Best video card

[stratvox]

A brief conversation I had with @jeffpeng has led me to wonder... which video card is best for this game, esp. under linux? AMD or nVidia?

I found this article from today that intimates we linux players may see some relief in August wrt the supported shader set: 

Quote

For Mesa 19.1, the Intel driver (and Mesa OpenGL drivers at large) are still bound to OpenGL 4.5 compliance rather than OpenGL 4.6. But it's looking like for Mesa 19.2 in August we'll finally see OpenGL 4.6 officially exposed for the Intel open-source OpenGL driver.

Also jeffpeng, I've found that using the "workaround command options" (i.e. -force-glcore42 -force-clamped) improve the z-fighting issue on the terrain significantly. While I'm at it, I also experimented with the -forcevulkan option, and while it's still somewhat broken, is significantly improved from where it was around the turn of the year. It's actually playable now, though I've found the inputs to be somewhat laggy (just enough milliseconds to notice) and from my observations it mostly looks like the stuff that figures out the shadows is what's causing the glitches I saw.

So, no matter what your platform... what do you think? Which is the good family of video cards for The Long Dark?

[ajb1978]

Well I'm no longer a Linux user (I was for a good 10 years but frankly just got sick of constant compatibility issues with basically everything) but I've only ever played TLD using nvidia and it's been pretty solid.  I started with a GTX 970, then upgraded to a GTX 1080 TI, and the game runs perfectly at 4k with all settings maxed.

I have noticed that outdoor shadows cast by the sun kind of vibrate a bit while you're walking, then settle down again when you stand still.  It's subtle, but there, and I chalk it up to how Unity handles shadows.  It's also probably more visible because I'm playing in 4k.  Either way, I don't think it has anything to do with nvidia.  It's really only noticeable when walking through a dense forest.  That birch forest near the PV barn for instance.  It doesn't seem to happen with shadows cast by any other light source--it's specifically the sun.

[stratvox]

13 minutes ago, ajb1978 said:

Well I'm no longer a Linux user (I was for a good 10 years but frankly just got sick of constant compatibility issues with basically everything)

See, that's why I stopped using Windows. Their terminal compatibility has sucked since forever.

[LilWolf]

2 minutes ago, ajb1978 said:

I have noticed that outdoor shadows cast by the sun kind of vibrate a bit while you're walking, then settle down again when you stand still.  It's subtle, but there, and I chalk it up to how Unity handles shadows.  It's also probably more visible because I'm playing in 4k.  Either way, I don't think it has anything to do with nvidia.  It's really only noticeable when walking through a dense forest.  That birch forest near the PV barn for instance.  It doesn't seem to happen with shadows cast by any other light source--it's specifically the sun.

My video card is Intel and also I noticed about the 'shadows vibrations', which is quite annoying. I thought it was a problem of my Intel graphics (integrated GPU's are weak compared with video cards with dedicated memory) but now, reading this post, I see it happens with other operative systems or stronger video cards like nvidia... so yes, looks like is not a fault of the video card.

And now that this was mentioned and this thread is under the "technical discussion" forum, I don't know if it is possible to have some 'feedback' about this.

[Guest jeffpeng]

On 5/27/2019 at 2:37 PM, ajb1978 said:

I was for a good 10 years but frankly just got sick of constant compatibility issues with basically everything

 

On 5/27/2019 at 2:51 PM, stratvox said:

See, that's why I stopped using Windows. Their terminal compatibility has sucked since forever.

Story of my life. I'm a Gentoo since 2004. That's 15 years of compiling and patching and getting things to work. Got sick of having to put in real work to get even simple applications to run sometimes. But Windows is just horrible for productivity, at least development stuff (PHP/Java-WebDev). That MS didn't manage to get a decent Posix compatible terminal to run in 2019 is just ridiculous. So after half a year of trying to actually work on windows (and see my efficiency drop significantly) I'm back on Gentoo and will go dual boot again. Speaking of dual-boot: Is there some Kexec-esque way to chainload Linux from Windows?

On 5/27/2019 at 6:03 AM, stratvox said:

Also jeffpeng, I've found that using the "workaround command options" (i.e. -force-glcore42 -force-clamped) improve the z-fighting issue on the terrain significantly.

