Shadow of the Tomb Raider Now Officially Available For Linux

[sarmad]

People were quick to do the benchmark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjuPA6HrFIU

[skeevy420]

Company of Heroes 2. And if it wasn't already bad, the performance on Linux took a 50% hit during the last quarter (from 22/24 fps with their in-build benchmark to 10 fps on a 6770M + dual core i5). I initially thought that the dGPU wasn't used at all, but I checked that it did. I got similar disastrous drops on my Ryzen + Vega 56 machine (distro was openSuse Tumbleweed with Mesa-git and default Mesa). All is fine on Windows 10 with this game though (wheras not really enjoyable for other reasons on the laptop).

By the way, thanks for your explanations in regards to ZFS, but I am afraid I tend to agree with Britoid there.

carewolf, I'd rather stick to the technical discussion for now. But I found your philosophical step aside intriguing nonetheless.

I have that game but I've never once played it. Part of my Humble Bundle backlog I'll get to in the next decade . If you were to wager a guess, what should I expect with a 3.6ghz Intel Westmere and an RX 580 @1080p? I'm a bit intrigued if it'll play like crap or not...though I don't have a Windows install as a comparison...

But, regardless of what it is, if it's open source, can be compiled on my own system, and is for the Linux kernel, it's Linux native. If a proprietary Linux game can be considered Linux native because it runs on Linux w/o a compat layer and was compiled from source on not my own system, an open source kernel module should be considered Linux native regardless of its tree status or origin...Anyway, I'm sorry. But that just happens to be the way I feel about it ... What do you think?

(not an actual question -- quoting one of my favorite SG1 episodes there )

[ms178]

To me being "native" has nothing to do with the abstractions in the piece of software itself to work with different platforms and that "native" means you can take the binary and run it without something like WINE to translate API calls.

Either way, it's probably splitting hairs. As long as it works, who cares?

Ok, we do disagree on that first part as for me using this source-level-translation from DX to OGL calls is somewhat important for the overall experience. If both worked equally performant, I also wouldn't care so much about this distinction, but unfortunately there is such a performance impact (and I have observed major differences on my hardware in Company of Heroes 2 which is also a Feral port).

[ms178]

Out of curiosity, which game has that massive hit?

Company of Heroes 2. And if it wasn't already bad, the performance on Linux took a 50% hit during the last quarter (from 22/24 fps with their in-build benchmark to 10 fps on a 6770M + dual core i5). I initially thought that the dGPU wasn't used at all, but I checked that it did. I got similar disastrous drops on my Ryzen + Vega 56 machine (distro was openSuse Tumbleweed with Mesa-git and default Mesa). All is fine on Windows 10 with this game though (wheras not really enjoyable for other reasons on the laptop).

By the way, thanks for your explanations in regards to ZFS, but I am afraid I tend to agree with Britoid there.

carewolf, I'd rather stick to the technical discussion for now. But I found your philosophical step aside intriguing nonetheless.

[skeevy420]

In many ways the choice of words reveals an attitude toward nativism. It is a philosophical question, that can be summed up as: Are you are a racist? If somebody moves to your country adapts your customs and speaks you language, gets local citizenship and in all ways acts like anybody else there. Do you insist on calling him a foreigner or not?

If you live in America -- the kid of the kid of the immigrant still isn't a "native" American. If you aren't white or black or an actual Native American, some asshat will say "Go back to where you came from" and the person will go "I'm from Chicago you dick". America is so damn xenophobic these days it isn't funny.

EDIT: To keep it real: Or if they're black, some asshat like my Dad will say "Go back to Africa" because they're not people let alone Americans...

[skeevy420]

I am not familiar with the ZFS discussion, the technical background might be different there. But with Feral games (at least older ports from them) there is some degradation in performance due to this source-level translation from an engine which was designed for DX to OGL.

Another reason I am a bit grudgy here is that the performance delta between the Linux and Windows version of one of their ports which I play is massive on my hardware. I'd expect the same or at least similar performance from a "native port".

