Best video card

[stratvox]

Personally, I think that if the textures are up to it this game would be amazing at 4K. OTOH, the price tag is not so amazing....

I'm currently running a 55" 1080p Sony Bravia... it's great. Still... getting a 4K monitor is down the priority list for me. Maybe this winter....

[Guest jeffpeng]

iirc 1080p is the most TLD is going at the moment, right?

[Admin]

17 hours ago, stratvox said:

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.

 

If you've already reached out to the team at thelongdark.com/support then that's the best course of action. They do get a large volume of tickets filed and so may not be immediate but we are best able to prioritize and deal with them that way. These forums are for more peer/player assistance with common issues.

[stratvox]

13 minutes ago, Admin said:

If you've already reached out to the team at thelongdark.com/support then that's the best course of action. They do get a large volume of tickets filed and so may not be immediate but we are best able to prioritize and deal with them that way. These forums are for more peer/player assistance with common issues.

Aye, I understand, that's why I reported there first. On the gripping hand, I also know that it's the squeaky wheel wot gets the grease :).

1 hour ago, jeffpeng said:

iirc 1080p is the most TLD is going at the moment, right?

Yeah, I don't know. I don't have 4K capable hardware here so it's a little hard for me to know if it can do 4K or not. It'd be great if it did. I kind of suspect that at least in the backend it can (the hi-res screenshots are 7680x4320 which is significantly higher than 4K) but whether the hooks are in to deliver 1440p or 2160p to a monitor is a separate question. The hi-res screenshots certainly seem to show that it could be on the roadmap if it's not capable now... and a wee bit of googling shows people in the Steam forums talking about running at both 1440p and 4K, so I guess we're good if we want to examine the nose hairs in painful crystalline detail on the Old Bear.

Edited July 8, 2019 by stratvox
reasons

[stratvox]

@jeffpeng Well, I did it. I bought the 5700xt. Results are that Vulkan performance is improved but still pretty bad. The shadows work fine (unlike while using vulkan under nvidia) but the frame rate kinda sucks. The flickering is just as bad using the opengl backend as it is under nvidia, which really sucks. Maybe when the next version of mesa comes out that'll improve.

I'm also wondering if this is a mesa issue, a unity issue, or an issue with this game in particular; it's very hard to say, but at this point I think we can say it's not an nvidia issue.

Overall the card is performing reasonably well. I'm using the proprietary stack from AMD because I'm going to have to do some serious surgery to get the latest'n'greatest from the open source drivers; running the one that's available on oibaf just dumps me into a default vesa desktop at 1024x768, which is absolutely unacceptable. I'm doing research right now to figure out what'll be involved in doing that, but info is scanty....

[Guest jeffpeng]

@stratvox Well, m'kay. Sorry it didn't work out for you. I hope you still enjoy your actually considerably powerful new GPU.

I've been a bit under the last few weeks, lots of work, and kid's home for summer, so I haven't been able to get into this myself. The OS stack will gradually improve as things trickle down to mainline and subsequently down to several distros. Navi 10 should be natively supported with Linux 5.3 (if the DRM maintainers don't get in the way again ...), which should drop in early september, while Ubuntu and Fedora will offer the 5.3 kernel for 19.10 and 31 repectively in October.

As to what the real cause of this is is kinda out in the wild, really. If it's not nvidia I doubt it's Mesa either. There's always the possibility of Unity/TLD being just broken, but which of the two no idea, and no way to get any information on this.

I must admit I'm sort of upset that the game is apparently broken for an entire platform for months now, and there is no fix and no real official commentary on this.

[stratvox]

9 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

I must admit I'm sort of upset that the game is apparently broken for an entire platform for months now, and there is no fix and no real official commentary on this.

Yeah, I hear you on that. OTOH, I also wonder if it's been reported by anyone other than me... I personally suspect that the number of active long-term linux users might be... two. I personally didn't report it to the support portal right away; between their response to me and their response in this thread I think it's reasonable to say that they've been aware of it for about a month.

In fact, they upgraded the version of unity they were using at the time that the problem showed up IIRC, so it may be that there's a coding change that needs to happen to properly deal with this while using OpenGL using the new(er) version of unity... and given that I think testing is outsourced, it may be that their vendor is the one that dropped the ball on this. 

