14 DAY TRIAL // The Linux version of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition has received yet another update and this time it brings good news for AMD users.
CD Projekt was quick to release The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition for Linux, but it turns out that the version they published wasn't a native one. As blunders go, releasing a non-native app on Linux is a big no-no. They have since recovered somewhat and the developers have issued a number of patches already, under the Beta label.
One of the main problems with non-native apps is that they need to run in wrapper. Most of the times it's a Wine wrapper, but now it was from another company. This was easily spotted by the Linux users because the game had really poor performance and it originally refused to work on AMD hardware.
Things remained pretty much the same for some time, but then developers started pushing a few Beta updates that made the game a little more playable. Still, AMD users were having problems and some of those issues still remain, but now, the latest update allows people to use the latest Catalyst drivers.
According to the changelog, a workaround has been implemented for AMD Catalyst's broken ARB_texture_storage support. The game now detects Catalyst and has disabled this extension for now, and AMD confirmed that the problem would be fixed in upcoming releases.
Also, a change has been made to the memory management and a much smaller ''reserve'' section is used, the heap manager now uses regular mmap() allocations and testing seems to suggest this works much better with large texture loads.
The developers also announced a while ago that they were taking the patches from the Beta branch to move them to the stable channel.
"Since as Beta 4 seems to be such a wide improvement both performance and stability wise, we have chosen to make this the current release. The only change from buildID 355503, is that we are now shipping openal-soft 1.16.0 with the game.
''This 'Release 2' doesn't mean we are done with improving things, but it does mean we feel that we have improved enough to consign the initial release to the bin :) We still have some more ideas on how to get more performance out of our D3D9 engine, but before we can look at implementing those we are waiting on improvements from both AMD and Intel on the driver front," was also noted on GitHub.
Stay tuned because it's very likely that more patches will land soon for The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition.