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Comment by dreen | Hacker News Reader

afaik the witcher 2 port for linux is actually really poor quality to the point of being just barely playable with a solid machine. or so i heard.

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You heard something that was true when it was released but which is completely wrong now after many updates. I finished the game from A to Z on Linux and while it still have some crashes it's perfectly playable even on a medium configuration (amd excluded, but that does without saying on Linux right now)

Fair enough it was a little time ago, glad to hear it's better now. However, even though I have been gaming on Linux for years, if playing a high-end title I encounter any performance problems I see no reason not to switch to Windows. You pay for the hardware and the game to have a high-end experience and then you limit that, for what?

Having said all that I have been buying lots of games from GOG and have been really impressed with the quality AND quantity of linux versions.

I can't play The Witcher 2, at all. It literally kills my computer, both on Jessie and Sid. After a few seconds in the game my GPU crashes or the kernel panics. It's most likely because of radeonsi.

Yeah, as I hinted in another comment, the games using eON technology for porting do not work so well with AMD yet.

All I found is that games ported with eON technology only work with the binary nvidia driver. Do you have more information about this?

What I find strange is that the game starts and seems to render fine, and then crashes the whole machine[1].

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=788779

Edit: fixed the link

No, I think they work with the AMD binary blob driver as well, but they have some display/compatibility issues with the drivers on those. You should check the official GIthub trackers for Witcher 2 and Bioshock Infinite, some issues are reported there.

It's not very good, no, but it works. Many gamers don't really care that much about graphics settings and if you do then Linux gaming is not for you anyway. The graphics drivers and the game executables are more optimized on windows, and that's just the current state of the world.

That wasn't the case when I used to run Windows and I really doubt it is a supportable blanket statement that can be made now.

Well, the consoles always win on optimization. However, Windows is a lot better supported than Linux or Mac. There's no other way to see it, really.

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