform that you choose to use.

Does this mean they shouldn't strive to improve? Of course not. But it means that we shouldn't be shitty towards these developers, we shouldn't be over critical of them. Despite what some people might believe, The Witcher 2 port is not a money-grab -- there may be a lot of money to be made in the Linux sector in the future, but right now it's not nearly what people may think it is. All they had to do would be to slap a discount on the game on Steam and it'd rise to the top; they didn't even have to do the port to get the sale. But it shows that they're interested, and paying attention.

You need to learn to walk before you can run -- even Valve ran into that issue with their initial releases. They're finally at a position where their Linux releases are on par with their Windows releases, but even that varies between drivers and chipsets. And Valve has far, far more resources than many of these developers do.

well said

[entropy]

It means that there are going to be a lot of shitty ports over the next year or so. We'll need to start to accept that -- we need to be respectful to developers who make the jump (the risk, one might argue) to release on Linux. We can't tell developers they're terrible, or their decisions are terrible, while they're trying to provide for the platform that you choose to use.

...

You need to learn to walk before you can run -- even Valve ran into that issue with their initial releases. They're finally at a position where their Linux releases are on par with their Windows releases, but even that varies between drivers and chipsets. And Valve has far, far more resources than many of these developers do.

I wonder if the approach via that Virtual Programming / eON is cheaper (or significantly cheaper)
than having Icculus (or the other well-known porters) do a real native port of that game?
IIRC, all middleware used in TW2 is available for Linux.

[aksdb]

I wonder if the approach via that Virtual Programming / eON is cheaper (or significantly cheaper)
than having Icculus (or the other well-known porters) do a real native port of that game?
IIRC, all middleware used in TW2 is available for Linux.

Well the game engine itself (REDengine) isn't available for Linux. Since they only supported Windows and XBox I heavily suspect it's pretty strong tailored towards DirectX. Porting this most likely isn't that easy. However with VOGL it might be ... no idea. We should have a better chance with REDengine 2 or 3, since they apparently support OS X (and PS4) natively, which implicates OpenGL support. So my hopes for a (truely) native Witcher 3 are still high.

[asdfblah]

Well, Valve devs know now that they can fix bugs simply by waiting for the users to give them good reports, workaround and sometimes fixes by themselves...
I wish people would help open source projects in the same way they help Valve (for example, by reporting bugs and/or debugging graphics drivers).
It's a great thing that this game worked well with the open source radeon driver, helps spreading the word.

[omer666]

well said

I do agree, too.

[Kemosabe]

It's a port for an older game and they are giving it at a discount of the already discounted price, so we shouldn't expect them to put so much efforts into the port, especially that Steam Machines will probably have a hardware that will run the game well anyway, so not much incentive to improve the performance. Hopefully they will put more efforts into Linux in their new titles.

Yeah sure we shouldn't expect it working.
No really - i mean. It's old, it's cheap. No - a working product is not mandatory.

[Grogan]

This isn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, with all the buttache I've been reading about.

It's a bit sluggish for me, but playable with "Medium" settings at 1920x1080 and it still looks half decent. This is with a Radeon HD5870, with the radeon driver in Linux 3.15, and Mesa 10.3.x from xorg-edgers ppa.

It's a beautiful game though... it's really a waste for me to play it on Linux with reduced graphics settings and somewhat poor performance compared to how the game runs on Windows.

Nice to see things coming along though. This is the first time I've ever had open source graphics drivers that can do shit like this.

[borsook]

Actually, I am very hopeful about this technology, I am a strategy games player, 90% of them have no graphics requirement, running great on anything, but do not have Linux versions. If using this proves less time consuming and cheaper than a full port, then I do hope for more games running under Linux... and in this genre, I really do not care about how they are running.

[yogi_berra]

It's a beautiful game though... it's really a waste for me to play it on Linux

Then don't play it on linux. It's not like the kidnapped Nigerian girls will be returned to their families if you play the game on linux.