Yeah, I came to the same conclusion, but not enough so that I don't get headaches. Litereally.

About what's actually the best graphics card for TLD... I guess in terms of performance it doesn't matter a whole lot. Maybe compatibility. The entire glcore42 fix is only required for nvidia cards. In gerenal AMDs implementation of GL is pretty much to the letter, opposed to nvidia that never really cared about GL compliance. Plus I probably don't have to tell you about the joys of running nvidias amazing proprietary driver on Linux. Sadly I have no AMD card here to test this out, and I kinda don't wanna run buying one with the entire Navi thing unfolding as we speak.
 

On 5/27/2019 at 2:55 PM, LilWolf said:

My video card is Intel and also I noticed about the 'shadows vibrations', which is quite annoying. I thought it was a problem of my Intel graphics (integrated GPU's are weak compared with video cards with dedicated memory) but now, reading this post, I see it happens with other operative systems or stronger video cards like nvidia... so yes, looks like is not a fault of the video card.

That indeed makes me believe that Unity/TLD (most likely Unity) is at fault here. No matter GL42, GL45 or GL46, intels implementations are usually spot on. I would be totally happy if HL could finally move to a non-alpha version of Unity.
 

[Guest jeffpeng]

On 5/27/2019 at 6:03 AM, stratvox said:

For Mesa 19.1, the Intel driver (and Mesa OpenGL drivers at large) are still bound to OpenGL 4.5 compliance rather than OpenGL 4.6. But it's looking like for Mesa 19.2 in August we'll finally see OpenGL 4.6 officially exposed for the Intel open-source OpenGL driver.

Not going to improve the nvida situation at all. nvidia is shipping their own Frankensteinish Mesa stack, and as mentioned above whatever they are implementing really isn't compliant to anything, really.

[stratvox]

On 5/27/2019 at 8:37 AM, ajb1978 said:

I have noticed that outdoor shadows cast by the sun kind of vibrate a bit while you're walking, then settle down again when you stand still.

 

On 5/27/2019 at 8:55 AM, LilWolf said:

My video card is Intel and also I noticed about the 'shadows vibrations', which is quite annoying.

That's not what I'm talking about.  I'll attach a video of what I'm talking about, you'll see me showing it when looking at far terrain and then at near terrain.

54 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

I'm a Gentoo since 2004. That's 15 years of compiling and patching and getting things to work. Got sick of having to put in real work to get even simple applications to run sometimes.

That's why I run Ubuntu. The graphics-driver and oibaf ppa (depending on your hardware) make dealing with the video cards a snap. You can get a functional desktop going in five to ten minutes on modern hardware. I deal with enough machines (I sysadmin a unix shop in my day job) that I don't want to have to deal with all that stuff. Just get it in, know the packages I need for the tools the devs need to do their work so I can get them in too, and create/manage the accounts on the network services.

In production environments most of my history has been Solaris and Red Hat via Centos, but in my current position we're using ubuntu server side too. I'm getting myself up to speed on running Ubuntu in MaaS mode, and using the lxd version of containers and kubernetes for HA stuff... but the current production environment is standard ubuntu server with lxd. I'm looking into the MaaS/lxd/kubernetes stack to be able to expand our services out onto cloud providers for short term capacity issues, while guaranteeing that there's no question about which version of the data is canonical.

54 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

Speaking of dual-boot: Is there some Kexec-esque way to chainload Linux from Windows?

Not that I'm aware of. I've had far more success using grub and having it add Windows as a bootable partition.

I'm also wondering if I should consider making the jump to ATI er Radeon... ummm AMD? When I started investigating this a few weeks back I was surprised and interested in what I read about the difference in OpenGL support between the two manufacturers. While you're at it, you should try using the "-force-vulkan" command line parameter. When I first tried it early this winter it was completely boxed, but it's a LOT better now... but there are still problems with some of the shadows of trees going crazy. Given that before it resulted in strange pillars of light in the sky (if you follow my meaning  ) it's come a long way... and there is no z-fighting when using the vulkan backend. I'm hoping that this is a case of the vulkan driver/libraries getting close to being feature complete on linux. I'm also wondering if the vulkan backend might work just fine with an AMD card. Alternatively, it could be that unity support for vulkan is what needs progressing... but no matter what progress is clearly being made.

