Observer Is Aspyr Media's Latest Linux Game Release, No Radeon GPU Support

[Apopas]

"Not supported" doesn't mean "doesn't work".

[humbug]

I believe we should vote with our wallets and not encourage these practices.

This is supposed to be the PC ecosystem, not a console. One of the core tenants of the PC eco system is that cross-compatibility is achieved by adhering to certain industry standards. Like openGL, Vulkan, or directX in windows. It applies for both software and hardware vendors. It's the reason the same code works across different x86-64 CPUs and graphical applications can render the same image regardless of running on Intel, nvidia or AMD. Industry standards also allow us to build our PCs using components from various different vendors because we have cases following the ATX spec, PSUs too, RAM adhering to DDR4 standards, disk drives using common sata interconnects.... I could go on.

I am not being idealistic here. The fact of the matter is that every other PC game developer making games for both windows and Linux who is using either opengl, direct or Vulkan manages to get their games supported on Nvidia and AMD. So it's a proven model.

If they found a problem with the AMD drivers which blocked them I trust that they reported it? On the other hand if they have not being testing on AMD hardware too throughout the development process it only reflects badly on them. That seems a bit incompetent.

in years gone by we only excused this because there weren't proper openGL drivers available for AMD. But that's no longer an issue..

Aspyr has confirmed that they don't even plan to support AMD.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articl...upported.10604

[boxie]

I believe we should vote with our wallets and not encourage these practices.
...
in years gone by we only excused this because there weren't proper openGL drivers available for AMD. But that's no longer an issue..

Aspyr has confirmed that they don't even plan to support AMD.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articl...upported.10604

I wonder if they are looking at the market, seeing that nvidia has a much larger share and target that much larger market segment. (makes sense from a business point of view).

unfortunately they are missing out on mindshare and copping a bit of flak for their decision to ignore a vocal part of the community.

[chithanh]

The problem lies in that these games use a 3d party multiplayer engine that uses raw values from floating point calculations in their protocol and VS and GCC does not produce 100% compatible raw floats/doubles on calculations.

Getting cross-platform consistent floating point results is not trivial but straightforward. Plus MSVC can create Linux executables nowadays.
Likely getting cross-platform multiplayer requires making changes to the Windows codebase, but this all boils down to whether the involved companies want to. Not any technical hurdles preventing this.

I spoke with Aspyr Media, who confirmed to me the team has "currently no plans to support AMD at this time for Observer".

My actual question asked what was holding the support for AMD up, but that's what they gave me.

Wow, what a shitty answer from Aspyr. The way I read it, they did not have any plans from the beginning.

[MagicMyth]

I can understand if an issue did come up but have they actually contacted any Mesa developer about the problems they may have faced? Feral have shown not only will they work with the open source community but these days they also contact Mesa developer long before release so that both parties can work out any issues and more importantly know who's issue it actually is (and this is what many game devs do with NVidia on Windows). Has Aspyr started doing anything like that?

[LEW21]

There is no way I'm buying anything that doesn't officialy support AMD. I've already boycotted Civ 6, and I really love strategy games. Whatever, Paradox is always there with Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis & Stellaris, and they always support Linux & AMD on the release date.

[humbug]

unfortunately they are missing out on mindshare and copping a bit of flak for their decision to ignore a vocal part of the community.

Unfortunately on Linux the community reaction isn't quite harsh enough. Probably because in years past it was the norm when AMD did not have good openGL drivers.

If anybody tried this on Windows (making an Nvidia exclusive) they would be crucified by the community. There it's just an accepted part of the PC ecosystem that if the hardware is powerful enough and the drivers are conformant the devs are expected to get it to work.

[humbug]

Wow, what a shitty answer from Aspyr. The way I read it, they did not have any plans from the beginning.

LOL On their website they say ATI not supported on Linux. So they may be a bit out of the loop on the whole AMD situation...

They probably don't know that AMD GPUs now give the best out of the box experience on Linux across multiple distros/kernels.

[Hi-Angel]

The problem lies in that these games use a 3d party multiplayer engine that uses raw values from floating point calculations in their protocol and VS and GCC does not produce 100% compatible raw floats/doubles on calculations.

Have it been reported to the devs of that multiplayer engine?

[F.Ultra]

Have it been reported to the devs of that multiplayer engine?

I'm quite sure Feral have done so but I don't think that they care, Windows is their main selling platform and if they changed their code with say compile everything with GCC as some here talked about then they would break Windows multiplayer for people who do not upgrade to latest version so I don't think that they will do that either.