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

[log0]

Well, it is not even known yet if they are actually using any sort of "NvidiaGL", as accused of, or standard (but new) OpenGL that simply does not work on the other drivers (yet), or the performance is too bad.

Your point about not relying on nvidia driver during development, due to its "compatibility" policy, is still valid.

[iv841]

Your point about not relying on nvidia driver during development, due to its "compatibility" policy, is still valid.

It is the only driver they can rely on that provides an up to date (version 4.5) OpenGL implementation, so it is not like there is much choice without compromising the quality of the port. I would not even be sure if the other drivers are reliable for the purpose of rejecting non-compliant code, for that matter, it is just that given the market share percentages, no sane developer would release a Linux game that fails to work on the Nvidia driver.

[dungeon]

I would guess the main problem is that it is a Direct3D 11 game, while Mesa supports OpenGL 3.3

Well no, i think it is not because of mesa lack something besides tesselation (which should be optional feature of course)... as a metter of fact you can run CIV_BE on Radeon 3650 on Windows and that is year 2007. and DirectX 10.1/OpenGL3.3 capable hardware.

It is more kind of story of: "It is first time we (Aspur) porting one DirectX 11 game to OpenGL, it is pretty new stuff for us and we have problems to support all the drivers so easely as earlier"

[flim]

It is the only driver they can rely on that provides an up to date (version 4.5) OpenGL implementation, so it is not like there is much choice without compromising the quality of the port. I would not even be sure if the other drivers are reliable for the purpose of rejecting non-compliant code, for that matter, it is just that given the market share percentages, no sane developer would release a Linux game that fails to work on the Nvidia driver.

I'm not sure why you mention it, but OpenGL 4.5 is irrelevant for this discussion.
They could release a working port for everyone, just follow the specs and stop trial & error.

[log0]

It is the only driver they can rely on that provides an up to date (version 4.5) OpenGL implementation, so it is not like there is much choice without compromising the quality of the port. I would not even be sure if the other drivers are reliable for the purpose of rejecting non-compliant code, for that matter, it is just that given the market share percentages, no sane developer would release a Linux game that fails to work on the Nvidia driver.

Beautiful circular reasoning you have got here. The nvidia driver should not be used for development, but they have got no choice.

Actually there is a choice, though from my impression, most if the devs porting stuff seem to be unaware of it. Mesa, from my personal experience (up to gl3.3), is the most conformant OpenGL implementation out there. If you get you crap running against Mesa, there is a high probability it will run with any other drivers (with the exception of older intel windows opengl drivers maybe, those are fubar ).

[pixo]

The Nvidia driver is not a conformance testing or debugging tool. It is designed to maximize compatibility with applications (unlike in the case of FOSS developers, there is a monetary incentive to actually make the product useful to consumers). As such, a driver is only really broken if it fails to run code that should work according to the latest specification of the standard, which unfortunately happens more with the Mesa and AMD drivers. Also, implementation defined behavior does not mean that it is mandatory to fail. Mesa developers are free to implement a strict conformance mode for debugging, but users ultimately only care about game compatibility and performance.

Yes we care about compatibility and Nvidia with their loose implementation is breaking that.
Working on Nvidias driver != working on OpenGL driver (be it from Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Mesa, Apple ...).

I find Nvidias driver to have been unusable for me (not using it now so cant comment) :
- problematic settings of multimonitor that needed changes to xorg.conf
- was not working alongside oss intel and amd driver
- security problems
- video tearing
- problems with vga-passthrough for use in VM

And what really pissed me was when the KVM had to be patched because Nvidia Win drivers would detect it and not work on Win guest.
I was so happy to be using AMD and Intel cards.

Nvidia may have less bugs but is too much restricting.
Or maybe not, it may be just that the games are coded to use those bugs.

[iv841]

as a metter of fact you can run CIV_BE on Radeon 3650 on Windows and that is year 2007.

Not with all features, I would guess ? Given the small size of the Linux market, it might not make commercial sense to support both OpenGL 3.3 and 4.x. Even Valve's ports increased the minimum GPU requirement on Linux. And since the AMD proprietary driver has some >4.0 support (up to version 4.3 IIRC), it would be a reasonable decision to require at least that as the minimum.

[blackiwid]

I do not think your numbers are right. In the latest survey by GamingOnLinux, 69% of 1100+ Linux gamers reported using Nvidia GPUs. It also shows that proprietary drivers are used far more than open source ones. In the Steam hardware survey, Nvidia has about 51% share, while it is only 29% for AMD, and 19% for Intel. That is for all three platforms combined, it does not seem to be available separately for Linux. But higher Nvidia percentage on Linux - for the purpose of gaming - makes sense, given the quality of the drivers.

I dont think the numbers of steam were high demanding games are availible is not representive for strategie games. The typical Civ players in the past were people that had time to waste in their job, so they played civ on their pcs at the work place whenever they had 5 minutes availibe.

Shurely that changed with total survalence in the world and the workplaces and compaction of work so nobody has a free second while they work, but still its a game many old (or older past 40) people with no special gaming pcs play such games.

And todays linux market share does not matter much, because with steammaschines and good support from gaming companies just coming in few months that will drasticly change.

Its not the guys from the past that bought a strong nvidia card to play 99% their games in nvidia-wine.

[dungeon]

And since the AMD proprietary driver has some >4.0 support (up to version 4.3 IIRC)

Catalyst/fglrx has OpenGL 4.4 supported on Linux/Windows.

Not with all features, I would guess ?

Of course not, but you can run it with everything on low/mid and is stated as minimal requirements, so it is still officially supported.

Now read what Aspur says again:

Additionally, we’re seeing some graphical problems with Intel and ATI cards on Linux. The performance is good (i.e. no slowdown or chugging frame rates), but there’s still lots of graphical tearing and other anomalies that make it practically unplayable. Though not official yet, it’s likely we’ll drop support for Intel and ATI graphics cards on Linux platforms prior to the game’s launch on Linux.

As on Windows too, if game runs on XYZ hardware drivers even on low settings it should be supported, why not isn't it

And those kind of things happens on Windows version too with some card/driver/settings, for example Radeon HD 4600 but that is still supported:

[iv841]

Beautiful circular reasoning you have got here. The nvidia driver should not be used for development, but they have got no choice.

I have never claimed that the Nvidia driver should not be used for development, that is something you have invented. What I meant is that it (or any other specific driver, including Mesa) should not be used as a conformance testing tool, as in the fact that a particular piece of code happens to work on a particular driver does not by itself guarantee it does not depend on undefined behavior. Regardless of the driver, the code can always be written to the standard, and verified with whatever tools are available. If the tools are lacking, that is not the driver's fault.

Actually there is a choice, though from my impression, most if the devs porting stuff seem to be unaware of it. Mesa, from my personal experience (up to gl3.3), is the most conformant OpenGL implementation out there. If you get you crap running against Mesa, there is a high probability it will run with any other drivers (with the exception of older intel windows opengl drivers maybe, those are fubar ).

For those who want more than OpenGL 3.3 (and it is not like 4.0 is not almost 5 years old by now), Mesa is not sufficient, and missing major parts of the standard limits the usefulness of its "conformance". It also does not in fact guarantee conformance, since its developers have already fixed (by including compatibility hacks) games that previously failed to work with the open source drivers, allegedly because they use the OpenGL API in "broken" ways. So, Mesa does indeed sacrifice conformance for compatibility, it just does not achieve the same level of compatibility as the proprietary drivers. And of course it is no wonder it is difficult to find Mesa-only code, because no one would want to lock out about 80% of potential users.