I guess developers had problems? Though filing bugs to Gallium3D can help in such case. You can do it yourself - try running the game and report crashes / bugs to Gallium3D bug tracker. See here: http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Radeon/

Open drivers developers appreciate such bugs, since it helps fixing the driver.

Wish I had the time to do all that, but sadly I don't (at least not in the foreseeable future)... I barely found enough time to try out the game. I had hoped the game developers would consider working out with the open source driver community instead of just dropping support for the driver.

In any case, I'm not entirely convinced the drivers are at fault here. Perhaps the developers simply decided it's not worth making the game work with the open source driver since not a lot of people will be using it (and I happen to be among the unlucky few), though I'm not sure I'd call using proprietary drivers the Linux norm.

It's also strange that they've decided not to support open source AMD drivers since I've even played other Double Fine games on the same setup without having ANY problems whatsoever (Pshychonauts, Costume Quest and Broken Age).

Oh well... it's probably the last game I'll ever pre-order due to nostalgia.

You can also ask it directly here: http://www.doublefine.com/forums/viewforum/77/

Thanks, I think I will.

With the latest oibaf ppa update (8 hours ago), it started working on Radeon open source driver out of the sudden! Prior to that it was throwing segfaults, and no manual meddling with libraries would help. Using Radeon HD7950 on 14.04.1 Trusty x86_64 here...

Regardless, this game is an overaggressive resource hog, making my GPU more hot than it gets when running the Linux 'version' of Witcher 2!?! And all of that to render few remastered textures on top of VGA-ish static backgrounds.

Lame.

Grim Fandango is an artistic marvel of digital entertainment, one of the few rare exceptions in gaming history, but the technical execution of this particular release is a total BS.

The opensource drivers are probably not supported because they are often far behind the proprietary drivers. And are far more buggy and the performance will also be far worse.

It would be a waste of developer time to write special code/feature paths to avoid stuff that is buggy in opensource drivers then just support the main drivers and probably can make it work without writing code specificly for Linux opensource drivers

Not always. Open AMD driver is actually quite good and moves forward well.

In my experience the AMD Catalyst (proprietary) driver is prone to crashing and the Open Source (gallium) driver is rock solid, however Gallium is a poor substitute that doesn't have nearly the same amount of capability as the proprietary driver when it comes to 3D accelleration. It'll do the job for 2D games like Papers Please but something like Grim Fandango or anything else that uses 3D models will chug along terribly.

Admittedly AMD has stepped up their driver support (Omega Drivers) since I last actually used my AMD card, so it's possible the prone to crashing bit may no longer be the case.

I never had crashes with the proprietary or the open source drivers.

But with the proprietary drivers, I am always worried that after a kernel update the Linux will fail to boot. Granted, the last time this happened to me was a few years ago (and it had happened a few times not just once), but it was still nasty to have to figure it out and resolve it.

The proprietary drivers for me (HD 7950) have a somewhat better behavior / performance in Unity Engine games, but still have some glitches eg with some of the lighting or fog effects. The open source drivers seem worse in this regard and seem to lack support for more Unity engine features / shaders (?). Also, the current (up to a few days ago really) open source drivers are randomly causing my desktop screen to go instantly black and then return (sort of like the screen is blinking) and it is highly annoying.

I am a programmer and all for the Open Source community software, but the situation with the AMD drivers seems to be (and always have been) a horrible mess. It seems that there are a dozen places with different instructions of which drivers to use, how to completely uninstall the proprietary, how to configure the new ones etc. I didn't even know that the open source drivers are now called "gallium" (when did this happen?)

Btw, thanks for the link for the bug reporting page for the open source drivers. I was completely oblivious about its existence.

Open source Radeon driver is actually quite stable as of lately. The problem are the games, most of them are done by coders indoctrinated into a proprietary work practices, and saying that some working driver is 'not supported' is just a matter of their sloppiness and conservative approach. Can't really blame them, they need to worry about the game itself, not the drivers, but in reality, it is easier to 'support' open source driver than a proprietary one, if for nothing else than for the fact that all driver code is available and open, any potential bugs can be sorted out by looking into the driver code and fixing the issue in either your own game code or the driver code itself.

Mesa surely lack in a terms of capabilities, but those capabilities that are supported are done well, and in a standard-compliant way. That can't be said for Catalyst.

Agreed the game is in desperate need of optimization.

I think the developers were misled to believe that the advanced shaders they used for the "remastered" rendering would outweigh player expectations of being able to play the game on older hardware (though for the life of me, I can't understand why - who the hell would play Grim Fandango Remastered for the new ultra good-looking soft shadows?).

And I still don't think it's a fair trade-off to impose an OpenGL 3.3 requirement for a game that probably uses only a couple of the 3.3 GL extensions, even if it is supposedly brought up to speed in terms of graphics.

As for the Radeon open source driver, I believe there are some people with older cards for which it actually performs better than the proprietary driver. As most people have fairly said so far, it tends to lag behind in capability when compared to the proprietary driver, but whatever it supports/implements so far is usually rock solid.

In some areas such as 2D acceleration and video accelerated rendering it offers better support than what the proprietary driver devs from AMD dish out (though I think these Linux-specific things are not really treated as a priority in the first place).

I'm still impressed with how far the Radeon open source driver has come in these last years. The performance could be better of course, but I have not had a single problem with getting any game to run until, of course, I tried the remastered Grim Fandango...

If the open source driver is up to scratch the game should just work perfectly fine.
Because that would mean the driver is supporting the opengl standard.
It's easy how standards work you write your opengl code in them and it will run on the cards without any problem and it shouldnt matter what driver it is as long as there are no bugs the drivers.

It does work just fine, provided you have the latest mesa (oibaf ppa in my case). The thing is, 99% of the modern Linux games actually do work with stable Radeon mesa (both r600 and radeonsi).

This particular game 3D engine is such a spoiled brat, it is so badly written that it requires way too much love from the driver side. Requiring OpenGL 3.3 for the visuals the game provides is a clear example, other from being the total nonsense. Must be due to the fact that Sony is involved, so the devs never optimized the thing for anything other than PlayStation4. FFS, even Witcher 2 can run on Linux with just OpenGL 2.1!

I don't remember because it was under development for quite a long time before it started to replace the old drivers. The Mesa web page has a note from November 2007 that "Gallium3D is the codename for the new Mesa device driver architecture which is currently under development.", and according to the changelog Debian started shipping the Gallium3D driver for Radeon cards in Mesa 7.9, so about three years ago for ATI cards?

I do remember it made a lot of difference for me because Braid used to be very crash-prone, and even when it didn't crash it had lots and lots of graphics glitches. After that update, it just worked.