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

[gigaplex]

To purposely put in something to block the game from running on Intel or AMD graphics would be stupid, not to mention it would require extra work.

I agree, yet I see this kind of thing all the time. The software vendors usually prefer sticking up a dialog saying "your hardware is not currently supported" rather than having the app crash in unpredictable ways, to reduce burden on support calls. For example, I've seen an issue where a game checked the NVIDIA driver version and refused to run if it wasn't new enough. Then NVIDIA changed their version numbers from 2 digits to 3 digits, and the version check failed, refusing to run even though it would normally work. NVIDIA worked around the issue by bumping their version number up significantly (to around 160 or so). I can't recall which game this was...

[kenjitamura]

If it's a problem with the graphics drivers then we can't hold the game developers responsible. In time MESA and AMD will address the issue and in the meanwhile it's broken on that hardware. I don't think anyone is going to suggest the developers waste time trying to assemble some shoddy work around that wouldn't be required at all had there been correctly functioning drivers.

[zanny]

Release the game and have it spit out debug output of all its GL calls. Mention on the Steam page only supports Nvidia, but make sure any switch in the engine is togglable by the end user so we can actually fix Mesa with whatever they need. Or even better, they could submit bugs to Mesa on whatever isn't working.

[johnc]

The irony here is that Civiliation: Beyond Earth is an AMD Never Settle / Gaming Evolved title. "Plays best on AMD Radeon.*"


(* on Windows)

[peppercats]

This is the OS X requirements

Graphics: ATI Radeon 4850 / nVidia 640M /Intel HD 4000

I'm honestly curious as to why it would run fine with that hardware but not on linux

[Anarchy]

It won't be the first, nor the last time that someone has dropped Intel support.

[Guest]

Well then, I'm looking to drop the idea of buying Civilization:Beyond Earth. I can understand their difficulties if the game requires OpenGL 4, and if they can't guarantee it works due to that.

But if they do crap like checking for Mesa drivers and then preventing game launch, I will get mad. That's just bullshit - it prevents any possibility of getting it to work in the future.

[crymsonpheonix]

What about using Direct3D 9, present in Mesa 10.4+?

ummm... because Beyond Earth is DX11 and Mantle only?

It's likely that being DX11 Beyond Earth relies on features like Tesselation that haven't landed in Mesa yet.

[grigi]

AMDs drivers are known for having bugs, but yet, I have significantly worse stability with my older nvidia notebook and my desktop than the work notebook that runs fgrlx...
In fact, my fglrx notebook plays witcher2 much better than the significantly more powerful nvidia desktop.

I am getting very annoyed that people only dev on their nvidia machines, and then says intel/amd is broken, when in all likelyhood it is their code that is broken, by using nvidia-only features.

[peppercats]

AMDs drivers are known for having bugs, but yet, I have significantly worse stability with my older nvidia notebook and my desktop than the work notebook that runs fgrlx...
In fact, my fglrx notebook plays witcher2 much better than the significantly more powerful nvidia desktop.

I am getting very annoyed that people only dev on their nvidia machines, and then says intel/amd is broken, when in all likelyhood it is their code that is broken, by using nvidia-only features.

There's a lot of truth to this, openGL with nvidia is essentially nvidia's version of mantle with how many non-conformant things it accepts