Vendetta Curse of Raven's Cry Is Another Sad Linux Game Port

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 25 November 2015 at 08:40 AM EST. Page 1 of 2. 15 Comments.

Last week marked the release of Vendetta: Curse of Raven's Cry that was greeted by a Linux release on the same day as the OS X and Windows game release. Given that there were reports of a command-line driven benchmarking mode, I decided to try out the game. However, in total I spent just ten minutes inside the game.

Vendetta: Curse of Raven's Cry is a re-release to the original Raven's Cry game release that happened in January. Raven's Cry was widely criticized back then for a variety of issues with this pirate-themed game. Of course, my interest at Phoronix really isn't on any of the game-play but more along the lines of performance.

Since writing about the game last week, the SteamOS/Linux system requirements are now listed on the Steam page. The minimum requirements are Ubuntu 15.10 with "OpenGL version 2.0" and a graphics card that's GeForce GTX or Radeon HD 5000 series with at least 1GB of video memory. The recommended graphics are using the "proprietary graphics drivers" with a GeForce GTX 660 or Radeon HD 6000 series or better.

When buying Vendetta Curse of Raven's Cry for $45 USD, at first the game wasn't even loading... When looking at the terminal output, GLIBCXX_3.4.20 wasn't found in libstdc++.so.6. Some quick searching revealed that this is a common problem for Linux users trying out Vendetta Curse of Raven's Cry. The easy workaround is just updating your system against this Ubuntu Toolchain PPA. After that, the game launched on this Ubuntu 15.04 x86_64 system.

The game launched to windowed mode by default at the monitor's native resolution (in this case, 2560 x 1600). First up I decided to try a Radeon R9 290 with the new Radeon Software 15.11 Crimson release.

When going to the in-game benchmark mode through the settings menu, there was quickly a message box about "your current hardware doesn't support low-detail settings." This was with the Radeon R9 290 on the proprietary drivers and a Core i5 Skylake CPU on Ubuntu... The R9 290 is much more powerful than the Radeon HD 6000 series that the Vendetta: Curse of Raven's Cry makers recommend for Linux gamers.

When dropping the resolution to 1400 x 1050, the average was just 33 FPS! At 1400 x 1050 for this Radeon R9 290, the game said it would be possible to play with medium quality settings at this resolution.

On the next page I share my NVIDIA Linux experience...


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