Ashes of Singularity Moves Ahead With Vulkan, Door May Open In Future For Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ashes of Singularity Moves Ahead With Vulkan, Door May Open In Future For Linux

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation is receiving a Vulkan port and will be released this summer...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ashes-Singularity-Vulkan

[GreenByte]

Well what that means is that just like doom it may be run through wine.

[pal666]

Well what that means is that just like doom it may be run through wine.

if you feel urge to sponsor windows-only games

[M@yeulC]

And I read the title as

Ashes of Singularity Moves Ahead With Vulkan, Doom May Open In Future For Linux

I mean, I should have guessed that it would have meant two different articles, but come on... we were so close...

I would like to see this one on Linux, though. It would certainly help justify a new (vulkan capable) GPU.

Edit: One more thing. You can read on the blog post

#1 Improve compatibility (which translates as game stability)

#2 Support the modding community

#3 Get more units into the game (Juggernauts)

#4 Add more depth to the gameplay (more units, more resources, etc.)

#5 Improve performance, lower hardware requirements

Thus, in my view, getting the above things done trump getting a Linux version out. That doesn't mean no Linux version, it means it's not yet on the radar.

Wouldn't #1 be an argument in favor of the Linux version, though? I didn't bother register on the forum to ask, but that seems pretty obvious.

[boltronics]

They even admit the game is often used for benchmarking. Wouldn't being cross-platform make the game as a benchmark tool more useful?

[LeJimster]

They were promising Vulkan support for the original Ashes release as they had originally being developing it for Mantle, but they never released it. So I'll believe it when I see it.

[boltronics]

"the biggest challenge for Ashes remains the hardware requirements. Most PC gamers cannot run the game."

Thats bullshit for Linux users because Linux users in general have much better hardware.

This means Linux maybe do only have 1% market share on Steam but the 1% have highly possibility of better hardware what would perfect fit for this game.

Agreed. My Asus G55VW i7 laptop (a couple of years old now) with an mSATA SSD has 32Gb of RAM. My overclocked i7-6700k with two Samsung M.2 SSDs has 32Gb of RAM. I've got a couple of Fury X cards, and I'll consider upgrading them to Vega if the performance bump on GNU/Linux is significant. I'll probably upgrade my CPU to a high-end Zen-based CPU at some point.

Maybe he mean to say "Most Windows gamers cannot run the game"? Mixing the terms PC and Windows is a common mistake!

[devius]

Thats bullshit for Linux users because Linux users in general have much better hardware.

Well, to help balance out the statistics my main PC has a Pentium G840 with 8GB of RAM, Samsung 840 EVO and no standalone graphics card.

[Tomin]

"the biggest challenge for Ashes remains the hardware requirements. Most PC gamers cannot run the game."

Thats bullshit for Linux users because Linux users in general have much better hardware.

How can you make such a conclusion? Is there some statistics what Linux users have?

Btw, my hardware is mostly fairly old, Phenom II X4 with GTX 460 and Core 2 Duo with HD6670 and that's how it has been past five years or so. Fortunately, at least the Core 2 Duo is going to be replaced soon with some recent Ryzen and Radeon hardware. I'm also planning to replace the GTX 460 at some point, because it won't have Vulkan support, but the Phenom is going to stay for now (I could get an FX, but that wouldn't be much of an upgrade). So, yes, I'm also upgrading them, just not every year.

[humbug]

The state of Vulkan on windows is far superior to the state of Vulkan on Linux. On windows all modern discrete GPUs got fast, stable working vulkan drivers early on. Which creates the right environment to attract devs to release Vulkan games.

On Linux Nvidia seems to have good support.
But for AMD you need to use amdgpu-pro which only works on a narrow range of distros and kernels and means you have to sacrifice openGL performance. And the open alternative apart from being slow only work on the latest gcn parts by default unless you are a non-typical user who is willing to configure the kernel yourself to force amdgpu kernel driver. Plus many modern distros like Fedora 25 don't even support Vulkan out of the box.

Linux is already a small gaming community compared to windows. Having Vulkan support be so patchy and fragmented is totally the wrong way to attract devs to Linux. We are basically saying to devs that Linux gaming is already small and the amount of people who enjoy proper Vulkan support is smaller still, despite them having the right hardware. By comparison the roll out of Vulkan on windows was beautiful across windows 7, windows 8 and windows 10 so it's no wonder it is attracting devs.