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Thanks ⌠you know for what, donât make me be specific!
The Mesa open source stack on Linux is really coming into its own now. AMDâs closed source Linux graphics drivers on the past generally sucked in OpenGL performance and fell behind Nvidiaâs OpenGL performance on their closed source drivers. But AMDâs commitment to going Open source has really benefited them here.
And it is not just AMD either, MESA has been doing wonders for Intelâs embedded GPUâs as well on Linux. I have an old Netbook with an Intel ATOM with an embedded graphics core, and it is using Lubuntu with the latest preview MESA drivers, and I have been impressed with how well they have been working for me.
Really tempted to jump over to Arch. Whatâs one of the best flavors of Arch with an idiot proof installer?
Manjaro or Antergos if you want an easy installer.
Or OB Revange maybe.
I will have to create some bootable USB drives and try some of these out. I might check out Manjaro with the Gnome DE, and Antergos with a MATE DE (I always liked classic Gnome).
Yeah you basiclly can try any desktop you like.
Hi there wendell,
I appreciated your post and video almost a month ago now. At the time I was on holiday and I watched it with some heavy dose of disbelief.
Do you have updates on this by any chance wendell?
I ask because your post got me âexcitedâ. Excited in the sense that I got to thinking could it be? Most of the time in Linux I donât really like to delve into linux kernel building/libraries etc. I have enough things to do. But just like you guys, sometimes things interest me and this happens to be one of them.
So having got Fedora 26 installed already, I embarked on a quest to see what I could see. It helped that my Vega 56 came a week after I got back. For once I didnât use the proprietary driver that comes with the card.
First test: Just like the PPA of paulo dias that you used, Fedora had a couple of people who were doing custom builds of kernels and mesa (courtesy of copr) Luckily there happened to be a 4.12 kernel with all the 4.15 fixes patched in. Meaning I got Displayport sound/video all working. Mesa was the same.
Result: Fedora had no crashes for over a week in my heavy use as a developer workstation. Good sign.
Second Test: Time for some GL testing. Here I ran glmark2, glxgears, all the unigine âŚall worked WOW looking good.
Third Test: Time for real games. Civ6 starts but I get odd flickering in the polygons. Divinity Original Sin, theres a few textures where it looks like theres flies buzzing around. Same in Donât Starve. Only game that ran 100% clean was Torchlight 2.
Fourth Test: Alright, maybe itâs my Mesa, it is only on 17.2 so pulled in devel, along with libDRM devel. Without swearing, all I can say is itâs a B$$$$ to compile. After some head scratching it worked. But still same issues in Divinity. Couldnât see if it worked for Civ6 because I couldnât figure out how to make it point to my custom LIBS. It was easy in Divinity
Mind you Iâm not entirely ânewâ to Linux but this is my first foray into compiling for system components. Whether its my last remains to be seen.
My constructive criticism is this. Whilst in your video theres little âhintsâ here and there. It would help to highlight some of the versions you ended up with (libdrm, mesa3d etc) in order for civ6 to run cleanly. Or what patches you applied that wasnât submitted to the mainline (if any). I know you said I had to get dirty and I think I have. A little direction on which puddle I should roll in would help reduce it. Yes, you mentioned you wished it was a âhowtoâ however I donât think it would have hurt to put a few more little signposts to help.
I do thank you guys for getting me excited about exercising my skills but doing this highlights one thing to me about âLinuxâ that I always found âpainfulâ; when you look under the covers.
You are 100% right. This is way, way overdue but this is in part because Iâve found lots of little isuses. In civ, for example, yes the culled ploygons may be contributing to the better performance?
Some of the stuff will be rolled into kernel 4.15. Another thing happened â amd submitted a huge amount of changes to the linux kernel to better support this stuff, but most of those were rejected⌠but should be included in 4.15.
I am super tempted to publish a how-to to get everything basically working with great performance and mostly ok games, at least civ and some other games. Some games were problematic, though. It is painful, you are right. I expected to have the follow up before now but nothing is really ready yet in spite of a lot of work from a lot of people.
Will try to do better in future.