I have to hand it to Valve… 99% of their games are awesome, they have a convenient platform to buy games on, more than one platform. Which is why I think its cool that Valve, to this day updates their older games riiiiight when you think Valve will never touch them again. Yes, TF2 had an update recently… BUT PORTAL 2 HAS VULKAN NOW HOLY SHIT.
You don’t normally see many game companies update their older products (or even make them available outside of Windows), which is why Valve will always be my main squeeze.
Now if they could just properly port SFM to Linux…
I stumbled across this in my RSS feed the other day, and as someone who traverses between Windows and Linux frequently I was quite happy to read about this. Apparently if you own an AMD GPU then congratulations, you’ll have better performance under Linux rather than Windows .
The fact there is no native Linux client for RDR2 and there is a considerable amount of performance compared to Windows is both hilarious and impressive at the same time. May we see more results as above.
Here’s today’s roundup of games tested under Proton using some more modern game titles:
Quantum Break: Worked until I tried to talk to one of the NPC’s on campus, then it Quantum Broke my machine and I had to restart. Frame rate was extremely low despite setting to the lowest settings.
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus: Other than some small strange facial glitches the game ran perfectly with no performance impact whatsoever on the highest settings. Praise Vulkan!
Wolfenstein II was most of my prime focus for today, felt good to blast nazi’s again AND on a different platform! I’m surprised it hasn’t been whitelisted yet. For me this runs better than DOOM 2016 (which would be perfect if I could figure out how to get the damned mouse to function). I wish Quantum Break worked just as well… I played that under Windows 10 last night and I think I’ll have fun with that one. I think I’ll save that game for another post though, it was a lot to take in despite only having played it for an hour.
Now that I’ve had more time to play with the new Steam Play feature I’ve decided to make a list for what I tested last night and this afternoon:
DOOM 2016: Default OpenGL version failed to load; had to rename DOOM64VK.exe to DOOM64.exe in order for it to launch. Everything but the mouse worked.
Quake Champions: Locked up solid, had to reset.
Hard Reset Redux: Worked perfectly.
Obduction: Same result as Quake Champions.
Blade Kitten: Didn’t even try to run.
Tomb Raider Underworld: Keeps steady frame rate for the most part, but dislikes the Steam Overlay no matter which monitor I run it on (which it kept deciding for me). It also didn’t like me clicking mouse buttons during certain sessions.
MGSV:TPP: Everything but the sky is black.
Commander Keen, but that runs on the Windows version of DOSBox, so kinda hard to fuck up.
I don’t expect every game to work out of the box instantly considering this update only took place yesterday, and the fact we’re able to even attempt this at all is amazing. I feel like it’ll only get better from here. Like I said in my previous post, if anyone has a suggestion for what to test next feel free to let me know, you can have a look at my game library if you’re not sure. I think I’ll take a break from it today to focus on some other stuff. :happy:
I remember Quake, excellent FPS of the time with excellent graphics of the time, then glQuake happened and it became even better. Now thanks to Novum we have vkQuake! A totally vulkanized version based off of the QuakeSpasm sourceport. Someone made a video showcasing the OpenGL (QuakeSpasm) version vs the Vulkan version.
The Vulkan version sports a nice performance increase (not that you really need it for Quake in this day and age, but still very nice. 😛 ) and it has a nice sharper look to it. I may have to retire Darkplaces and switch to this version, which can be downloaded here.
I bought DooM during the last winter sale and decided to take it for a spin today, figured it would help me with my aggression. I was a little concerned with how DooM would turn out considering none of the original ID team was involved with it, but it’s a brilliant throwback to my childhood if I ever saw it, so far I’m really impressed! I’ve been running it using the Vulkan API with all eyecandy turned on and haven’t run into any issues. Everything is butter smooth and fun to play.
You had me at Vulkan
I’ve been playing the campaign and did a bit of arcade mode when I wanted to take a break. I figure with a bit more fragging and wandering around in campaign mode I’ll test my mettle in multiplayer. It’s been quite a rush, there’s a lot to go through and replay value seems rather high thus far thanks to hidden secrets, and wanting to play the game on higher difficulties overall. My only complaint is the inability to save whenever I want, and having to rely on checkpoints, but the checkpoints are rather frequent for my gripe to be a minimal one.
I do hope more games start using Vulkan, give DirectX a kick in the pants. 😛
Grand Theft Auto 3 is getting it’s own Open Source engine called OpenRW. I love hearing stories like this, the more games that are playable under Linux the better (with excellent ports of course).
On another note, Dota 2 which is already working under Linux will be getting Vulkanized. Well, the good kind. 😛
We’re going to release vulkan support soon, probably sometime next week. That DLC checkbox is an error and shouldn’t be visible yet. Sorry for the confusion.
That’s awesome. I’ll be even more hyped if and when other source titles join on the vulkan bandwagon. Especially gmod, the optimization is piss poor on Linux when I run it on the highest settings.
This will be good news on the Linux front (and for a bunch of people overall). Vulkan 1.0 released today!
Khronos’ aim with Vulkan is implementing a low-level API that is simpler and more efficient than its predecessor. The company says that “simple drivers allow for low-overhead efficiency and cross vendor consistency,” and that there is “layered architecture so validation and debug layers can be loaded only when needed.” Another benefit over OpenGL is Vulkan’s ability for multiple threads / cores to handle graphics work.
The Talos Principle has already called dibs as the first game to have implemented Vulkan support.
I think Vulkan is the kick in the pants needed to start off a proper competition between Linux and Windows, because unfortunately OpenGL as it stands is not up to par with Direct X. And I want to see Linux succeed as a gaming Operating System. Once things start to move I might have to open up Talos Principle under both OS’s and see how well things handle.
