Civilization VI Now Available For Linux

[randomsalad]

So I'm using the latest LLVM & Mesa from git, the intro video plays but then the game errors out with:

Civ6: /var/tmp/portage/sys-devel/llvm-9999/work/llvm-9999/lib/Target/AMDGPU/SIMachineScheduler.cpp:1584: void llvm::SIScheduleBlockScheduler::blockScheduled(llv m::SIScheduleBlock*): Assertion `LiveRegsConsumers[RegP.first] == 0' failed.

Getting further than me atleast. On Debian Stretch with LLVM 4.0 & Mesa git it just crashes immediately with:

/home/user/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Sid Meier's Civilization VI/./Civ6: Symbol `_ZTVN10__cxxabiv120__si_class_type_infoE' has different size in shared object, consider re-linking
/home/user/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Sid Meier's Civilization VI/./Civ6: Symbol `_ZTVN10__cxxabiv117__class_type_infoE' has different size in shared object, consider re-linking
Segmentation fault

[bug77]

Sorry Aspyr, I don't care about "should work", I'm not spending my money until RadeonSI is officialy supported.

Imagine being a game developer, working on porting stuff to a platform having 1% market share. And then seeing messages like yours above. Would that wntice you into pouring even more money into that platform?
You don't like it, you don't buy it. But don't whine like the Universe in indebted to you.

Whether you like it or not, Nvidia uses pretty much the same driver on both Windows and Linux and that means when you port something, Nvidia offers the easier path. Regardless of how nice AMD fits into the Linux stack. Give developers time, let them see there's money to be made on Linux and they'll add the resources to support AMD on launch as well.

[duby229]

Imagine being a game developer, working on porting stuff to a platform having 1% market share. And then seeing messages like yours above. Would that wntice you into pouring even more money into that platform?
You don't like it, you don't buy it. But don't whine like the Universe in indebted to you.

Whether you like it or not, Nvidia uses pretty much the same driver on both Windows and Linux and that means when you port something, Nvidia offers the easier path. Regardless of how nice AMD fits into the Linux stack. Give developers time, let them see there's money to be made on Linux and they'll add the resources to support AMD on launch as well.

But that is -exactly- the biggest problem with ports coming to linux these days. It is -not- the drivers that are causing bugs, it's bugs in the ports themselves. And really we all need to loudly blame nVidia for that.

[gurv]

When I see somebody saying this:
... and I'm not having the same problems. That's when AMD drivers are better.

Yeah, that reminds of a problem I've had on my GTX 670 : just couldn't get half decent fps on Remember Me under wine.
No matter what I tried (CSMT on/off, older wine versions mentionned on winehq, winetricks..) couldn't get more then 3-5 fps... on the menu!

Then I tried nouveau and it was fluid (60 fps in the menu), and with normal Wine (no CSMT).
Seeing as (old) Winehq reports didn't mention any performance problem with NVidia, it must be a regression in the proprietary driver.

I also had bad frame pacing on ETS2 with the proprietary driver (much better with nouveau but significantly worse fps) though I finally fixed it with triple buffering.

So yeah NVidia proprietary driver does have its fair share of problems.

[M@GOid]

Imagine being a game developer, working on porting stuff to a platform having 1% market share. And then seeing messages like yours above. Would that wntice you into pouring even more money into that platform?
You don't like it, you don't buy it. But don't whine like the Universe in indebted to you.

Whether you like it or not, Nvidia uses pretty much the same driver on both Windows and Linux and that means when you port something, Nvidia offers the easier path. Regardless of how nice AMD fits into the Linux stack. Give developers time, let them see there's money to be made on Linux and they'll add the resources to support AMD on launch as well.

Well, I believe we are quite civilized compared to some folks at Windows forums. But I see your point.

Windows drivers, both Nvidia and AMD, are not that good. Back when I played there, I forgot how many times I cannot have played a new game properly because the driver for that release was not ready yet. Even today you see games crashing or with really bad performance unless you have the very latest driver.

And if you like some niche game and have some driver problem with it, good luck, no special driver for you, we only care about AAA games that makes to the front page of famous websites.

[reavertm]

I haven't seen Nvidia blob crash in my Gentoo since around 2007 I think. But then again I don't run beta releases.

