LinuxGameCast Weekly 377: Graphics Slayer

Celebrating 7 years of Steam on Linux! Shadow of the Tomb Raider goes native, Navi Lite discovered in a Linux driver, and Valve might be working on a Stadia competitor.


Special thanks to our patreons:

  • AdmiralJT
  • Jonas
  • LinuxGNURU

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Timestamps:
05:19 Steam cloud gaming
08:33 7 years of Steam on Linux
11:46 Steam client beta
13:50 EA Steam integration
18:57 Proton 4.11-8
21:08 Dead Cells Corrupted update
23:43 Shadow of the Tomb Raider Linux release
26:43 Bears Vodka Balalaika
27:58 The Coma 2
30:42 Shameless self promotion
32:44 NVIDIA Vulkan update
35:20 Mesa 19.2.3
37:55 Navi 21 Lite
40:58 GODOT Vulkan progress update
42:21 OGRE Vulkan update
44:10 Game Off 2019
45:44 CHAIRQASITION: Shadow of the Tomb Raider
01:02:53 Hate Mail


Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro

Steam: News

Steam cloud gaming

  • Make all my dreams come true and have rentals with the option for local downloads.
  • Steam is playing the long game, son.
  • Also, why are people expecting this to be free?
    • Magical thinking
  • I’m curious if this will basically amount to a PC rental run through steam remote play or if valve has more of a bespoke solution in mind
  • What if uber but with gaming pcs?
  • Might as well.
  • Everyone else is doing it
  • And VALVe basically has its own Internet backbone to drive all this

 

7 years of Steam

  • Damn, it’s’ been a minute.
  • LGCW has also been around for 7 years. Coincidence?
  • I told this story before, but I remember actually getting to a human in VALVe’s legal department to find out whether or not Fuduntu could distribute Steam in its repos.

 

Client update

  • Finally have access to the broadcast settings.
  • Small mode is back!
    • Yay my eyes!
  • The atomic Ass will be happy that they’re fixing some bugs steam has with NFS

 

EA integration

  • This all leads to EA releasing Skate 4.
  • It does help mitigate the pain of having a zillion services hosting your games. We saw microsoft experimenting with something similar
  • Although I’m a bit miffed that EA has a patent on cross service save/achievement hosting
  • Guess we’ll see how Proton handles the Origin.

 

Proton 4.11-8

  • VKD3D for that DX12 translation.
  • I wonder what “improvements” mean for the GTA V thing.
    • Maybe It’s for RDR2? Gotta rename the exe to GTAV anyways
  • The newest Devil May cry is apparently playable now

Steam: Game Updates

Corrupted Cells update

  • The idea of balance sounds great
  • Mostly because whenever I play, I feel like it’s pointless to go for the chests in the latter levels.
  • I tend to take a lot of damage to get a weapon that’s significantly worse than the one I currently have.
  • Route optimization is definitely a thing in these games, and it’s good to see that they’re trying to give each path to the end a decent opportunity to shine
  • Adding a map hint rune is also a nice usability touch. Makes getting lost a little trickier

Steam: New Games

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

  • Now the only version available is the Definitive Edition \:D/
  • Nothing to do with Feral but grouping all the DLC with the base game and putting it on “sale” for the regular price is Bird culture.
  • People are having issues buying the game.
    • Someone done goofed when they set up that bundle.

 

BEARS, VODKA, BALALAIKA!

  • The most anticipated game of 2019 is finally out!
  • On sale for a buck.
  • You can’t get vodka that cheap without the risk of going blind
  • I can smell the Unity from here.
    • Glorious soviet unity komrade

 

The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters

  • This is the weirdest looking sequel to Giana Sisters

News:

Vulkan beta update

  • Everything still works, has that going for it.
  • Hey! Future Venn! Remember to relink CUDA for Davinci instead of rolling back drivers thinking something borked.
  • Better HDR support and F1 2017 fixes
  • VK_KHR_separate_depth_stencil_layouts, which lets you set either the aspect depth bit or the aspect stencil bit without needing to specify the other
  • HDR support in multi device configurations…
  • Well, I guess NVidia have always been pretty good at fixing bugs with legacy stuff.

 

Mesa 19.2.3

  • Bringing that spec bump goodness.
  • Minor maintenance release. Nothing earth shattering this go around
  • A couple of RadV fixes.

 

Navi lite

  • I really really want to see something that rattles NVIDIA at the top end.
    • Don’t we all. I really don’t want to have to drop another G on a video card in a few years
  • As the article says, we’re probably not going to hear anything concrete until at least early 2020
  • I would be nice to have some baked drivers, for once.
  • Using a 5700 series is still quite the carp shoot ATM.
  • I still want a bit of competition in the low power/low end space.
  • If you want a low profile card with any kind of performance you’re still stuck with a 1X50 series card.
  • That said, AMD really does need something in the high end (1080ti/2080ti) space.

 

Vulkan Progress Report #5

  • Real time lighting with up to 3 bounces and ambient occlusion have been completed
  • Most of the work this month seems to be focusing on the lighting subsystems
  • They’ve introduced dynamic objects that can provide their own lighting from their shaders.
  • Part of the performance improvements came from an Ogre3D dev.

 

Ogre Vulkans

  • Since they helped Godot get better Vulkan, might as well implement it in Ogre.
  • Dropping some shade on the LunarG Vulkan examples.
  • Wouldn’t it be high-larious if OpenMW now switches back to Ogre for vulkan support at some point?

