Feral has announced at the end of last week that they were working on releasing F1 2017 on the Linux platform (i.e. Ubuntu and SteamOS as target distributions) by the 2nd of November 2017. This confirms our previous assumptions based on SteamDB signs, and this is overall very good news as F1 2017 looks like a fantastic game all around. Expect to hear more from us as the game reaches Steam later in this week.

In the meantime, we have also learned on Twitter than the game is working on Linux with the Vulkan API by default.

https://twitter.com/feralgames/status/923977346561998848

This is the third game that gets official Vulkan API support (the first one being Mad Max, but not at launch, and the second one Warhammer 40k Dawn of War III) from Feral Interactive. Their pace of releases in this year has been somewhat slower than usual so this may be related to the internal work they had to make Vulkan support a reality for new launches. What’s really interesting is that, just like for Warhammer 40k Dawn of War 3, F1 2017 on Windows does NOT support DirectX 12 (it’s a DirectX 11 game only at this stage) which confirms again that Feral interactive has internal tools to help them convert Non DX12 games to Vulkan for Linux. It should bring some benefits to most users in the coming future as Vulkan drivers become a higher priority for hardware vendors, and performance is expected to be better in CPU constrained cases.

More on all of this in a few days.