Edited May 29, 2019 by stratvox
Forgot attachment

[stratvox]

41 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

Not going to improve the nvida situation at all. nvidia is shipping their own Frankensteinish Mesa stack, and as mentioned above whatever they are implementing really isn't compliant to anything, really.

Yeah. I think I'm with you. I'm going to wait until the new amd stuff comes out and once I see how it goes down wrt speed/compliance, I may make the jump.

Don't spend today what you can decide to spend tomorrow ...

[Guest jeffpeng]

7 hours ago, stratvox said:

That's why I run Ubuntu. The graphics-driver and oibaf ppa (depending on your hardware) make dealing with the video cards a snap. You can get a functional desktop going in five to ten minutes on modern hardware. I deal with enough machines (I sysadmin a unix shop in my day job) that I don't want to have to deal with all that stuff. Just get it in, know the packages I need for the tools the devs need to do their work so I can get them in too, and create/manage the accounts on the network services.

Did my time running debian, ubuntu and derivatives - and maybe it's just me, but I never found myself quite happy with what I got in terms of snappyness and customization.

7 hours ago, stratvox said:

I'm also wondering if I should consider making the jump to ATI er Radeon... ummm AMD?

I guess if you are serious about playing on Linux you'll come to a point where you will want an actually supported card, not some hardware half-assed spliced into your system, with every other driver revision breaking something new. Nvidia is never going to opensource their drivers, and, as impressive as it is for a fully reverse-engineered driver stack, nouveau just won't do the trick ever. So I'll make that jump, in any case. The 1050Ti has gotten a bit old, and I'm not going to spend a single dime on CashTX.

Not sure if waiting is a good idea or not. On one hand with Navi looking to be not totally sh*t maybe waiting a month or two is worth the wait, on the other hand you can get some Vega 56's for 250ish bucks right now, and the drivers are tested and true. As for what I've heard it took Polaris 30 (RX590) about two months after release to be anywhere useable with the AMDGPU drivers. But I'm pretty sure they have begun phasing out Vega 10 already as 64 cards are rather short in supply already. So ... maybe waiting isn't the best idea? I'll probably just bet on it with the next paycheck. Plus: you can apparently undervolt Vega 10 GPUs with Linux 4.9 and up. Which is even in the most conservative distros. So you actually have a chance of not running a jet engine.

[Guest jeffpeng]

8 hours ago, stratvox said:

While you're at it, you should try using the "-force-vulkan" command line parameter.

I might, actually. But again how good and well that's supported depends on nvidias wonky Mesa implementation. That's kinda the point. And I've got a lingering feeling that the company that to this day has failed to properly implement DX12, and that to this day has failed to comply with GL will have a hard time properly supporting Vulkan which, at it's heart, is an architecture 'agnostic' implementation of AMDs Mantle.

Edit: But yes. I'd really love to see Vulkan get the support it deserves. I did some educational programming with it good a year back, and I really like how straight forward it is compared to GL, and it should really "liberate" how game developers write their titles as it kinda does away with the entire argument that GL is more comaptible, but DX is faster. Just hope Apple's boycott doesn't end up killing it

Edited May 29, 2019 by jeffpeng

[Guest jeffpeng]

Also, with all this fuzz and speaches I'd be super interested to read if the @Support has anything to say about the entire issue (meaning the Z-fighting Terrain).

[Polynomial-C]

I can only recommend giving a recent AMD GPU a try. The amdgpu drivers are really good nowadays and with recent mesa (19.0.x or 19.1.x) the game works like a charm. Although I don't know if I fully understood what you guys mean with "Z-fighting", I sometimes have quite annoying flickering with amdgpu as well in TLD especially on distant rocks and trees.

But since I use the GoG version of the game, I haven't found out yet how to submit command-line options like "-force-vulkan" to the game as I use the startup script that gets shipped with the GoG version of the game.

