Feral's Linux Team Lead Is Leaving The Company

[F.Ultra]

Feral is doing a good service to the Linux community.

I hope though that we can continually improve the porting methodology and get to a point where we no longer incur a performance loss vs windows.

For a long time it was poor drivers holding us back, finally now we have good graphics drivers.

But we still incur 20% performance hit due to the porting frameworks used, unlike the devs who do true cross platform development from the get go.

We will only get to that point of the game is originally coded for OpenGL or Vulkan (and here I mean orginially coded for and not that the game also supports this) since no porter ever will rewrite the entire game engine to fully optimize it for OpenGL/Vulkan instead of DX11/DX12. And even after that there are still millions of lines of code left in every game that is heavily optimized for how Windows works.

[artivision]

Feral is doing a good service to the Linux community.

I hope though that we can continually improve the porting methodology and get to a point where we no longer incur a performance loss vs windows.

For a long time it was poor drivers holding us back, finally now we have good graphics drivers.

But we still incur 20% performance hit due to the porting frameworks used, unlike the devs who do true cross platform development from the get go.

The porting frameworks do not consume that much power. The thing is that games are optimized for D3D11 state_trackers and vendor Intermediate_Layers are optimized for D3D11 state_trackers as well. So even native Vulkan engines get a 15% hit because they are based on previous D3D11 engines with some hand made changes to the shader sources. The only real Vulkan games are the Vulkan-only ones. So Vulkan must take code corrections to match other Intermediate_Layers or games must take D3D11 corrections in order to be more driver agnostic and not Nvidia-holics.

[TemplarGR]

So what? Anybody in this forum still buys Virows only games?

Plenty of great games are Windows-only. For example Witcher 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Assassin's Creed Origins, Farcry 5, to name a few. Believe it or not, some people would like to play those, and there is no chance in hell of them getting a Linux port in the foreseeable future.

Your attitude is really toxic by the way, this attitude that you and many other supposed Linux-fans share has only harmed Linux. I hate it when i see it: If you need a feature than is only on Windows, typical Linux-cancer response: "Live without it". You can't make progress like this, and thank God most don't think that way. This attitude is the reason the Linux Desktop still hovers around 2%.

[Tomin]

Your attitude is really toxic by the way, this attitude that you and many other supposed Linux-fans share has only harmed Linux. I hate it when i see it: If you need a feature than is only on Windows, typical Linux-cancer response: "Live without it". You can't make progress like this, and thank God most don't think that way. This attitude is the reason the Linux Desktop still hovers around 2%.

I'm not sure if that's really the attitude of the developers. Of course things like exFat and some codecs are often not supported on Linux, but that's mostly because MS or someone else doesn't let us to have it. Wine and other such things are based on public documentation and reverse engineering and they will never be complete replacements for the things they implement. Windows APIs are a moving target and so complex that Wine will probably never implement it 100 % compatible.

What feature is such that it can be considered at least somewhat important but isn't available on Linux while it's available on Windows? HIDPI and Optimus used to be something that was lacking on Linux but people have been working on these things and the pieces are starting to come together now. Suspend we technically have but it has its issues. I think that's something Intel (and Red Hat maybe?) are looking into now. Firefox's video hardware acceleration still doesn't work on Linux but I believe they know what they need to do first before they can start working on it.

[PackRat]

I find that with VKD3D, DXVK +D3D10_patch and VK9 +D3D8_patch, will find Feral obsolete for Linux by the end of 2019. So i propose a shift to remake games for Android and fast chipsets like Snapdragon 820-845. I don't believe in the x86_to_ARC Emulator, it's better to have access to the source and compile for ARC and target Vulkan as well.

Feral has ported the old sega's game rome total war to ios they could do the same for andriod. Companies that change businesses models don't go obsolete. Feral could alway's make their own games.

[L_A_G]

This is not entirely true. First of all, many ports use wrappers which are more or less glorified WINE-like layers. Those do have a performance hit relative to the windows version.

I'm fully aware a lot of ports, particularly of big games with in-house or heavily modified commodity engines, use wrappers and I said nothing that would imply otherwise... Nice try at a straw man, but no cigar.

Second, in some cases DXVK can work faster/better than a native port. For example:

That's Ark: Survival Evolved you're using there, its' native Linux and OSX ports have almost legendarily bad performance compared to the windows version, which also has some serious performance issues, so you really couldn't have cherry picked a worse example if you tried...