As if the outdated version of Trine 3 wasn't already bad enough, the editor for their brand new game is also Steam bound. As a Linux user I can understand that porting those tools beyond Windows costs money and is time consuming, but tying it to Steam when the game was also confirmed on GOG before release is a slap in the face to the customers here.

Until Frozenbyte starts giving a damn about GOG users, I won't be buying anything else from them, If I did I'd be supporting these bad practices.

To enable FPS meter in the game, change: to In $HOME/.local/share/frozenbyte/Shadwen/options.txt

Not sure if the game has any kind of console which allows setting that dynamically, but at least there is that. Plus you can always use voglperf though it's not as direct. Some Mesa drivers have built in FPS meter overlay, but I never tested those.

Thank you for that information. I reran the tests to get actual numbers. I didn't like my options for adding a "table" to this forum, so I just attached the FPS chart as a PNG file.

The take away is this, as far as I can tell.
- Performance isn't that great, even when you lower the detail setting.
- Crossfire does NOT seem to be used, even with proprietary drivers (the earlier reported boost in FPS was due to restarting. I have a performance glitch that appears to be tied to suspending the machine that I forgot about, but happened to Valhalla hills as well. Sorry about that).
- Medium AA has very little performance hit (but I have an N of one, so, I may look at that again later).
- My ability to discern "smooth" video is at a much lower FPS than I thought... kinda sad about that.

Hopefully someone can shed some light on what gains might be had with an Nvidia card.

If i missed something, let me know. It's late, and I'm almost sure I forgot something.

Yeah, with antialiasing, only medum one makes sense (FXAA). With it I get steady 60 fps on Nvidia GTX 680 with all other settings on max (1920 x 1200). Adding any SSAA on the other hand (anything above medium AA in the settings) degrades performance quite a lot. I guess because SSAA is really too inefficient. FXAA is much more optimized technique.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_approximate_anti-aliasing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersampling

I see your table now. That's quite lower than I get even with some SSAA enabled (30-40fps). I wonder if it's because Mesa AMD OpenGL implementation isn't optimized enough?

Actually, I caught your posts on GamingonLinux, and that's why I didn't bother checking SSAA options :)
But very good info.

Good grief, 60FPS? ....
Is there a way to disable Physx to see what your FPS would drop to? (if you don't mind checking).

If performance is tied to Physx, I will need to rethink this purchase I'm afraid.
I'm aware that AMD has a poor reputation on Linux for their drivers, but a 1/3 or less of the performance seems a little steep. I was thinking 1/2 to 2/3 as acceptable losses for now.

Edit: Forgot to mention, the attachment didn't save the first time. Fixed that.
It's a good question. I thought when using the proprietary drivers on Linux (which I have every indication I am), the Mesa drivers were skipped. Or is AMD using Mesa for some aspect still? (Sometimes hard to recall what things were mushed together).

Ah, I didn't realize, and thought you are using Mesa when not in crossfire mode. From what I've heard, for some hardware amdgpu + Mesa OpenGL for AMD already performs better than their closed implementation.

I'll check if I can disable physX. Is it known not to use GPU compute on AMD hardware?

I found a 25% to 50% performance loss from the same game in Linux vs. Windows is completely normal for AMD's proprietary driver, it's crap unfortunately. I had better performance from the Mesa driver in almost all scenarios, the only problem with Mesa is it's still lacking some OpenGL functionality.

I don't see any such option to disable GPU acceleration for PhysX. I didn't really research PhysX, but from reading different reports, it seems Nvidia on purpose disables GPU acceleration for compute if they detect that it's not Nvidia. That's really nasty!

I guess you better ask developers if such huge fps drop is expected when PhysX isn't running on the GPU.

And if Nvidia is doing that, developers should simply avoid using such library. There should be other physics libraries that aren't limited to one GPU type.

That's ok, I think I stated about the drivers it in my first post, but maybe not (and I don't expect you to memorize that).

I have heard the open source drivers were pulling ahead in some cases. I will test it tomorrow. I'm only using the AMD drivers because a game I was testing from GOG needed openGL 4.3 support.

As far as I know, Physx is computed by the CPU when using an AMD card, and that you don't benefit from optimizations used in the GPU. But, I try to avoid titles that rely on closed tech - it's why I didn't buy Witcher 3 at this time (also, lack of Linux support).
So many options for cross product and OS support, and devs keep picking the ones that deny user choice, and increase the chance at a monopoly. <sigh>

If you do figure out a way to test sans Physx, that would be interesting to see.
I'll search around again for info, but the last article I could find on the subject was from 2010 on Tomshardware.

Edit: Oops, posted after you responded. I will test the Open Drivers tomorrow and if the FPS is still very low, I will contact the devs. And yes, it's a really nasty trick. I'm sad we (as gamers) let it slide at all.
That does echo what I've seen online and experienced. Still 1/3 or less seems steeper than you or I have normally experienced.



I'll try that open driver tomorrow, as you noted, the only real reason to go with AMD drivers is due to lack of OpenGL support for some games. Certainly hope the features will be added soon. I don't know how much the new driver stack(?) might slow down the adoption of 4.3 features to the r600g driver. I'm honestly not even sure who normally worked on those features. The developer world is a tangled web :)

From what I've read, AMD has no intentions of adding support for anything older than the Sea Island series for their new AMDGPU driver.

But the radeonsi driver is progressing nicely, the development version is up to OpenGL 4.3, r600 is still stuck at 4.1.

Thank you for responding, and for the info. +1 for your help.

Thank you very much indeed for finding that and posting the link. I'm really grateful. A big +1 for your trouble.

Edit - it's a very big file, I'll try to get it downloaded tomorrow, when I have a free internet window.

Frozenbyte, why is Shadwen consuming so much proc power when it's minimized/in background?

Also Shadwen doesn't properly recognize and utilize discrete graphic card when it's being played on dual GPU laptop.

Fully agree, mods exclusive to steam was something I feared when the damn Workshop was released and here we go again.

games similar to shadwen?

Hm. Played Demo for a bit now - is it possible to save progress somewhere through the level in the full version? Much as I like games I also like to be able to shut them down at whatever point I choose to and attend to other things :).