This is still a Beta version, but it's getting there

Jan 28, 2015 13:52 GMT  ·  By

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is still being improved on for the Linux platform and a new major patch has been released for the games, although it's still in the Beta stage.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings was released in May 2014 for the Linux platform and it immediately turned into a failure for the publisher, at least from a PR standpoint. The problems was that the developers didn't port the game to Linux, they used a special kind of wrapper, similar to Wine, that would enable Linux users run the game.

The main thing known about solutions such as Wine is the fact they incur a performance penalty, which can be pretty severe for complete titles. The Witcher 2 is definitely a complex game and the performance was abysmal. To make matters worse, some users with video cards other than NVIDIA could not even play it.

The new update really makes a difference

This is not the first update for the game, but none of the previous improvement was quite this efficient. It's important to mention that even Linus Torvalds had to intervene in the development process of the game. He admitted that there was a problem in the kernel, which impacted this title, and he released a patch for it soon after.

"A bit of a refresh here. We've worked more on our Direct3D 9 engine since the last beta, so everything we've done there has gone into this patch. Hopefully, that means better performance too! We've also added a fix for the crashing caused on kernel 3.17.7 and later, even though the kernel maintainers have already agreed to amend the patch that caused the problem - it is better if our behaviour avoids the issue in the first place," wrote the developers on GitHub.

As it stands right now, if you have the game on Steam, you will need to get the Beta version, but if you have the GOG version, you will need to download an archive from the link posted above.

Happy gaming!