[GAMES] UT99, UTGOLD, UT2004 on native PPC64LE!

[tle]

Okay you click and get baited to read this post.

Well you might have heard that OldUnreal community has entered into an agreement with Epic Games to continue the support for these 3 UT games. That means they have gained access to the engine source codes.

I am trying my best to convince the team to add support for PPC64LE at https://github.com/OldUnreal/UT2004Patches/issues/316

I would really appreciate if more of us POWER-users could chime into the ticket to express our interests

EDIT: UT2004 is now available for ppc64le! https://github.com/OldUnreal/UT2004Patches/releases/tag/3374-preview-17, I've updated https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Games_Compatibility with the details. Gameplay video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hiaiBzoH7U

[power9mm]

Ive asked them before they wouldnt do it

[tle]

Ive asked them before they wouldnt do it

Let's hope they will accept the hardware offer from Tim.

For now we could always play the game with box64

[power9mm]

Ive asked them before they wouldnt do it

Let's hope they will accept the hardware offer from Tim.

For now we could always play the game with box64

oh wow, who would turn that deal down... there's been some work on a re implementation of early unreal engine. Maybe one day we can play deus ex on PPC64LE.. I've also reached out to nightdive studios about supporting the arch as well.. Wish I was offered a system to get half life 2 / source engine running

[MPC7500]

Was there feedback from Nightdive?

[power9mm]

Was there feedback from Nightdive?

I asked if they could do a "source available" akin to UT4 since system shock remake uses the same engine. IIRC it had some proprietary licensed bits added in. Maybe they would give it some modicum of consideration if enough people chimed in. Getting game devs to even support linux in general let alone a different arch is quite an uphill battle though.. Considering how things are going in general with corporate and government control of computing systems maybe more people will move into the open source sphere with time.. I know I did 5ish years ago.

[MPC7500]

Yes, prices have to go down, too. But maybe we will have more options in the future

[tle]

Tim said Preview 12 will be available natively! Amazing news! I cannot wait to go back to this beautiful game

[tle]

It's HERE FOLKS! Please grab Preview17 version https://github.com/OldUnreal/UT2004Patches/releases/tag/3374-preview-17

Great thanks to Tim and OldUnreal team for the enormous efforts to get this great game supported

[tle]

I guess let's wait for UT2004 v3374 released first then we could try to convince OldUnreal team to do the same for UT99 and UTGOLD

[SiteAdmin]

We're glad you are enjoying the preview release!  UT2004 has been a favorite on the Raptor side for some time and we are honored to be able to officially enable it on the OpenPOWER platform.

Regarding performance, if you look at the CPU usage while the game is running you will likely see we are not CPU bound in the game itself.  This is likely one of the most graphics intensive applications currently available for the OpenPOWER platform, and we suspect we're inadvertently highlighting performance issues in MESA and the Linux kernel on the POWER9 platform.  If there is interest in tracking those down in the respective open source components the help would be appreciated -- in fact, anyone that wants to assist in that area can Email Tim directly for better collaboration on the open source side of the stack.  It's unclear if we're hitting a GPU bandwidth issue, copying buffers somewhere that we don't need to (MESA/kernel), or if something else entirely is just not optimized for the instruction set.

That all said, the FPS observed is generally within a small percentage of that seen on at least older amd64 systems at similar clocks, so the problem may be more endemic to Linux than the OpenPOWER architecture itself.

[tle]

You are right, the game is indeed not CPU bound. It's not clear to me if OldUnreal team has any plan to add Vulkan renderer for UT2004.

[MPC7500]

There is AntiDrv.

* Our patch includes a brand new OpenGL 3.3 / ES 3.0 renderer, AntiDrv. This renderer outperforms the original OpenGLDrv on most platforms, adds new features (e.g., shader-based gamma/color correction), implements/fixes several features that were missing/broken in the original OpenGLDrv (e.g., gradient projectors and weightmap terrain rendering), makes features that were previously nvidia/amd-exclusive available on all platforms (e.g., CO_AlphaBlend_With_Mask combiners), and it can serve as a reference implementation for other new renderers

ReleaseNotes

But there is a Vulkan renderer for Unreal Tournament (UT99) repo.