At any rate they're aware of it now; I hope they fix it soon because it's quite annoying. @Admin @Raphael van Lierop I've got lots of time working in the IT industry, albeit not in gaming, including as a tester (mostly in telecom, email, and in distributed computing), so if you're interested I'm happy to try out various test/debug builds for you if that'll help because this is by far my fave game and I'd like to see this fixed.

On a more general note, the radeon vulkan support does still have the shadow issue in the game (shadows on drugs!), while the opengl backend still has the flickering. I think the vulkan shadow issue is something that only happens under certain circumstances so it's not always immediately obvious when you fire it up.

As for the new radeon, it's obviously significantly more powerful than my old card, but it's patchy; some things are *much* faster, while other things not so much. I suspect that as driver maturity improves so will my results.

[stratvox]

I got ambitious and ran some of the phoronix benches. Holy crap this card is fast.

[Guest jeffpeng]

11 hours ago, stratvox said:

I got ambitious and ran some of the phoronix benches. Holy crap this card is fast.

Happens when you decide to make a gaming card for once  Basically GCN was inadequately named since its inception. It should have been "Compute Core Next" as that's clearly what the architecture excells at and always has. That's why Polaris was actually better at mining Ethereum than playing games. What they basically did was give Navi (which AMD markets as RDNA1.0, but in LLVM is called GCN1.6 😉 ) twice the rasterizers (64, same as Vega, GTX 1070+, RTX2070+) and allowing the shader engine to handle twice the amount SIMD operations over then half the amount of compute units per SIMD operation. So one could say Navi has actually twice the amount of Compute Units, but each compute unit is only half as wide.

Bottom line this means that the card in terms of raw compute throughput is worse than Polaris was clock for clock, but with twice the rasterizers and the ability to compute data in smaller chunks it's much more catered to what is required of a gaming card. And if you look closely you realize that Navi has the exact same amount of Shading Units, Texture Mappers and Rasterizers as NVidias x070 and x080 cards, which explains why the card works much better than previous GCN implementations in games in which it lacked versus nvidia, but doesn't gain that much in games where it didn't.

Edit: (More tech babble) Navi also has Vega's (and Turings's) FP16 compute mode, which GTX and Polaris didn't have, which explains why Vega, in theory, can run RayTracing adequately, Polaris and GTX cannot and a bigger Navi eventually will be able to. 

Edited August 7, 2019 by jeffpeng

[stratvox]

I'm very much looking forward to driver improvements on this. I'm considering doing a rebuild of my system with a distro more appropriate for getting into the bleeding edge versions of the drivers, because I personally suspect that it'll be a while before AMD gets around to updating the proprietary driver, and it'll be a while before ubuntu gets around to getting a good driver stack going on their distro. Any recommendations? 

[Guest jeffpeng]

8 minutes ago, stratvox said:

I'm very much looking forward to driver improvements on this. I'm considering doing a rebuild of my system with a distro more appropriate for getting into the bleeding edge versions of the drivers, because I personally suspect that it'll be a while before AMD gets around to updating the proprietary driver, and it'll be a while before ubuntu gets around to getting a good driver stack going on their distro. Any recommendations? 

TL;DR: In general you have to ask yourself: are you willing to and do you have fun with tinkering, tweaking and actually building your own OS? If your answer is yes then go for Arch or Gentoo (maybe Slackware, but that's sorta stale, and LinuxFromScratch really is for hardcore UNIXer's only). If your answer is no then Ubuntu, despite its many shortcomings, is your best bet, hands down.

I'm a Gentoo since 2004. That's bleeding edge if you wish to, but it requires you to compile every single byte of binary yourself. Depending on your CPU (mostly) this might take you half a day or half a week. With my 2600 I can recompile my entire system in about 12 hours, but that also includes heavyweights such as Chrome, Firefox and Libre - for which you can chose a binary option if you really want to.  The documentation is splendid, but you should be comfortable working with the console. The obvious upside is that you get code for _your_ system, not for CPUs from 10 years ago. Especially with less common architectures such as Bulldozer, Zen and - funnily enough - xMont (Intel LP CPUs such as Atom, J and N-Series Celerons) you can expcet a lot of added snappyness you really will miss once you go back.

