The Surge 2 Sees Same-Day Linux Support Via Steam Play, RADV Workaround Needed

Released yesterday was The Surge 2 third-person action RPG game by Deck13 and sequel to the earlier The Surge game. While only released for Windows and consoles, thanks to Valve's Steam Play there is same-day support on Linux.

The Surge 2 natively uses Vulkan so that works nicely with Steam Play and no other apparent fundamental issues leading to this fairly notable game working at-launch on Linux with Steam Play.

The first report on ProtonDB also reports a "platinum" status for this game. That report is with the NVIDIA Linux binary driver while those using the Radeon "RADV" Mesa Vulkan driver will need a quick fix.

Hitting Mesa 19.3-devel Git today (and also to be back-ported to Mesa 19.2) is a The Surge 2 specific workaround. That workaround for The Surge 2 is ensuring the vRAM gets zeroed out to avoid possible hangs. When the vRAM is zeroed out with RADV, the game works fine on the Radeon Vulkan driver. This is a hard-coded workaround within the driver and not just a DriConf entry due to the debug flag needed for clearing out the vRAM not being exposed as an option at this time for DriConf.

The Surge 2 retails for $49.99 USD and at least under Windows needs at least a Radeon R9 280 / NVIDIA GTX 950 but recommends an RX Vega 56 / NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti. Unfortunately this game doesn't appear to have any integrated benchmark capabilities.