BoilingSteam has been a little slow these past 2 weeks since I am basically enjoying a little autumn break and trying to disconnect from the online world a little more than usual. I will come back more on the recent port of Mankind Divided as soon as I have more time to spend on it, but I wanted to share some of my first impressions, as well as some hints of performance as reported by several youtubers.

Where shall I start? With some piece of advice, I guess. You’d better buy a good pack of coffee beans with the game. The loading times are so long (honestly the worst ones I have ever seen in any recent game), that you’ll need to fix yourself up a cup of coffee to do something useful instead of waiting forever in front of a black screen. On first load it was definitely more than 5 minutes, and loading up your saved game also takes another 2 or something. Note that this is not specific to Linux, the Windows version seems to have grueling loading times as well.

Usually I’d advice against killing a game’s process that’s running, but here with Mankind Divided I’m almost tempted to tell you to kill its main process instead of trying to exit through the main menu - this will be giving you another 2 or 3 minutes of loading time. I guess this is what you call a next-gen game, since it assumes everyone has moved to large-capacity SSDs for gaming. Hehe.

This is a little bit of a shame, since the game looks fantastic. I’m not just talking graphic models and effects, but also the general art of the game is great and stands out. We have a bunch of great looking games on Linux but this is certainly among the better looking ones ever to reach the platform.

Performance-wise, it’s kind of as usual. You end up losing a good chunk of performance while playing this game on Linux vs Windows, but this being said even Windows did not have very good frame rates to start with. Feral is also recommending to turn Vsync Off as it can kill performance even further (not sure why that is the case for this game).

With my nVidia GTX970 and i5 3.4 Ghz combo, I have found that the High level of details settings worked reasonably well. Not 60fps kind of smooth, but certainly good enough for you to forget about the framerate. Going to Ultra is going to require a lot more powerful cards, but honestly speaking you are not losing out too much by going down to High. It will still look great no matter what.

I am certainly going to spend more time on this game once I am back from my vacation, as long as I find the patience the endure the loading times. Once I get to play it enough I will be back with a longer and proper review of the game - and the port.