[stratvox]

Yeah, that flickering is exactly what we're talking about. On nVidia it's really blatant. If you want to use the command line option -force-vulkan (which may work much better on amd than nvidia; while the z-fighting goes away any shadows closer to you than maybe twenty metres or so will make you think Will/Astrid ate some mouldy rye bread) you'd edit the batch file to include it. Or, you can switch into whichever folder that the game got installed into in a terminal and try issuing "./TLD.x86_64 -force-vulkan"

[Polynomial-C]

Alright, got the command line switch working, and WOW, that's some kind of difference in the graphics... very beautiful. But... with forced vulkan support the mouse movement is very sluggish. So sluggish that it's a PITA to play the game...

[stratvox]

Aye, it's not ready for prime time yet. Interestingly, I just got a download for my two unity games from steam consisting of "pre-cached shaders: opengl vulkan" so I'm thinking things might be seeing rapid improvement....

[stratvox]

Just re-upping this thread. Having visited a few more maps I can definitely say that the most recent update (1.55) has resulted in a LOT more terrain z-fighting than used to be the case.

@Raphael van Lierop @Support I want to make sure you're aware of this; right now it's making playing the game actively fatiguing because of how much flickering one gets on the screen. If you lack linux testing harnesses I can possibly help you out with that.

On 5/29/2019 at 8:03 AM, jeffpeng said:

Not sure if waiting is a good idea or not. On one hand with Navi looking to be not totally sh*t maybe waiting a month or two is worth the wait, on the other hand you can get some Vega 56's for 250ish bucks right now, and the drivers are tested and true.

I'm figuring on waiting for another week or three as today's Ryzen and Navi releases should result in price cuts on older parts... at which point I'll think about either grabbing whatever's best from the newly outdated or dropping the dough on the 5700XT. The point of getting the 5700XT would be to eventually get a new ryzen machine sans video card and put the nvidia back in this one and get a full AMD stack gaming machine.

In my day job we're developing a grid architecture distributed supercomputer for scientific research; you can find our open beta at https://portal.distributed.computer. When I get around to having this machine become a spare I'll just turn it into a machine that works on the distributed computer and stick it in a corner somewhere. Once we get the standalone linux worker going and I can run it at idle priority and headless I'll probably stick a new NIC in this one, attach it to a wireless access point running in infrastructure mode and replace my very old wireless router gateway and get a far more powerful firewall/gateway setup for the home network here that also crunches on scientific research projects for fun and profit.

Happily I've been running high volume transaction services on the internet for years (solaris and ubuntu/centos/debian linux have been the main platforms I've worked in) so I feel pretty comfortable about running a secure ship here.

To return to the main point... please Hinterland investigate the z-fighting issues, and if you're having a hard time getting a good system up and running to test linux builds I'd be happy to lend a hand.

[Raphael van Lierop]

1 hour ago, stratvox said:

Just re-upping this thread. Having visited a few more maps I can definitely say that the most recent update (1.55) has resulted in a LOT more terrain z-fighting than used to be the case.

@Raphael van Lierop @Support I want to make sure you're aware of this; right now it's making playing the game actively fatiguing because of how much flickering one gets on the screen. If you lack linux testing harnesses I can possibly help you out with that.

I'm figuring on waiting for another week or three as today's Ryzen and Navi releases should result in price cuts on older parts... at which point I'll think about either grabbing whatever's best from the newly outdated or dropping the dough on the 5700XT. The point of getting the 5700XT would be to eventually get a new ryzen machine sans video card and put the nvidia back in this one and get a full AMD stack gaming machine.

In my day job we're developing a grid architecture distributed supercomputer for scientific research; you can find our open beta at https://portal.distributed.computer. When I get around to having this machine become a spare I'll just turn it into a machine that works on the distributed computer and stick it in a corner somewhere. Once we get the standalone linux worker going and I can run it at idle priority and headless I'll probably stick a new NIC in this one, attach it to a wireless access point running in infrastructure mode and replace my very old wireless router gateway and get a far more powerful firewall/gateway setup for the home network here that also crunches on scientific research projects for fun and profit.

Happily I've been running high volume transaction services on the internet for years (solaris and ubuntu/centos/debian linux have been the main platforms I've worked in) so I feel pretty comfortable about running a secure ship here.

To return to the main point... please Hinterland investigate the z-fighting issues, and if you're having a hard time getting a good system up and running to test linux builds I'd be happy to lend a hand.