In the beginning with ZFS when they still had the separate SPL (Solaris Porting Layer), that was arguably not native (using hair splitting). Since it's all contained within the ZFS module now in the form of "if Linux then....else BSD then....else Solaris then....fi"....can't really call it that much of a compat layer since damn-near all cross-platform code has OS based if/thens. But the argument we're having in the other thread doesn't go into actual technicalities like that because it is simply "out of tree modules are not native Linux" which, IMHO, is an utterly retarded position to take.

Similar to Feral game ports then and now, ZFS had some performance hits due to that but it got better over time. The only difference between ZFS and Feral is Feral is able to tweak their cross-compiler/cross-porter (for a lack of better term) to get it better by using newer APIs, newer OGL versions, etc whereas the ZFS devs get shafted with GPL Exports and worse performance thanks to kernel devs being hostile towards them (and completely ignoring a past precedent where an out-of-tree differently/"wrongly" licensed module, for a file system no less, was granted a GPL exports exception...AFS if you're curious).

But, since we're discussing closed source games and Feral and not open source and ZFS, it's more about when it was ported over and how well Feral's porter worked at the time of porting. It would be nice if once a year or two they'd re-run their porting tool on older ported games, do some automated tests, and give us Steam Beta access to it if enough tests pass to hopefully fix or make better those performance hits you mention.

Out of curiosity, which game has that massive hit?

[carewolf]

jacob, carewolf As posted in the other thread, there was a technical discussion about this on Reddit but I tend to use the word "native" like the op there does which is more restrictive: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/5cis3p/feral_interactives_indirectx/

And yes, splitting hairs with the choice of words is part of my profession.

In many ways the choice of words reveals an attitude toward nativism. It is a philosophical question, that can be summed up as: Are you are a racist? If somebody moves to your country adapts your customs and speaks you language, gets local citizenship and in all ways acts like anybody else there. Do you insist on calling him a foreigner or not?

[jrdoane]

Isn't this an oxymoron? Either it is a native game or a ported game, it cannot be both?! As mentioned in another thread today, I'd opt to call it simply a Linux port. Any dissenting opinions here?

I'm not really sure that I'd call it a port though, because it wasn't ported so much as parts of it were abstracted to be run against multiple platforms, right? To me being "native" has nothing to do with the abstractions in the piece of software itself to work with different platforms and that "native" means you can take the binary and run it without something like WINE to translate API calls.

Either way, it's probably splitting hairs. As long as it works, who cares?

[skeevy420]

I'd expect D3D12 to map relatively well to Vulkan due to their low-level nature and heritage of AMD's Mantle.

IIRC, something like 90%+ of D3D12 calls map 1:1 with Vulkan for exactly that reason. I wish I could remember the link to the page I was reading about that the day before yesterday when I was reading up on porting GLSL shaders to Vulkan because it had a lot of relevant information about that since it went into GLSL to DX12 too.

Thanks for the API, AMD.
&
Thanks for the short term memory loss, Weed.

[ms178]

Dammit, because this is relevant to another thread I'm currently arguing in....it's "native" in the way that ZFS is native -- they took the Windows code-base and did enough to get it to compile and run on Linux w/o a layer like Wine.

It's like saying ZFS isn't Linux native because it's both an out of tree module as well as it originates from Solaris/BSD even though it's been rewritten in many places and compiles to native Linux code.

If XYZ program used a (I assume Feral used a) Linux compiler and the compiled code runs on Linux w/o a compat layer, it's native Linux code. Beyond that is getting pedantic and splitting hairs. And since Windows uses compat layers to run older programs, since Linux uses compat layers to run sandboxed programs, etc; the compat layer part is starting to not really matter all that much. Heck, Linux userspace can be considered a compat layer to the kernel...especially these days where we have plenty of GNU alternatives making every system not guaranteed to be a traditional GNU/Linux setup with all the traditional GNU/Linux programs and glibc.

Of if you're like the person I'm arguing with in the Zsys thread, SotTR will never be Linux native because it isn't part of the upstream Linux kernel

I am not familiar with the ZFS discussion, the technical background might be different there. But with Feral games (at least older ports from them) there is some degradation in performance due to this source-level translation from an engine which was designed for DX to OGL.

Another reason I am a bit grudgy here is that the performance delta between the Linux and Windows version of one of their ports which I play is massive on my hardware. I'd expect the same or at least similar performance from a "native port".