Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II Rolls Out To Linux Gamers, Will Run Fine On Mesa

[ElectricPrism]

As I wrote in my article, I ran the benchmark mode and explored, but there is no support for firing it up from the CLI... just the in-game menu. Spent a good hour poking at the binaries and examining the strings of all the files to see there is no CLI support to be able to automate it.

Maybe you should drop them a line via email and request this feature. It probably wouldn't be that hard and it would benefit the game, the devs, and phoronix, and linux gamers.

[Michael]

ElectricPrism I communicate with Feral regularly and they provide the review copies. Unfortunately they aren't too interested in benchmarking. Even with past ports where the Windows game has had good benchmarking capabilities, they haven't ported it to Linux to match the functionality. It's something I've raised with almost every game but unfortunately as it doesn't drive up direct sales from their perspective they don't seem too interested.

[ElectricPrism]

ElectricPrism I communicate with Feral regularly and they provide the review copies. Unfortunately they aren't too interested in benchmarking. Even with past ports where the Windows game has had good benchmarking capabilities, they haven't ported it to Linux to match the functionality. It's something I've raised with almost every game but unfortunately as it doesn't drive up direct sales from their perspective they don't seem too interested.

That's too bad, I see the practicality in their thinking -- no one wants bad PR on their product on random GPU Z when GPU's A through P work good.

I believe in owning above average hardware when it comes to Gaming on Linux to offset the potential performance degradation or spontaneous bug that has a frame drop.

[Azrael5]

IS there some video to see the result of this porting?

[oooverclocker]

It runs really amazing on Ubuntu 16.10 beta. I couldn't resist to test them together.

142 FPS max.
72 AVG
32 min.
With my 290X@900MHz downclocked.

So now that I got my XFX RX 480 RS I made another screenshot, this time the card runs with the amdgpu driver. All clocks are currently at factory values.

154 FPS max.
68 avg.
31 min.
Well, regarding the fact that my 290X that ran with the radeon driver was downclocked to 900MHz the results of the RX 480 are a bit worse than one might expect summing up the FLOPS. One might believe that the amdgpu driver performs slightly worse at the current state. But the high FPS being pretty much as expected I am sure that the weakness in the low FPS is a little bit caused by the limiting VRAM connection. So I will definitely mod the bios because I'm quite sure that higher VRAM clocks will stabilize the low FPS. If this issue is eliminated the results should usually show that the amdgpu driver is pretty much on par with radeon.

But overall I'm really happy with this card . 144Hz never worked with any driver with my 290X. Trading these few temporary fps for the fluent feeling of 144hz and initial amdgpu support was a good deal in my opinion. So I can really recommend you a Polaris card for your distribution when its kernel supports it. If you don't like to mod your bios overclocking the VRAM you could choose some card like the RX 470 Nitro instead that's a bit weaker for the high FPS but should usually produce about the same low and avg FPS values as the 2GHz VRAM does hardly limit the card. Though this one might be a bit noisy

[starshipeleven]

I see. Very unfortunate considering how much multiplayer means to these particular titles.

Hopefully the DoW3 team will learn from this.

Unlikely. Relying on a deterministic engine allows them to save buttloads of network bandwith, which is crucial for multiplayer, and anything that isn't windows is pretty much irrelevant for them as it is a tiny market.

[c117152]

Unlikely. Relying on a deterministic engine allows them to save buttloads of network bandwith, which is crucial for multiplayer, and anything that isn't windows is pretty much irrelevant for them as it is a tiny market.

You can do a cross-platform deterministic engine if you make sure your math libraries are cross platform from the start.

[starshipeleven]

You can do a cross-platform deterministic engine if you make sure your math libraries are cross platform from the start.

Yes, that's why I also said "and anything that isn't windows is pretty much irrelevant for them as it is a tiny market. "
So if by chance the things they use are cross-platform, good, but they won't even care.

[c117152]

Yes, that's why I also said "and anything that isn't windows is pretty much irrelevant for them as it is a tiny market. "
So if by chance the things they use are cross-platform, good, but they won't even care.

This shortsighted mentality is that kneecapped games workshops in modern gaming. They had a shitty licensing policy that kept the 40K IP away from so many genres that it created opening for stuff like Starcraft, Warcraft and eventually, League of Legends to take over.

Now, the licensees are repeating the same mistake. They're cutting corners by not caring about cross-platform and are leaving their code-bases irrelevant for new platforms and consoles. For multiplayer games especially, this is deadly.

[starshipeleven]

This shortsighted mentality is that kneecapped games workshops in modern gaming. They had a shitty licensing policy that kept the 40K IP away from so many genres that it created opening for stuff like Starcraft, Warcraft and eventually, League of Legends to take over.

Yep, they are a "miniature-first" company because their leadeship can't grasp the concept of non-physical media. Sad but very true.

Now, the licensees are repeating the same mistake. They're cutting corners by not caring about cross-platform and are leaving their code-bases irrelevant for new platforms and consoles. For multiplayer games especially, this is deadly.

Well, no, they don't really have to care about platforms that have less than 2-3% of total marketshare combined.

We can only hope that the sales of this port are high enough for them to consider the idea of making a slightly easier to port title next time.