I'll let @Admin and/or the @Support team comment on this. Also if you are so inclined feel free to report to our Help Desk directly: hinterlandgames.com/support

We try to channel all support requests through one channel if possible, otherwise it just becomes too overwhelming for our team.

[stratvox]

20 minutes ago, Raphael van Lierop said:

Also if you are so inclined feel free to report to our Help Desk directly: hinterlandgames.com/support

I have done so... took me a while to get a video chopped down enough to be able to upload it to that page . I think I uploaded that one a week or three back.

I have heard back from some of your folks on some of the bugs I've reported, but not this one; I'm hoping that it'll be at least investigated before the next release comes out.

I'm also unsure that's it's not driver related; I'm strongly considering laying hands on an AMD RX5700XT next week (gonna eat up all my points at my local retailer for that one) so I can tease out the extent to which it's game/engine driven vs. gpu/driver driven. My experiments with using Vulkan vs OpenGL on this nvidia card seem to indicate it may well be driver related; if I end up pulling the trigger next week I'll post here and let people know.

This is all linux-driven and as such I'm sure only affects a small subset of your players; probably smaller even then the hardcore interloper/deadman crowd. Still, as I really like this game and your studio and want to see it (and you!) do well and also try to help make linux gaming a viable alternative to Windows gaming I'm hoping to kill two birds with one stone... I appreciate you taking the time to discuss this.

Edited July 7, 2019 by stratvox
some clarity, and for thanks.

[stratvox]

@jeffpeng I just tried running TLD under Proton. No Z-fighting on the terrain, performance is adequate. I soft-linked in my linux save game folder into the same place where it exists under the wine prefix for that particular game, in my case by issuing:

Quote

jack@ananke:~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/305620/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Local Settings/Application Data$ ln -s /home/jack/.local/share/Hinterland/ .

and it picked everything up and loaded just fine. It seems that the save games and config files are at least arch portable (i.e. x86_64).

Thought you may be interested by that.

N.B. I did take a back up of my saves folder, and I'm going to think about whether I wish to continue using this or revert to the linux native version. If you're thinking on trying this I highly recommend issuing something like

Quote

jack@ananke:~/.local/share$ tar -zcvf /space/jack/TLDSaveGameBak.tgz Hinterland

to make sure you don't destroy your saves and profile if it turns out my success was a fluke.

There are interesting subtle differences in how the game looks... definitely worth playing with.

Later:

Running the game with "-force-glcore" works, and the flickering returns. Using "-force-vulkan" ends up with the game croaking on startup with a "failed to initialize player" error.

This points back to your thesis that it's nVidia's bad OpenGL conformance that's leading to these issues.

I'm waiting to see if the Vega 64 prices drop next week; I may pick one up if they do. If not, I'm looking at the 5700(maybe XT) maybe around September after the drivers have caught up a bit and to see if any other manufacturers start putting out cards. Word is that the state of the drivers is shaky at best in linux land, although generally there's optimism that that will be dealt with reasonably quickly.

Edited July 8, 2019 by stratvox
Moar

[Guest jeffpeng]

I've been holding off, too, because Navi seems to come down in prices quite hard already, and looks to be better than (at least I) expected. Not surprised the drivers are shaky at best. The ones in the current stable kernel is usually 2-3 commit cycles behind. It's just how Linux' source control works. So I imagine unless you are willing to patch the latest AMDGPU drivers into your kernel tree yourself you will want to wait 2 or 3 revisions before things calm down, and in case you don't want to build your own kernel at all you will have to wait even longer, depending on your distribution. (No idea about that, we Gentoos just "roll" if you catch my drift).

But yeah. I guess the LLVM GL compiler wine employs (which is just translating DX) works more "nVidia compliant" than the one in Unity. Which may or may not be Unity's fault depending on how you look at the issue. Most engines share a big part of the code stack between MacOS and Linux as both employ the same libraries in many cases and share a lot more commonalities than with Windows. As you simply do not run nVidia on MacOS anymore I can see how one would neglect to test against those GPUs. It might be just not "important" enough anymore to actually test against nVidia GPUs in a GL/Unix environment, be it System V (Linux) or BSD (MacOS).

