Batman: Arkham Knight Delayed For Linux Until Next Spring

[CapsAdmin]

So you suggest to develop on mesa? Would be interesting to see if that code works in nvidia and catalyst without problems.

In my experience if it works on mesa it's most likely going to work on amd and nvidia yes. Like duby229 said it's just that nvidia allows some mistakes. One at the top of my head in glsl was nvidia allowing "float red = texture(foo, uv);" which doesn't make sense because texture returns a vec4 type. On nvidia it's the equivalent of typing "float red = texture(foo, uv).r;" whereas on amd it would error. Also you can even get away with "return highp;" on nvidia and amd.

[geearf]

Thank you for this example, it's interesting to someone like me that doesn't know OGL but read often these things!

[smitty3268]

Not feral's fault if AMD and Intel are unable to properly implement the opengl specification.

It is, actually.
This kind of argument really rubs me the wrong way.
If Feral is putting out a game, it's their responsibility to make sure their customers can run it. If OpenGL sucks so badly that parts of it can't run on all drivers... Then Feral has no business trying to use that portion of OpenGL. It sucks for them, but that's what a competent developer that was trying to make a good product would do. (Which is not to mention, of course, that it's very likely that Feral is mis-using OpenGL from the start and that's why they have problems)

Anyone who thinks it's some great conspiracy just needs to read something like the dolphin developer's blog where they detailed all the issues with non-nvidia drivers on linux.

Sure, but guess what? Dolphin runs on other drivers besides just NVidia.

Just to be clear, i don't think anyone thinks there is a conspiracy. Just laziness in making a bad port. You see that kind of thing all the time when porting console games to Windows - they just try to do the port as fast and cheaply as possible rather than trying to make it actually work well.

Feral would probably respond to that by arguing that the Linux market isn't big enough to warrant making a good port, which is probably true. It still sucks, though, and I don't think they should get credit for making "good" ports when they aren't. Even on NVidia the performance is pretty terrible compared to windows.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

Them needs make money and if linux nvidia shows around 80 to 85% of market is logical them have priority to nvidia

We are talking about Linux/OS X game porting company, right? Do you feel irony in your numbers?

[bjoswald]

If it's anything like the Windows version, you can keep it. This kind of crap shouldn't be happening in 2015.

[duby229]

I just want to say that we are greatful for getting games. But the quality of ports are pretty bad. To be perfectly fair Feral isn't the only one doing bad ports.

[faldżip]

Considering the Windows version's performance and Feral's other ports I assume that 4-way Titan X SLI would be good enough for the 24fps cinematic experience...

[directhex]

Depending how you look at it, you're basically implying that nvidia is the sole proprietor of the OpenGL specification, which is obviously wrong. Sure, maybe Intel and AMD haven't fully caught up with mesa, but they're still following the spec the way it was meant to be. You don't need the full openGL spec to play most games.

It shouldn't be the hardware manufacturer's responsibility to make sure a game runs on their hardware. As long as they follow the specs (which all 3 companies do) then the game should work. It should be up to the game developers to make sure it works across all platforms. If it doesn't, that's a mistake on the developer's behalf, not the hardware manufacturer and probably not the driver devs either. Again, that's assuming the drivers were properly coded to spec.

Okay, let's take an example for Alien.

The "correct" way to port some of the DirectX features being used (i.e. the closest equivalent, without major graphics engine rewrites) is heavy use of GL_ARB_compute_shader, which is not at all implemented in Mesa yet (but is in progress).

What does Alien look like *without* GL_ARB_compute_shader?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n35hwmN3VmQ

GL_ARB_compute_shader is part of 2012's OpenGL 4.3.

Are we blaming Feral here for mapping ID3D11Device::CreateComputeShader to 2012's GL_ARB_compute_shader in their port, instead of totally rewriting the graphics engine not to rely on all the visual effects depending on compute shaders purely to benefit a small subsection of a small subsection of users (i.e. Intel-based Linux gamers)?

[dimko]

You don't need the full openGL spec to play most games.

What original poster meant, probably, that AMD and Intel did not conform to openGL4.*. Devs are not supposed to write programs to hardware. They supposed to write programs to common denominator. Which is openGL. And obviously AMD fails to confirm to latest, commonly accepted openGL versions. On windows there is no problem with AMD driver. Issue is with specifically Linux version. Same goes to Intel. The quality is good, but it does not support openGL 4.* on Linux specifically. So it's not devs fault either way, but driver developer.(whenever fault is realistic or not, i am not going there, the fact of matter, it's driver fault and not game dev/porter fault)

[gotwig]

Depending how you look at it, you're basically implying that nvidia is the sole proprietor of the OpenGL specification, which is obviously wrong. Sure, maybe Intel and AMD haven't fully caught up with mesa, but they're still following the spec the way it was meant to be. You don't need the full openGL spec to play most games.

It shouldn't be the hardware manufacturer's responsibility to make sure a game runs on their hardware. As long as they follow the specs (which all 3 companies do) then the game should work. It should be up to the game developers to make sure it works across all platforms. If it doesn't, that's a mistake on the developer's behalf, not the hardware manufacturer and probably not the driver devs either. Again, that's assuming the drivers were properly coded to spec.

If YOU think , its the duty of developers to hold back progress due to missing driver functionality, one thats for decades in windows cross hardware available, you are very wrong!

Back in the days, AMD video drivers didnt even support basic graphics libraries like clutter properly. .... I had so much bug reports because of this shit.

Its really ONLY the drivers fault, not the devs fault for using technics that they can use on windows for at least 10 years already, if not more without any issues.

I mean come on, its almost 2016 and we still have to mess with this shit? Very right to just dont support them at all.