Yesterday Feral Interactive released a video on youtube showing their progress on the Tomb Raider port. This was not the first time they were showing where they were (I think about a month back they had a Twitch feed for a few hours) but they are not actively communicating that they are close to release the game (i.e. “very soon”).

They have also shared the minimum and recommend specs to play the game on Linux:

Minimum

• OS: Ubuntu 14.04 or SteamOS 2.0 (64-bit)
• Processor: Intel i3 or AMD FX-6300
• RAM: 4GB
• Graphics card: 1GB NVIDIA GeForce 640 (driver version 364.12) or 2GB AMD R7 260X (driver version MESA 11.2)

Recommended

• OS: Ubuntu 14.04 or SteamOS 2.0 (64-bit)
• Processor:Intel i5
• RAM: 8GB
• Graphics card: 3GB NVIDIA GeForce 760 (Driver version 364.12)

What’s remarkable in this upcoming release is that AMD cards are officially supported from the get go (this is a first for Feral ports, usually they support nVidia first and AMD later if at all), and on top of that it’s not the official AMD driver that’s recommended but the MESA ones! With the recent progress of MESA, AMD cards are actually able to get up to 4.3 OpenGL compatibility.

The only thing that’s slightly bothering me in those specs is that there’s some contradiction between the recommended OS and the Graphics Card drivers for nVidia. On SteamOS 2.60 (which is the latest stable version at the time of writing), GPU drivers are still stuck in the 352.x branch. Whether that will cause any issue (either as glitches or in terms of performance) remains to be seen.

After release we will be looking back at how the game performs on Linux versus Windows.