The Highly-Anticipated XCOM 2 Game For Linux Will Be NVIDIA-Only

[Herem]

Yes, that's a big part, too. Nvidia has profiles for like every title. The open AMD driver doesn't and it won't have anytime soon. Since no one expects Catalyst on Windows to ship without proper profiles, I don't know why AMDGPU would be allowed to do it just because it's open.

I think AMD are more concerned with bringing the open drivers up to feature parity with Catalyst before working on individual game profiles. I'm pretty sure most people would rather new OpenGL features weren't delayed by diverting resources to get a few more fps in the latest games.

[directhex]

Welp I'm off to cancel my pre-order, kind of bummed to because I got the digital deluxe for $56 on GMG but I cannot support this type of behavior.

Why should Feral care? They don't get paid a cent for GMG purchases.

[bug77]

I think AMD are more concerned with bringing the open drivers up to feature parity with Catalyst before working on individual game profiles. I'm pretty sure most people would rather new OpenGL features weren't delayed by diverting resources to get a few more fps in the latest games.

Since you can't play properly until you have both "OpenGL features" and game profiles, the order in which they are added is pretty much irrelevant.
The real issue here is that there's no plan to add profiles at all. There is support for profiles, but actually writing and validating profiles is not a scheduled item.

[Serafean]

And yes, if their out-of-spec APIs really make it that mush easier to work with their hardware, AMD should copy those too.

And intel, broadcom etc should too? IMO if there is a single ugly duckling, it should get the boot. If most players implement the spec in a specific different way, the spec should be changed. I honestly don't see making nvidia's opengl the standard as a solution... And AFAIK it's "easier" to develop for because it is less restrictive, whether less restrictive GL spec is good or bad is up to GL experts, but when programming, I sure prefer a stricter compiler to a lenient one (I get less surprises)...

Profiles : imagine there would be CPU profiles... I mean what the hell? Why is this even necessary? Bottlenecks should be found and evicted, working around them through profiles is kicking the problem down the road.

[bug77]

And intel, broadcom etc should too? IMO if there is a single ugly duckling, it should get the boot. If most players implement the spec in a specific different way, the spec should be changed. I honestly don't see making nvidia's opengl the standard as a solution... And AFAIK it's "easier" to develop for because it is less restrictive, whether less restrictive GL spec is good or bad is up to GL experts, but when programming, I sure prefer a stricter compiler to a lenient one (I get less surprises)...

Profiles : imagine there would be CPU profiles... I mean what the hell? Why is this even necessary? Bottlenecks should be found and evicted, working around them through profiles is kicking the problem down the road.

If being strict incurs such overhead that developers would rather drop AMD and intel support altogether, yes, become more permissive. Cause it probably means there's something wrong with the standard.

[bridgman]

If you drop checking then you get implementation-specific behaviour (HW-specific as well as driver-specific), not consistent behaviour. That's not what you want.

The reason for having standards in the first place is to allow portability between implementations.

The ideal model would be to have strict checking during development but relaxed checking during deployment, which is where Vulkan and some of the GL implementations are going. At the moment it's pretty much the other way round -- lax checking during development then "gee too bad it doesn't work on all the other implementations" during deployment.

[bug77]

But of course if you drop checking then you get implementation-specific behaviour (HW-specific as well as driver-specific), not consistent behaviour.

That's not what you want.

It depends on what checking are you dropping. Somehow I suspect nvidia's drivers are a "free for all" type of affair.
And about what I want, I only want a video card that works. And I have that already.

[bridgman]

It depends on what checking are you dropping. Somehow I suspect nvidia's drivers are a "free for all" type of affair.
And about what I want, I only want a video card that works. And I have that already.

The checking I am talking about dropping is the checking you referred to when you said "become more permissive". Whatever that was.

If you want a video card that works then you shouldn't be talking about other driver vendors dropping checking. If any other vendor made free-for-all drivers then you would suddenly start seeing code developed on those drivers breaking on NVidia, since (all together now) "there is no standard for non-standard behavior.

If all vendors are strict everything works. If one vendor has lax checking everything works for them but not for anyone else. If more than one vendor has lax checking then everything falls apart very quickly.

[hagda]

If being strict incurs such overhead that developers would rather drop AMD and intel support altogether, yes, become more permissive. Cause it probably means there's something wrong with the standard.

This is sending the wrong signal though, you're effectively penalyzing those who play by rules and follow the specs while rewarding parties like Nvidia who deliberately violates the official specs. If passing validation tests of a specification isn't enough to be compliant this hurts everyone involved, and risks making the specification irrelevant altogether.

Moreover, being more permissive can also result in worse performance, as you may need more runtime checks to explicitly test for stuff you wouldn't need to test for if you only handle the defined parts of the specification. Could very well be that the parts where NVidia diverges from the spec give *their* hardware a benefit, but would cause performance problems for everyone else.

[SyXbiT]

I understand the reasons why, but it's a real pity that a game released in 2016 is running on an ancient version of the Unreal Engine.
UE4 would have made porting much easier.