[bug77]

Well, I believe we are quite civilized compared to some folks at Windows forums. But I see your point.

Windows drivers, both Nvidia and AMD, are not that good. Back when I played there, I forgot how many times I cannot have played a new game properly because the driver for that release was not ready yet. Even today you see games crashing or with really bad performance unless you have the very latest driver.

And if you like some niche game and have some driver problem with it, good luck, no special driver for you, we only care about AAA games that makes to the front page of famous websites.

My experience is quite different. Any game I play, plays smoothly on Windows, to the point I can't even tell when I change drivers. But I don't play AAA titles on release, so I can't testify for those "release day" driver launches. I'm mostly about oldies and goldies. And I do play some demanding titles. Atm I have Shadow Warrior 2, PoE and Witcher 3 installed. As for niche games, I play many of those, too. They're usually indies that are not that demanding (but fun to play, as opposed to MMOs/MOBAs that are really just spreadsheet fests and trading games imho).

[geearf]

Imagine being a game developer, working on porting stuff to a platform having 1% market share. And then seeing messages like yours above. Would that wntice you into pouring even more money into that platform?
You don't like it, you don't buy it. But don't whine like the Universe in indebted to you.

Whether you like it or not, Nvidia uses pretty much the same driver on both Windows and Linux and that means when you port something, Nvidia offers the easier path. Regardless of how nice AMD fits into the Linux stack. Give developers time, let them see there's money to be made on Linux and they'll add the resources to support AMD on launch as well.

I have to agree with LEW21 there, when MESA was still on OGL 3.x, or even 4.2 sure that would make sense, but not anymore.
The latest Feral games will support Mesa on day-1, why is it feasible for them but not Aspyr?
(Even with DE:MD Feral gave us a list of bugs/commits needed for Mesa to work.)

You're talking about letting devs see there's money, but if users on Mesa don't buy the games that's quite a lot less money, especially with Intel graphics... I think it's good for them to know why users are not buying after all.

[M@GOid]

My experience is quite different. Any game I play, plays smoothly on Windows, to the point I can't even tell when I change drivers. But I don't play AAA titles on release, so I can't testify for those "release day" driver launches. I'm mostly about oldies and goldies. And I do play some demanding titles. Atm I have Shadow Warrior 2, PoE and Witcher 3 installed. As for niche games, I play many of those, too. They're usually indies that are not that demanding (but fun to play, as opposed to MMOs/MOBAs that are really just spreadsheet fests and trading games imho).

Indie developers are more careful about driver problems. They know that AMD or Nvidia will not get then out of trouble. I rarely get trouble with those too.

I remember buying 3 games at launch back in 2010/2011. Batman: AC, Rage and IL-2: Cliffs of Dover. The first one worked okay until I lost 45 hours of saves due to the infamous bug... The second, didn't work right for a week because of texture problems that were supposed to be fixed by a driver update and the third one was a mess so big that no driver could fix it and later was abandoned by the developer. I got so mad for these three that I promised myself to never buy a new title less than 6 months after release, when they were properly patched and with a lower price. I broke that promise when I begun buying some Linux games a couple years ago.

[funfunctor]

What?

In what universe are the AMD drivers better than Nvidia's?

There isn't much you can do as a game developer if you rely on features that some driver doesn't support well.

The Nvidia drivers don't strictly conform to the spec, AMD and Intel ones do. That means you can write completely invalid GLSL shader code and it still appears to "work" for the time being, meaning maybe your game stops working in the future even. Additionally, since the game isn't using strictly conforming shaders or API usage then that isn't a driver bug it is a game bug. To make matters worse, both vendors AMD and Nvidia, have allowed ISV's to ship broken applications and then "fixed" them in the driver by way of "profiles" where the driver knows your running xxx game and internally disables/enables or artificially breaks features of the driver which it utter nonsense.

Ergo, if someone complains they don't want to spend 50$ ? or whatever on a application with completely broken code that sells cards for only one particular hardware vendor who lets people not conform to Khronos GL but rather Nvidia GL dialect then that is a pretty darn reasonable position to take.

In all likelihood they probably just didn't invest the time/money to validate on anything but Nvidia, maybe they only paid one guy to play the game for validation building two workstations for each ASIC vendor means they have to pay two guys to play the game.