Civilization: Beyond Earth Likely To Drop Intel/AMD Linux Support

[dungeon]

I'm not sure if you are serious or no one tells the distributions how Linux works. Lets see the Current Situation. Drivers in Steams Target Platform are outdated and don't get a upgrade. The same for the Kernel.

That is xyz distribution business, they may not support opensource graphics drivers at all if they like . They may disable let, say, intel, nouveu and radeon completely and also their xorg drivers and mesa... and boot stright to nvidia blob if they want that

[xeekei]

Go ahead and fix it, the source is at your fingertips.

I'm sure the Blender developers are just incompetent idiots like the Aspyr guys. You will be able to fix this in no time, because obviously it cannot be the fault of the driver.

I will as soon as my coding skills catch up (if, by then, they haven't already fixed it). But my point was, people keep making claims about AMD's drivers, and I keep seeing other people doing what the first people claimed to be impossible. I would like more information. We are Linux users, we can handle a bit of a technical explanation.

[smitty3268]

Well, they said AMD is not yet officially supported.
However, since they released the port (IIRC beginning of October) there has been no patch, no statement what's wrong
and what AMD users can expect. Mind you: this game is based on UE3, so a bleeding edge Direct3D version shouldn't
be an issue here. Really disappointing...

My understanding is that the game by default runs with all the fancy engine effects turned off by default on AMD, because turning them on results in slow performance.

There's a hidden pref you can flip over to test things yourself. With that flipped, you'll get the same graphics as NVidia, it was just too slow so they decided to default to simpler graphics on AMD and not officially say it was supported.

At least for the Mesa drivers, I think the issue is fixed. They added some fixes for it in the 3.18 kernel, and I think at least 1 more in the 3.19 kernel, and I believe it's now running well on Mesa/radeon. I've got no idea about fglrx, and I think it's expected that Intel hardware just isn't fast enough to give good results no matter what the drivers do.

I agree it'd be good to have Aspry follow up on this stuff. I get the impression that a lot of these ports get done and then are mostly forgotten about as they move on to the next project. This is a big enough issue you'd hope they could come back to it, though.

[gamerk2]

Not terribly shocking. On the Intel side, they have a number of OGL 3.3 functions that simply do not work properly on their HD3000/HD4000 series of iGPUs. On the AMD side, historically, going back to their ATI days, OGL driver support has been...less then good. This is nothing new.

[efikkan]

The issue here is about standards compliance. A game should work on any hardware with a decent driver. Both AMD and Intel are still struggling with OpenGL support. Intel has decent OpenGL 2 support, but still struggles with GLSL. AMD also is decent for OpenGL 2.x support, but their claims for 4.x support are questionable.