<edit> And yeah, right: the other BSD based platform unity runs on - PS4 - also runs on AMD. So .... yeah. I guess the days of running nVidia on anything non-windows are kinda done. With Stadia this trend will only increase. I should have seen the writing on the wall back when I bought the GTX1050Ti, which I only did because it was passively cooled. It should have bought that RX570, even for the few extra bucks.

I just hope AMD RTG gets their shoot together so I don't have to bicker with nVidias closed source driver stack anymore. I'm sick of it.

Edited July 8, 2019 by jeffpeng

[stratvox]

10 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

But yeah. I guess the LLVM GL compiler wine employs (which is just translating DX) works more "nVidia compliant" than the one in Unity.

As I understand it Proton has a layer that translates DXwhatever video calls into Vulkan that was authored by Valve, and that's the basis of their success with these games, which is why they've managed to make such strong progress in such a short amount of time.

I'm also torn about waiting for the inevitable price drop on the Vega parts or waiting a couple more months and going Navi.

Guess it's pretty easy to decide not to spend money right now

Edited July 8, 2019 by stratvox
clarity

[Guest jeffpeng]

1 minute ago, stratvox said:

As I understand it Proton has a layer that translates DXwhatever video calls into Vulkan

They are doing that? Wow. Personally my results have been quite compareable between a homebrewn Wine version and Proton, but I guess I should give Proton another, closer look then. I mean it's open source, after all, so I should have little hassle getting a properly integrated version to run. In any case it's great that there is a big player (again) involved with Wine developement, which gives me some hope that we might actually see Windows as a gaming platform become somewhat redundant. It's a pain for me to swap back and forth all the time.
 

4 minutes ago, stratvox said:

Guess it's pretty easy to decide not to spend money right now

I'm actually looking at a €50 RX570 on ebay right now. As a placeholder. The things I play are so undemanding that they are fine on a GTX1050Ti. An RX570 will easily cope with that. But I must admit that I kinda really would love one of those 5700XTs - just not with that dented blower. Maybe you can mount a Morpheus II onto them. That would be perfect and for that I would actually gladly invest a few bucks extra. I'm just terribly opposed to the idea that my PC should be audible at all. 

[stratvox]

15 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

The things I play are so undemanding that they are fine on a GTX1050Ti. An RX570 will easily cope with that. But I must admit that I kinda really would love one of those 5700XTs - just not with that dented blower. Maybe you can mount a Morpheus II onto them. That would be perfect and for that I would actually gladly invest a few bucks extra. I'm just terribly opposed to the idea that my PC should be audible at all.

I'm sort of in the same place. Gotta admit one of the things that appeals is trying to run some of this stuff at 4K, if I can lay hands on a decent 4K monitor that doesn't watch me (i.e. a monitor, not a <koff koff> "smart" tv). I'm also thinking that waiting a bit may mean that we'll get to see parts from some of the other manufacturers, which may have better cooling etc. Overall the fan doesn't bother me that much but options, lower prices, and more mature drivers all sound like they're worth waiting for.

[stratvox]

One thing about running it on Proton; it crashes on exit and must be killed. I'm curious about whether it's syncing to the cloud or not.....

[Guest jeffpeng]

13 minutes ago, stratvox said:

One thing about running it on Proton; it crashes on exit and must be killed. I'm curious about whether it's syncing to the cloud or not.....

That's actually a rather common thing with wine in general. The processes don't shut down properly and either crash violently or silently, and stay zombified in the background. LoL had the same problem since forever (when it still worked...), Civ5 when I used to run it through wine, too, XCOM:EU is another candidate, TES:Skyrim .... etc, etc. It's a rather long list. I'm not sure why that is, but I guess since it doesn't really affect gameplay itself it's probably pretty low on the dev's priority lists.

29 minutes ago, stratvox said:

trying too run some of this stuff at 4K

Dunno, 4K is kinda not too appealing to me yet, but I'm due for new screens and still running those 1080p ones (7 year old LGs that were ridiculously pricey back then) kinda got old recently seeing even my 60 year old mother is rocking a 1440p screen to browse the web and watch youtubes. I'll prolly settle for 1440ps because that's the most I can get my boss to pay for before he throws an iMac at me.