The Witcher 2 Works On Beta Improvements

[Kivada]

Any Unity3D game is not native on any platform, because it runs mostly on a virtual machine (C#/Mono). Minecraft is not native because it runs on the JVM. Really, almost all Android apps are not native because of Dalvik.

Nobody should care if a game is "native" or not. All that matters is the bottom line: does it run well? In this case, Witcher 2 does not run well, at all. The problems may be due to its engine, or maybe not. But it seems everyone posting in the forums is an expert and knows exactly what the devs did wrong! Hooray for the forum experts.

Unity3D games actually run well for the vast majority of people(just ask the SteamLUG and their weekly GOIO events) the WINE style ports run like shit for everybody.

[Vim_User]

because the game is multi threaded but eON is only single threaded

https://github.com/KillaW0lf04/The-Witcher-2-Issues

Note that this doesn't yet include any of our DX9 multithread rework, as that's still in progress.

Can also be found in the article this thread is for, not that I expected from you that you actually would inform yourself before commenting.

[Cyber Killer]

I'm not against using wrappers, etc, but for old (>10years) games, as long as they are properly tested and without bugs. Anything newer should be made a proper port though.

[ChrisXY]

Strangely I haven't really seen much discussion about one point:

The claim is that on other implementations like on OS X multithreaded opengl works with good performance. Now I don't know if this is true, but on the other hand: Would it be really hard to implement fast multithreaded opengl in mesa, either natively or by serializing it itself (and doing some magic to dynamically removing the slow stuff)?

[przemoli]

Strangely I haven't really seen much discussion about one point:

The claim is that on other implementations like on OS X multithreaded opengl works with good performance. Now I don't know if this is true, but on the other hand: Would it be really hard to implement fast multithreaded opengl in mesa, either natively or by serializing it itself (and doing some magic to dynamically removing the slow stuff)?

Mesa people go for:
1) Corectness.
2) Feature parity for hw.
3) OpenGL.

In that order.

Tweaking OpenGL to accept many contexts would be major work...

And would not be compatible with AZDO (where one thread have context, other just write to memory).

I really wish for AZDO first.

[rdnetto]

Wrong, eON/Wine/Crossover/Cedega and Adobe AIR/Flash based games are a massive waste of time money and effort for everyone, most of all the users that end up with a barely working, CPU killing game.

Funny, I've got at least a dozen games on Steam that work completely fine through WINE (Gold rating or higher on appdb).
Most people don't care if the game is native or not, they care if it works. If the creators officially supported the use of WINE, and it worked, then most people wouldn't even care.

I'd rather not have Wotcher2 at all then have the current eON port as theres no way they'll ever get this non native port to run well unless the user has the hardware to get a playable framerate via brute force because the game is multi threaded but eON is only single threaded and it's like WINE so the specs need to be substantially higher then what the Windows specs where just to get anything to run even if it was a single threaded game.

tl;dr maybe in another 5 years the average system will be able to play Witcher2, long after anyone would care.

What you want doesn't really matter compared to what the majority of people want. Even if the game is buggy, if it's playable some people will still find it worthwhile.

"Brute force" - that phrase does not mean what you think it means

What does it actually mean for eON to be single threaded? Does the entire game run in a single thread, or only system calls?
Interestingly, the Windows version of the game has a silver rating on Appdb, so it might have made more sense for them to fix the launcher and use WINE instead of eON, though understandably they do have a sunk cost with the latter.

Also, what do you mean by "like WINE" - WINE achieves equal or greater performance than running a game natively under Windows. (source)

[rob11311]

Wrong, eON/Wine/Crossover/Cedega and Adobe AIR/Flash based games are a massive waste of time money and effort for everyone, most of all the users that end up with a barely working, CPU killing game

Can you explain, how a WINE implementation of the function calls used by game of the Win32 API, is inherently "CPU killing", please?
How would an in-game compatability layer, translating D3D to Open GL be qualitatively superior? If you believe, someone will do a re-write to support a minority platform, then you need to find a different planet to live on where naivity pays.

In past at times, people even found cases where WINE was faster. I myself have found test cases where running Windows in a VM under Linux, was faster than pure "native", because of better disk I/O.. hand waving generalities don't tell you what's significant.

[sarmad]

HD 6770M here, minimum setting : 15fps top. I played it from start to end but few have that kind of stubbornness

Wow, you are stubborn indeed. 15fps for me is way beyond unplayable. I will wait and see if they fix this, otherwise there is no point suffering with frame rates when Steam is full of Linux games that run well.

[allenmaher]

So I got this on day one even though I right now have only an i7 with HD4000. At first it was unplayably slow (less than5-10 fps), but honestly the improvements thus far are fairly decent. I played through the first part last week and was getting about 20-25 fps (low settings) on a laptop with HD4000 graphics (latest kernel and git mesa drivers on Ubuntu 14.04). For a work in progress, give them some credit.

[sarmad]

So I got this on day one even though I right now have only an i7 with HD4000. At first it was unplayably slow (less than5-10 fps), but honestly the improvements thus far are fairly decent. I played through the first part last week and was getting about 20-25 fps (low settings) on a laptop with HD4000 graphics (latest kernel and git mesa drivers on Ubuntu 14.04). For a work in progress, give them some credit.

That is a great improvement. If on an HD4000 it gets 20-25 then I might be able to get 30+ on a Radeon HD 6750m. Maybe delimz can give it another try on his 6770m and let us know.