Valve's Portal 2 Now In Beta On Linux

[smitty3268]

As a customer, I can't say I'm too impressed with Valve. They take your money and then drop off the planet to work on something else. JMO.

Honestly, i don't think this criticism is valid. Valve is famous for providing extremely long amounts of support. There was a huge blowup when LFD2 came out, simply because it was only 1 year after the first game and everyone expected them to do the usual thing and provide support, mods, and extensions for the next 5 years before moving on to the next game.

[GraysonPeddie]

Distro: Ubuntu 14.04 Development Version
Mesa 10.2-devel (PPA)
Linux: Custom 3.14-rc4 low latency kernel
APU: AMD A10-5700 APU with Radeon HD 7660D GPU.
Resolution: 1920x1080

Excellent performance with slight frame drop in some areas, especially when meeting with GlaDOS. Audio from announcer is missing for completion of test chambers 4 and 5 and an announcer dropped out after I place a cube in a super button in test chamber 0 and pass through emancipation grill. Camera points down sometimes when I pass the grill and in certain areas where music starts like when I get to the neurontoxin chamber. I almost completed the repulson gel area without a drop of a frame rate.

Overall, I'm very impressed with Portal 2 taking advantage of my open source radeon driver. Every setting is set to high or very high except with no AA and 2x AF.

I don't have the FPS numbers since the dev console is disabled.

[Kivada]

Interesting. Do you need to pay in order to try out the beta? I am very happy to pay for games and I buy steam-Linux games for the kids all time, buy paying for a beta seems a bit OTT. Thanks in advance!

Yes, you would have to buy it first unless the devs gave you a key. "Early Access" games are also games in the beta stage and are sold via Steam. However many stupid people do not understand this and try to bash incomplete games.

[kwahoo]

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTM2Mzk

Not exactly soon, but better late than never

Published on 02 May 2013 07:11 PM EDT
Written by Michael Larabel in Gaming

Valve's very popular Portal and Portal 2 interactive puzzle video games are now natively available on Linux!

Hm...

[PatricF]

The Source 2 engine is D3D with another crappy D3D -> OGL translation layer. Yeah maybe they'll get around to doing native OGL support in Source 2.

Where did you get that?

From Steam Dev Days 6 weeks ago:

- The Source 2 Engine has been allegedly referenced many times and from the start it's been designed around Linux and OpenGL. It looks like DirectX will be out the door at Valve!

Link

[AnonymousCoward]

It appears you don't even have to opt-in to the beta to get access. At least it's available for me, and I didn't have the beta selected.

For me, the game downloaded and installed without the opt-in beta but I had to enable it to actually launch the game. Works pretty decently, too. 60 FPS with medium shaders @ 1080p on an A10-4600M with FOSS driver.

[AnonymousCoward]

I don't have the FPS numbers since the dev console is disabled.

The dev console is working for me. You can also set GALLIUM_HUD=fps when lauching Steam, as an alternative (gallium drivers only)

[blackout23]

The only visual drawback seems to be the reduced shadow quality. Other than that it runs like a dream with NVIDIA.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/portal2/issues/30

[Kemosabe]

Downloads, starts but without Announcer unplayable for me I don't want to ruin my experience.
Performance with Radeon driver (A10 5700K) is great btw.

[Widerwillig]

Downloads, starts but without Announcer unplayable for me I don't want to ruin my experience.
Performance with Radeon driver (A10 5700K) is great btw.

To fix the Announcer look here:

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/portal2