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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[dungeon]

Black and White .... Some Years Ago the gpu drivers was developed Out of the kernel Tree and the kernel version was not a problem.

Well i remember that, that came with UMS to KMS switch ~7 years ago . So of course all KMS drivers naturaly depends more on kernel then UMS drivers, that is nothing new

[Nille]

That is how you make drivers if you really supports the way linux do things . If you wanna use so to be depend on nvidia and nvidia blob, you (or xyz developer like this one) actually does not support linux way but nvidia way, blah, blah

Black and White .... Some Years Ago the gpu drivers was developed Out of the kernel Tree and the kernel version was not a problem.

Oh that is not problem at all, only "binary only_third party_out of tree_graphic drivers" does not like that - what you call "a problem" is usual way to made and maintain any linux kernel driver in tree

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.

[asdfblah]

In the Blog someone say that this doesn't matter. They target Ubuntu 14.04 and there is a "old" Mesa Version and older drm Modules. So even if the foxes land Upstream, thats doesn't help now.

There is https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack (but there is no mesa-lts-utopic/vivid or whatever, not yet at least), so they could target newer releases. I don't get it, why don't they do that?

[dungeon]

Why do you think that? None of the developer that i know don't want to mess with the platform. They don't want to compile System Libs and why should they? They have a target and Plattform and cant tell a user to use a ppa or the cheap excuse "Update you drivers" on a highly integrated system.

Well Linux taken different development approach right from beginnig (opensource kernel model on GPL2 only wings), it is not like other propertiary kernels and with no stable API...

This problem gets really troublesome if amd start to rollout there FOSS Kernel driver and Mixed-user space only way for newer cards.

That is how you make drivers if you really supports the way linux do things . If you wanna use so to be depend on nvidia and nvidia blob, you (or xyz developer like this one) actually does not support linux way but nvidia way, blah, blah

Thats a problem. New Intel or AMD Code comes with new Kernels. So they have to Back port the drm Code or use a very recent Kernel. The Userspace is only a Part from the Driver. And thats not only for SteamOS also for Ubuntu thats a Target-Platform.

Oh that is not problem at all, only "binary only_third party_out of tree_graphic drivers" does not like that - what you call "a problem" is usual way to made and maintain any linux kernel driver in tree

[gutigen]

Once our ATI issues are ironed out, you shouldnt have any issue on FOSS.

Quote from Aspyr from comments under that blog post. Can we stop bitching now and just wait till Civ is out (and eventually bitch then if needed)?