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

[phoronix]

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

While many Linux gamers are waiting for Civilization: Beyond Earth to premiere for Linux, if you're an ATI/AMD or Intel Linux graphics driver user you might be out of luck...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTg1MzM

[xeekei]

How the hell is this thing coded? Okay, so AMD's driver is bad, heard that story before, but Intel?! Come on!

[Edogaa]

Could be that it uses a lot of opengl functionality not available in mesa and glitchy on AMD cards?

[rikkinho]

looks like

Could be that it uses a lot of opengl functionality not available in mesa and glitchy on AMD cards?

amd drivers are garbage, no big news. intel probaly the problem is the lack of opengl 4

[gigaplex]

What do they mean by "drop support"? They'll prevent the game from running, or they'll just ignore bug reports when the driver is Intel or AMD? If the former, then we've just lost a reproducible test case so the drivers can be fixed...

[Veyrdite]

This "Nvidia only" behaviour is highly suspicious.

If you're not using a pre-existing graphics toolkit/engine then per-brand glitches are to be expected. Almost every game project encounters these bugs in development and has to perform workarounds and fixes.

It is likely that the devs made and tested their game on Linux using only Nvidia hardware. From that point on it's anyone's guess whether or not they don't want to put the effort into fixing it for other setups, or if it's a political decision not to.

Bad form. A badly ported game will not earn you many more sales.

[peppercats]

As someone who has spent a lot of time working on real-time 3D graphics, I'm wholly interested in knowing what features they're using that standard openGL 3.3 + standardized extensions available to mesa can't provide. We've yet to find a reason to go beyond GL 3.3 and extensions because essentially every modern feature can be had on mesa this way(still missing some though, but mesa is moving really fast )

I'm assuming they mean dropping mesa support anyways since they included intel.

[sirdilznik]

What do they mean by "drop support"? They'll prevent the game from running, or they'll just ignore bug reports when the driver is Intel or AMD? If the former, then we've just lost a reproducible test case so the drivers can be fixed...

My guess is that "drop support" means that in their official system requirements it will only list Nvidia graphics for Linux. The game may run on Intel and AMD cards, it may even run well, but it will essentially be on a "do it at your own risk and don't come crying to us if it doesn't work" basis. 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.

[user82]

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

[gigaplex]

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

How will that help? Doesn't work with Intel, since Intel doesn't use Gallium. I doubt they're going to port to an experimental Direct3D 9 implementation on Linux just to work around potential driver bugs on AMD Gallium drivers.