Alien Isolation Is Just The Latest NVIDIA-Only Linux Game

With this morning's announcement of Alien Isolation coming to Linux next week, Phoronix readers quickly pointed out something silly.

While the Catalyst 15.9 for Linux mentioned Alien Isolation menu fixes, it seems that even with the latest AMD driver it's still not in good enough shape for handling this game on Linux that was released for Windows last year.

Feral's system requirements for this game mention that a NVIDIA GeForce 600 series or better graphics card is recommended, and to be using the very latest NVIDIA drivers of 355.11 or newer. The GTX 600 series is the minimum system requirement while GeForce GTX 700 series are the recommended requirement. The Feral page specifically states "Intel and AMD GPUs are not supported."

Of course, not many Phoronix readers will be surprised by the lack of AMD GPU support given their buggy OpenGL driver and repeatedly shown slow performance where in some tests even a GeForce GTX 950 graphics card beats out a Radeon R9 Fury graphics card. Alien Isolation probably doesn't run yet on the Mesa/Gallium3D drivers due to these open-source drivers still needing to implement more OpenGL 4.x extensions.

The good news about Alien Isolation for Linux is it looks like there is a built-in benchmark mode, assuming Feral doesn't break it in the process. From what I've dug up this morning, Alien Isolation has a "-benchmark" command-line switch that is able to work in an automated manner. If that all pans out, I'll certainly be running many GPU/driver benchmarks on this game next week. Great to see another game studio having a built-in benchmark that supposedly can be scripted and run automatically.