Just switching from Gentoo to Debian is notable as in you can tell the difference without knowing. The only binary distro I know that is as snappy as Gentoo can be is Clear Linux - which is an Intel-Only distro not suited for gaming due to the lack of IA32 support. But in any case: If you wanna try it do it in a VM first. For some it's how Linux was supposed to be, other simply can't stand it. Interestingly enough Gentoo is Google's weapon of choice to build ChromeOS. This makes Gentoo the probably most widely used Desktop Linux Distribution without most people even knowing it.

Gentoo's binary twin is Arch. Arch is a slick, rolling release distro not too dissimmilar from Gentoo, where you can get bleeding edge stuff working considerably easier than in debian distro (especially Ubuntu). It's packages are well maintained and the package manager is fast and powerful.

It needs to be noted with a friendly exclamation mark that you will not get the same out-of-the-box experience with either of those. Also debian's/Ubuntu's eco system is much more mature and wider supported. Every program that offers a Linux version will habe a release for either Ubuntu or debian. With Arch or Gentoo you basically will have to rely on making it work yourself (which is easier than it sounds) or the community providing out-of-tree packages/builds. But when (not if) you get your stuff working you have a fully fledged and in no means diminished Linux system, over which you have full control, in case of Gentoo down to the source level, meaning compiler optimizations, linked in libraries and optional features. Gentoo even has the option to opt out of systemd if you want that (which I do for embedded systems ranging from Atoms to ARM CPUs and even MIPS).

And inb4 you ask: yes, you can run Steam on Gentoo. You can even run it on your native (optimized) libraries if you wish to - but some games won't like that. And of course you can run Steam on Arch.
 

[Admin]

The Long Dark is compatible with all major modern video cards supported by a user's OS. Unity is aware of any rendering issues in OpenGL.

If you find that you are having issues running The Long Dark on a video card supported by Unity and OpenGL please contact our Support Team at thelongdark.com/support.

Thank you.

[stratvox]

1 hour ago, Admin said:

The Long Dark is compatible with all major modern video cards supported by a user's OS. Unity is aware of any rendering issues in OpenGL.

If you find that you are having issues running The Long Dark on a video card supported by Unity and OpenGL please contact our Support Team at thelongdark.com/support.

Thank you.

If you read up the thread, you'll see that that happened about a month or so ago. Receipt was acknowledged in early July. I'm guessing that this message means that the issue has been passed along to the folks at Unity?

[Guest jeffpeng]

On 8/8/2019 at 7:48 PM, Admin said:

The Long Dark is compatible with all major modern video cards supported by a user's OS. Unity is aware of any rendering issues in OpenGL.

That in itself is a contradiction. TLD is compatible by all cards by "a user's OS" but rendering does not work with OpenGL, which is the only available (mature) renderer on Linux. The game is broken on Linux, period, if Unity's at fault or someone else doesn't really matter to establish the fact that it is practically unplayable.

On 8/8/2019 at 7:48 PM, Admin said:

If you find that you are having issues running The Long Dark on a video card supported by Unity and OpenGL please contact our Support Team at thelongdark.com/support.

Been there, done that, nothing happened - as it is custom with these unidirectional support systems. Unless you have an issue that is affecting a large enough group of people and/or is severe enough to warrant immediate action your ticket just drowns down the list due its lack of priority.

[stratvox]

@jeffpeng My read is that this is a Unity issue, and that Hinterland has opened up a ticket ("Unity is aware of any rendering issues in OpenGL"). It may very well be that all they can do is wait for Unity to fix it, and can't really say anything about it, given they are a Unity partner.

[Guest jeffpeng]

On 8/13/2019 at 9:51 PM, stratvox said:

@jeffpeng My read is that this is a Unity issue, and that Hinterland has opened up a ticket ("Unity is aware of any rendering issues in OpenGL"). It may very well be that all they can do is wait for Unity to fix it, and can't really say anything about it, given they are a Unity partner.

Yeah that is probably as close to it as it gets 😉

[stratvox]

13 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

Yeah that is probably as close to it as it gets 😉

Needs a laugh upvote emoji thing.