Interstellar Marines On Linux With Catalyst: Bull S*#@

Interstellar Marines is a science fiction FPS game in development that's powered by the Unity 4 Game Engine. While it's been available in early access mode for Linux gamers going back several months, the latest AMD Catalyst driver still seems to be having issues with this game.

Interstellar Marines hit Steam Greenlight in 2012 and was insired by Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, Half-Life, and other games. The game is developed by Zero Point Software. Early access to Interestellar Marines is available via Steam for $18.99 USD on Windows, OS X, and Linux/SteamOS.

While this game has been available for Linux for a while, I haven't tested it out myself for the lack of it not suiting my automated benchmarking requirements. However, Phoronix reader "calexil" wrote into Phoronix to share a YouTube video he made showing off the game with the Catalyst 14.12 "OMEGA" Linux graphics driver.

He forewarns that there's explicit language in his video due to being upset over the poor graphics performance of Catalyst 14.12 when using a Radeon R9 270 graphics card for this Unity 4 game. The rest of his system comes down to an AMD FX-8350 Vishera, 8GB of RAM, Ubuntu-derived Linux Mint 17.1, and is playing at 1920 x 1080. His Radeon R9 270 graphics card is from XFX. The specs should be good enough for this independent Unity-powered game, but at least with Catalyst 14.12, there's still issues to overcome.

Hopefully a future Catalyst Linux update will improve the experience... Though I'm not entirely surprised by the Interstellar Marines results given that with Catalyst 14.12 I've ran into issues with Unreal Engine 4 along with the Metro Redux games on Linux and Civilization Beyond Earth on Linux.

If you've tried out Interstellar Marines, comment on this article to let us know what driver/GPU you're using and how it worked out for you on Linux.