Mad Max Appears To Work Fine With RadeonSI Gallium3D

This morning's release of the Mad Max game for Linux lists only NVIDIA graphics as supported, but it does turn out at least for newer AMD GPUs using the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver things should work -- well, assuming you are using the latest open-source driver code.

Mad Max on Linux notes a GTX 660 Ti with the binary driver as minimum requirements while a GTX 970 or better is what's recommended. Mad Max on Linux with OpenGL is quite demanding... But there was no note by Feral Interactive about AMD GPU support, not even an unofficial footnote at the bottom of the system requirements table. So I decided to fire up Mad Max on RadeonSI.

Unfortunately, Mad Max for Linux has no benchmark mode thus just some quick tests this article and that will be about it. When firing up a Radeon RX 480 Polaris card with Linux 4.8 and Mesa Git, the game indeed ran fine! It does warn that the graphics are not officially supported, but it seemed to work fine.

With a Radeon RX 480 on RadeonSI, the game was smooth at 1080p. There were times though when the game slowed down a lot, likely due to shader recompilation, etc.

I only played the game for a few minutes, but didn't encounter any show-stopping issues with a RX 480 on RadeonSI.

Some Phoronix readers also commented in the forums that they too have been able to get Mad Max running on RadeonSI. Just don't expect running this demanding game on any R600g era hardware or even probably lower-end GCN GPUs will likely struggle, given Feral's recommendation of a GTX 660 / 970 on Linux.

The graphics for the game look rather nice, just a pity having another game shipping in 2016 that lacks integrated benchmark capabilities.