Feral Interactive: fglrx vs radeon

[imrazor]

Feral Interactive is a popular porter of games from Windows to Linux (and Mac.) I have several games that they have ported, but I've run into a frustrating development with their recent games. A two year old game, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, experiences a bug with the open source drivers documented here:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/200510/discussions/0/522730700169435716/

So they stated that one must use the fglrx driver for XCom. OK so far.

Recently I purchased another game ported by them called LIfe Is Strange. In the release notes they specify that only the open source drivers are supported. And indeed, when I try to play the game with fglrx loaded, all I get are menus and flashing colors, but no 3d rendering at all.

I find it extremely frustrating that I can't play two different games by the same developer without rooting out one driver set and replacing it with another. Changing video drivers on a Linux laptop can be a frustrating nightmare, and I don't want to have to do it every time I want to switch games. Does anyone think that Feral is taking a reasonable position on this?

[imrazor]

Well, I'd rather run XCom natively, but if Wine is the only way to get it stable with the open source driver I may have resort to Wine.

Are there any tutorials/howtos/wikis for installing amd-staging-4.7 on Debian Jessie?

[juno]

Sorry to say, but the situation is quite well known and the solution is not to buy shitty ports and reward them for that.

[haagch]

Well, it's a mesa issue, nothing Feral is responsible for.

A short search in the bugtracker later, there is feral, talking about trying to make it not crash on mesa: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94984#c12

Your best way of action is to go to the freedesktop bugtracker and ask the involved people about progress.

[ernstp]

Looks like there is a patch for Mesa+Xcom in the works: https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/series/12382/

[dungeon]

Well all Feral ports are sort of broken with fglrx, but i think they actually aren't. Feral GUI uses gles2 i think and that fails on fglrx, otherwise if you avoid running their GUI app but instead app directly, game should run on fglrx

Didn't tried actual Life is Strange game, but for most ports that is a problem fglrx does not run their gles GUI well

[dungeon]

For example TombRaider if you run app with their GUI, that break everything... GUI start to leak mem like mad and use even 2 GB of RAM

But if you run TombRaider executable directly, then no problemo

[imrazor]

Well, I took the brute force approach and installed another copy of Jessie onto a 2nd drive (gotta love multiple drives in a laptop.) The game runs, but the tearing is horrible even with v-sync on. The desktop and video playback tear as well. Fglrx has a handy feature called "tear free desktop" that fixes the problem, but AFAIK no such option exists for the Mesa driver. Any hints for fixing the tearing? Would Stretch get me a more recent driver with less tearing?

[RemcoL]

Option "TearFree" "on"

in your xorg.conf

[cRaZy-bisCuiT]

I was considering to buy a used 7970 for 100 € since it's able to run most linux games maxed out. I thought most of the issues with AMD drivers would be fixed nowadays. Seems like if I still want to play feral ports (which are most of the AAA titles) I still need to go for nVidia. :/