This might be interesting for those who own the game Mad Max. The game was originally released for Windows in 2015 by Avalanche games and Warner Bros. and was ported to Linux by Feral Interactive in 2016.
Feral Interactive just updated their Linux version of Mad Max with a Vulkan beta that can be enabled in "BETAS" tab under the game properties menu if you type in the access code:
Mad Max is a solid (but not spectacular) open world game in it's own right. This is very encouraging to see. Feral Interactive does handle a lot of AAA Linux ports from other game publishers and they have been experimenting with Vulkan and MESA support going forward.
Feral Interactive work's as a "middleman" for various publishers, and has ported many triple AAA games to Mac and Linux.
They have ported all of the following games to Linux:
Alien: Isolation
Company of Heroes 2
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Empire: Total War Collection
Dirt Rally
F1 2015
GRID Autosport
Hitman 2016
Life Is Strange
Mad Max
Medieval II: Total War
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Tomb Raider
Total War: Warhammer
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II – Chaos Rising
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II – Retribution
XCOM: Enemy Unknown - The Complete Edition
XCOM 2
Mad Max is their first attempt at Vulkan implementation on Linux and it is being used as a test bed for the API. But going by the early benchmarks, the game is seeing some rather large improvements. Especially on AMD cards where OpenGL performance has always been garbage under Linux. Hopefully they start implementing Vulkan into some of their other ports, like Hitman 2016, XCOM 2, Dirt Rally and Mankind Divided.
The only Witcher game that is available for Linux is The Witcher 2. It was ported by a group called Virtual Programming. Their Linux port is partially native but uses wrappers for the DX shadder protocols.
Sadly The Witcher and The Witcher 3 are not available on Linux, and there is no word on The Witcher 3.
Yeah, I guess GamingOnLinux failed to mention that. Making the Vulkan benchmarks a little more impressive than they are. Apparently playing the game with OpenGL beta has some issues, and OpenGL 1.0 gets better performance. However, Vulkan still showing a nice 20-30FPS increase over OpenGL 1.0.
Here is their correction article on that:
I have been playing the game on an older i5 2500k with a Geforce 660TI and16GB of DDR3 1600 running Linux Mint 18 with the NVidia 375.39 driver and 4.4.0-21-generic Kernel. Here is a comparison I made:
OpenGL 1.0:
Vulkan Beta:
The game is running on older hardware, so it is using a mix of high and normal settings. This is not maxed out by any means. These images are not a perfect 1:1 either. But Vulkan does make a noticeable difference in the framerate. I am seeing 30-50FPS on Open GL while Vulkan gets about 60-75FPS.
There has been some reports that Vulkan is getting some huge gains on AMD cards like the R9 series. It apparently is benefiting AMD cards a lot, improvements from 20-30FPS to about 90.