 

Game Off 2019

  • Leaps and Bounds this year
    • So make sure your game will only run on OpenSuse LEAP and you’re good
  • Itch is also doing a good by promoting a bunch of open source game tools

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies


Game: Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Devel: Eidos-Montréal, Crystal Dynamics, Nixxes software, Feral Interactive
Engine: Foundation Engine
Price: £44.78 / US$59.36 / CA$79.34

Wazzat: As Lara Croft races to save the world from a Maya apocalypse, she must become the Tomb Raider she is destined to be.

Mandatory Disclosure: Patreons bought us keys



Venn:

Does It Launch

  • After disabling the nag screens everything started without a hitch.
  • If you don’t count the 3 times Steam tried (and failed) to download the shader content.

Performance @ 1080

  • If you have a 6GB card don’t set it on UltraMax or you will have a bad time.
  • It’s 100% multithread eleteness.
  • Even spread across 24-threads and 85/100% GPU usage.
  • Staying between 75/90 @ 1080p on High.

Graphics

  • It looks like a slightly less gritty version of the last one.
  • No RTX even though it’s supported by Vulkan and NVIDIA has provided some guides.
  • Hell, NVIDIA made a game.

Control

  • Worked OOTB with PS4 and Xclone.


Jordan:

Does It Launch

  • After the feral scream of nope gets done with it’s crap, yes
  • I did get one crash after a reload though, followed by some herky jerk, but that sorted itself out

Performance @ 1080

  • In game, it was holding about 45 ferps @ UHD on ultra
  • Bumped up to 122 Ferps @ 1080. Pretty good considering the level of detail

Graphics

  • Like I said, everything looks amazing
  • It’s no suprirse that square makes pretty games

Control

  • PS4 Works with correct button prompts.

Pedro:

Does It Launch

  • It do
  • The sheer amount of scaremongering and crap you need to click through in Feral’s screen of Nope…
  • People just gave you money, is this kind of bs really what you want to put in people’s faces?
  • It’s also impossible to control the screen of nope in BPM.
  • Game froze once
  • Couldn’t get it to do it again, so I’mma chalk that up as a hiccup

Performance @ 1080

  • It’s considerably more demanding than the previous one but I do expect that Feral will improve the performance, as they’re oft to do.
  • Right now I get an average of 60 FerPS in the Bench (47-98) at 2560×1440 Highest (motion blur disabled)
  • Average of 90 at 1080p High
  • On El Cheapo 1080p High gets a 57 FerPS average in the Bench.
  • Feral’s Game Mode gave me 1 extra FerPS on the Bench average.

Graphics

  • It looks very pretty, even the lower presets are very well done.

Control

  • Can’t set right Shift or Ctrl keys.
  • I can rebind them to PgUp and Dn, which I have set on the mouse, but not being able to set these keys is something I haven’t seen since Doom 3

QA Score:

Fedora:
Neon:
Debian:


Fun section:

Fun?:

  • Venn:
    • It’s new Tomb Raider part 3.
    • Did you like the last two?
    • Welp, have some more!
    • So what do we have here.
    • Croft is in South Merica, stole some shite, triggered the apocalypse.
    • To the games credit Step 1. was not build a bow.
    • After things get going it’s your standard Trinity slaughtering, puzzle solving murder quest.
    • There might be a plot but the writing in these games is so full of cringe-inducing nope I tend to skip it.
    • At the end of the day I enjoy these new Tomb Raiders, I enjoy them alot.
    • Solid puzzle solving broken up with stealth and outright fire fights.
    • That, and it’s going to take 12/15 hours to Venn my way through it.
    • If you’re a completionist, well, may FSM have mercy on you.
    • In closing, it’s a bit of alright.
    • I just wish it had not been bundled in with the optional DLC.
    • That hurt sales, period.
  • Jordan
    • Jesus christ I’ve played this same tutorial literally three times now. It’s either a gimmick or a very well done joke
      • Complete with murder slip and slide
    • And it’s pretty much more of the same of the previous two games
    • Fun puzzles, Okay-ish combat, exploration, murder and lots of it. The game gives you quite a lot to do.
    • It’s a pretty fun
    • The story’s interesting enough, and the performances are well acted and animated
    • It can get a little too derivative sometimes, but that could also just mean that this series knows what it does well and wants to stay in it’s comfort zone, and that’s fine
  • Pedro
    • The very beginning of the game is a carbon copy of the previous two.
    • I am glad that, unlike the 2013 one, both Rise and Shadow of the Tomb Raider actually give you Tombs to Raid.
    • I still very much enjoy the ability to completely ignore the main objective and just go around exploring all the bits without the game making me feel terrible because of it.
    • There also seems to be less of an emphasis on glorifying all the different ways Lara can get killed and more on the camera panning around to show you all the pretties.
    • If I had to find a gripe to point at, it’s the series’ over-reliance on taking control away from you whenever you walk into a new area to show a glaringly obvious point of interest.
    • I didn’t like in the first of these and I certainly don’t in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
    • I wish I had had time during the week to play more but whatever free time I had was dedicated to getting KDE Neon up and running on this box.
    • When all is said and done, I did very much enjoy what I played of it.
    • Except the systematic use of cutscenes for all the plot bits.

Fun Score:

Venn:
Jordan:
Pedro:


Hate Mail:

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