A Developer's Perspective On Porting Games To Linux

[Azrael5]

The AMD cards are not crashing because of a "nvidia hack" they are crashing on oGL code, an open standard.

are there solutions?

[smitty3268]

The AMD cards are not crashing because of a "nvidia hack" they are crashing on oGL code, an open standard.

Are they?

Well, yes, a lot of the time they are.

But a lot of the time developers figure out that they coded things wrong and didn't follow the OpenGL standard. NVidia's implementation is pretty famous for allowing incorrect code to run, while AMD follows the standard closer and will correctly crash.

As i said before, some apps are doing nothing wrong and the blame lies entirely with AMD. But other apps are doing things wrong, and the blame lies with them.

[stqn]

Too bad Painkiller and Deadfall Adventures don't actually work correctly. Pretty hard to take them seriously... that's some of the worst rubbish I've ever seen.

It's probably OK if you have Nvidia (so I've heard), but performance, stability and load times (shader compiling) are ridiculous on AMD (fglrx or radeon + Mesa 10.x).

They are ridiculous on nvidia too, at least for the first run (of Deadfall). For some reason the game was released with a non-playable (because of the huge freezes) playable intro. So you have to wait until it is finished, then restart the game, and then it?s playable. If you?re getting the same freezes on every run on AMD then yeah, I feel your pain. I also get freezes ingame during shooting scenes, the perfect moment to get shot and be killed.

Oh and the mouse sensivity is fucked up so I can?t really play either with my trackball or mouse. Yet another programmer who thinks it?s a good idea to get raw mouse events (and break alt-tab at the same time).

[Ladgurie]

Homeworld and Joint Task Force.. in modern grafical way.

[stqn]

Deadfall not so horrible after all

Hm, I see I commented on Deadfall freezes here, so a clarification: it seems that the game needs a lot of RAM on ?high? settings, and having a lot of it could reduce significantly the freezes. Reducing the graphics options also solves this problem.