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

[bug77]

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.

Yeah, ok. You guys are doing everything just fine, but it must be a world-class conspiracy confining you to under 20% market share.

[Cyber Killer]

This is bull! XCOM 1 is running better on my machine with Mesa drivers than with fglrx (it's running barely playable though - about 20-25fps, I got R7 250X), and here with the same engine they say they won't make it run on Radeons?

Like a couple of people said - nvidia should get the boot for breaking the specs.

[Daktyl198]

Everybody seems to be blaming the Catalyst drivers, but as somebody pointed out the MESA drivers are at the same feature parity as OSX drivers, and faster to boot. This is where I'm confused, especially since Macs use AMD gpus now so... wtf Feral? Couldn't they have targeted the much less buggy MESA drivers instead of trying it once or twice on Catalyst and going "nope, doesn't work"?

[Daktyl198]

Yeah, ok. You guys are doing everything just fine, but it must be a world-class conspiracy confining you to under 20% market share.

Michael, I petition to give this guy the title "Official NVidia Fanboy"

It's not a conspiracy, it's a combination of NVidia's (questionable, but brilliant) marketing and admittedly slower DX11 drivers on AMD's side. Most of these "AMD-only problems" didn't exist when ATI/AMD had a similar market share to NVidia, but once AMD's market share slipped under the 35% market share or so, barely anybody bothered testing on it more than cursory, since they didn't deem it worthy. THAT'S when NVidia's laxness in the standard finally showed through, forcing bugs to show up in standards-complient drivers like AMD or Intel, further forcing them down in market share since people thought they were buggy on the latest triple-A games.

Now it's just a vicious circle of people only testing on NVidia leading to bugs in AMD leading to less people buying AMD leading to people only testing on NVidia and so on and so forth.

[bug77]

Michael, I petition to give this guy the title "Official NVidia Fanboy"

I don't know whether I'm a fanboy. Just a guy that has known for years that getting an Nvidia card means guaranteed support for any kernel, X server and performance in virtually any 3D application. I had no trouble recommending an R9 380 to a friend a few days ago, since Nvidia has left that segment largely unoccupied and my friend doesn't know Linux.

Also, the problem isn't people testing only on Nvidia. There's no such problem on Windows. The problem here is that AMD has neglected Linux drivers for so long, they probably have 10% market share of the 1% desktop systems (systems that run Linux) and that is so low, people can't justify the costs of testing and eventually supporting AMD anymore.

[Serafean]

Michael, I petition to give this guy the title "Official NVidia Fanboy"

I understand this is said in jest, right?

bug77 : I get your point and your "it just works" stance, and I respect it. Just do one thing, please : look how it works on consoles... Pick up a game and play? Nope. If each vendor has his own variant of OpenGL, buying a game for PC would also require checking you have a compatible GPU (as is the basis of this thread).

Edit : ad windows : yes, there Catalyst is a lot more complete, and AFAIK AMD has copied nvidia's hacks so it just works(tm)...

[bug77]

I understand this is said in jest, right?

bug77 : I get your point and your "it just works" stance, and I respect it. Just do one thing, please : look how it works on consoles... Pick up a game and play? Nope. If each vendor has his own variant of OpenGL, buying a game for PC would also require checking you have a compatible GPU (as is the basis of this thread).

Edit : ad windows : yes, there Catalyst is a lot more complete, and AFAIK AMD has copied nvidia's hacks so it just works(tm)...

If (and I say if, because I have no positive confirmation Nvidia's permissiveness is what causes all this friction) Nvidia is playing the non-compliance game, then it's more like IE back in the day. Except that AMD is not Netscape/Firefox/Opera just yet.

[Daktyl198]

I understand this is said in jest, right?

Of course. Being funny doesn't come across well on forums, I'm afraid :/

[Herem]

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.

I don't understand your logic that the order is irrelevant. How could anyone possibly tune something which hadn't been implemented yet?

In all the development I've ever been involved in the initial target is always delivering functionality, tuning then comes later in the development cycle.

[bug77]

Of course. Being funny doesn't come across well on forums, I'm afraid :/

Fwiw, I don't have a problem with being funny. Or sarcastic.

I don't understand your logic that the order is irrelevant. How could anyone possibly tune something which hadn't been implemented yet?

In all the development I've ever been involved in the initial target is always delivering functionality, tuning then comes later in the development cycle.

You could have profiles for games targeting OpenGL 4.0 or lower before you finish working on OpenGL 4.1+ support.