[mdlug] Commercial games and Linux

[Ingles, Raymond]

There have been a fair number of developments in gaming on Linux in the past couple of years. One of the biggest, of course, is Valve Software throwing its weight into making Linux a prominent gaming platform.

They've done it two ways - making their Steam platform available on Linux, and producing their own "SteamOS" Linux distribution to run on SteamOS machines, which are starting to be available. And it has had a definite impact - lots more commercial games are available on Linux now. (Over 1,500 on Steam alone as of September.) The vast majority are "indie" games, but larger studios are producing Linux ports of major games. On my machine, I've played Borderlands 2, Shadow of Mordor, and - just last night - Alien: Isolation.

There are some less-desirable aspects of this. For example, especially for the "AAA" games, the open-source graphics drivers have either insufficient performance, or lack required features, or both. Proprietary, binary-only drivers are necessary in practice. Secondly, of the two major "enthusiast" graphics vendors, only Nvidia has a really solid driver on Linux. AMD's Linux drivers simply don't do the hardware justice. Two games ported to Linux by "Feral Interactive" - Shadow of Mordor and Alien: Isolation - only officially support Nvidia cards.

Also... while the ports are full-featured, there are limitations. In major commercial gam development, on Windows, the driver teams analyze major games and put in special-purpose code to accelerate them. Up to and including replacing things like shader code with faster-performing versions in the driver, under the game's nose. The Linux ports haven't garnered quite that attention, and so their performance is noticeably below that of their Windows counterparts.

That said, I have a beefy enough system that I get playable framerates anyway. (i7-2600K, Nvidia GTX 970, 16GB RAM.)  If you have a decent gaming rig, I'd recommend Shadow of Mordor and Alien: Isolation - both good games in radically different genres.