Talos Principle Is Still Struggling On The RadeonSI Driver

[Michael]

>Catalyst had to be left out though since I was just getting a black screen when running it on the box with the proprietary driver enabled.

Michael if You could run the game under Catalyst to get a black screen and then send me the [Talos installation dir]/Log/Talos.log, I will try to reproduce it and report straight to Croteam's internal bugtracker, to which I've got access to.

I have contacts at Croteam, but alas, when hitting a Catalyst OpenGL issue and being short on time as it is, it's a big time saver just moving on...

[LeJimster]

I found playing the game on wine using gallium(d3d9) to be a smoother experience on my AMD card. When playing it natively in OpenGL the frame rates are *ok* on the RadeonSI drivers, but the game hitches for the first few minutes of loading a new level. The Shadow bug was so annoying I had to disabled dynamic lighting all together, which is a shame as it's quite immersive when it works properly.

I keep hoping for more big improvements on the open source stack, but the bug fixes seem to drag on. Which is forcing me to look at Nvidia and closed sourced drivers for my next PC.

[duby229]

I found playing the game on wine using gallium(d3d9) to be a smoother experience on my AMD card. When playing it natively in OpenGL the frame rates are *ok* on the RadeonSI drivers, but the game hitches for the first few minutes of loading a new level. The Shadow bug was so annoying I had to disabled dynamic lighting all together, which is a shame as it's quite immersive when it works properly.

I keep hoping for more big improvements on the open source stack, but the bug fixes seem to drag on. Which is forcing me to look at Nvidia and closed sourced drivers for my next PC.

I wouldn't let that discourage you. What your experiencing is most likely nonstandard behavior as a result of poor practices at gaming companies. (Proven by wine doing much the same thing far better.) Nvidia and AMD both make the problem worse by working around bugs in the driver. Yes, that is a solution, but it's not the right solution.

[EoD_]

Bug report for "shadows were jerky" https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93594
For me that makes the game unplayable. It's far too distracting.

The bug report also mentions on how to change settings such that there are not more flickering shadows. Just disable dynamic lightning.

[haagch]

I keep hoping for more big improvements on the open source stack, but the bug fixes seem to drag on. Which is forcing me to look at Nvidia and closed sourced drivers for my next PC.

Even when Vulkan is released by then?

The bug report also mentions on how to change settings such that there are not more flickering shadows. Just disable dynamic lightning.

If I wanted to play it with worse graphics, right.

[Kano]

What has a closed source AMD Vulkan driver to do with over 1000 current Linux games?

[bug77]

The bug report also mentions on how to change settings such that there are not more flickering shadows. Just disable dynamic lightning.

Why would you want to disable dynamic lighting? It's a feature so basic it predates the pixel shader. And it adds substantially to the immersion.
I mean, I play flash games with no dynamic lighting, no problem. But those were designed to be like that. If you play a game designed to use dynamic lighting with only static lights, it just looks weird and dull. You might as well turn off texturing and just concentrate on the gameplay </sarcasm>

[duby229]

Why would you want to disable dynamic lighting? It's a feature so basic it predates the pixel shader. And it adds substantially to the immersion.
I mean, I play flash games with no dynamic lighting, no problem. But those were designed to be like that. If you play a game designed to use dynamic lighting with only static lights, it just looks weird and dull. You might as well turn off texturing and just concentrate on the gameplay </sarcasm>

Ok, but then shouldn't such a basic and ancient technology be an indication to the game company that their shit doesn't work right? If that feature works on that card and driver on any other game, then it's the game that's broken.

[marek]

Dynamic lighting is indeed a very old thing, but initially it was also ugly as hell. What's in the game is way more advanced than that.

Let's just assume it's a driver bug until we find out what's causing it.

[bug77]

Ok, but then shouldn't such a basic and ancient technology be an indication to the game company that their shit doesn't work right? If that feature works on that card and driver on any other game, then it's the game that's broken.

It's not necessarily ancient. It's been around for a while, but I don't expect Talos Principle to be using the same implementation Quake did. And yes, if a game is broken, just skip it. There's plenty (other) fish in the pond.

Dynamic lighting is indeed a very old thing, but initially it was also ugly as hell. What's in the game is way more advanced than that.

Let's just assume it's a driver bug until we find out what's causing it.

Someone hasn't played Descent.

There is some truth in what you say, tho. Every new graphics tool is abused first, before artists/developers learn to wield it right. I still remember back when we got PixelShader 2.0 how nearly every game had characters that looked like plastic. For example, this guy was in Doom3, several years after PS2.0 was upon us: http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/...20110913092946