Re:AMD Catalyst Linux Driver Performs Differently Based on P...
by paulmd on Monday July 20, 2015 @10:13AM
(#9916138)
No, this is just how modern game drivers work nowadays [1]. With older APIs (pre-Mantle/Vulkan/DX12) it's really opaque how to produce correct and performant code. And even past that, AAA game devs have enough clout to basically force hardware companies to fix their bugs, eg one major game never made BeginFrame/EndFrame calls which is a horrendous violation of API rules. You don't want to have "broken drivers" on launch day while it works on your competitor's hardware.
This results in a game of pattycake where the game developers and the driver developers are both guessing at what the other will do, and trying to optimize for it. So game releases basically require having an NVIDIA/AMD developer sit down, profile your code, and figure out which of the tens-to-hundreds of thousands of behavior triggers and optimizations should be turned on for your game.
What's probably going on here is that CS:GO is having a different set of optimizations applied from its parent game (or hasn't had any at all applied yet on Linux). The big question here is whether CS:GO actually works 100% reliably on those settings, on all AMD GPUs, on all possible combinations of graphics settings. Because it's very possible that it doesn't, or that no one has verified that it does.
This results in a game of pattycake where the game developers and the driver developers are both guessing at what the other will do, and trying to optimize for it. So game releases basically require having an NVIDIA/AMD developer sit down, profile your code, and figure out which of the tens-to-hundreds of thousands of behavior triggers and optimizations should be turned on for your game.
What's probably going on here is that CS:GO is having a different set of optimizations applied from its parent game (or hasn't had any at all applied yet on Linux). The big question here is whether CS:GO actually works 100% reliably on those settings, on all AMD GPUs, on all possible combinations of graphics settings. Because it's very possible that it doesn't, or that no one has verified that it does.
[1] http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-o...