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

[Nille]

AMD is actually sponsoring the game (best played on Radeon, etc.),

The Linux and MAC Port comes from a different company and developer that port to AppleGL.

[dungeon]

Well i wish to believe it is just weekly bloging update as it is It might be next week: "oh, we found what problem is with intel/amd"

[blackiwid]

This is so cracy on so much levels its totaly absurd:

1. I learned reading this thread that it needs dx11, normaly civ games are extreme crap graphics like nearly each other game in this genre.

2. they talk about ati cards, did the got stuck 10 years in the past, and did not look out from their rock they were hiding?

3. gpu wise mabye 5% of the users have nvidia gpus, the rest have either intel or amd igps/apus or amd grafics cards so they drop suppport for 95% of their customers under linux, thats a strange thing to do.

4. people here talk about crappy amd drivers, even if you use it in one sentence like amd drivers are crappy but intels are good it makes nearly no sense, because still even most amd gpus are way faster than intel gpus and u got most likely more fps with combination amd gpu + free amd driver than with intel combination. So why would you compare the bad driver from amd with the good driver from intel. Ok here and there the intel driver is still better but the free radeon driver is very close.

5. and then the thing here some people mentioned, if they just relese the game most likely 1-2 months later or at worst 6 months later mesa will support it... except nobody buys this game.

[Nille]

3. gpu wise mabye 5% of the users have nvidia gpus, the rest have either intel or amd igps/apus or amd grafics cards so they drop suppport for 95% of their customers under linux, thats a strange thing to do.

Thats not true. Look at the Steam statistics. Nvidias usage is over 50% in the Gaming Marked. Under Linux users its probably higher (only for the gamers)

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

[Silverthorn]

Well i wish to believe it is just weekly bloging update as it is It might be next week: "oh, we found what problem is with intel/amd"

That is exactly what this is, a weekly bloging update. They wanted to give us a heads up that they might consider postponing the release for non nvidia users in case they won't be able to fix it in due time. What this mean in reality is that if you report a problem with an AMD/Intel card you will get a standard reply "We do not support your card yet but we are working on it". There's nothing in this blog post to get excited about. They will let us know in the coming weeks about the progress and what their final decision will be. Until then, people just need to calm down.

Thumbs up for Aspyr for sharing the information with us.

[iv841]

So they coded in NvidiaGL and not in OpenGL.
Nvidia is known to take garbage and do something and dont report errors.

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.

[iv841]

3. gpu wise mabye 5% of the users have nvidia gpus, the rest have either intel or amd igps/apus or amd grafics cards so they drop suppport for 95% of their customers under linux, thats a strange thing to do.

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.

[log0]

The Nvidia driver is not a conformance testing or debugging tool...

Tell that to the guys at Aspyr.

[iv841]

Well i wish to believe it is just weekly bloging update as it is It might be next week: "oh, we found what problem is with intel/amd"

I would guess the main problem is that it is a Direct3D 11 game, while Mesa supports OpenGL 3.3 (roughly equivalent to Direct3D 10), and the Nvidia proprietary driver supports 4.5. Maybe they could make the code work with 3.3 (a la Metro: LL with tessellation and other effects removed on Linux), but in fact I hope they will not, because that would be one more Linux port that is clearly inferior to Windows, and Mesa driver developers would have less incentive to finally catch up with the OpenGL version support.

[iv841]

Tell that to the guys at Aspyr.

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.