Just to be clear about it, you did see the big announcement right? GOG has official plans for Linux offerings, and I seriously doubt they would go to all of the trouble of making a port only to toss it up on Steam alone when they own a store for that sort of thing.

Yeah. And they're planning it for fall this year. Steam seems to have the files available for download right now; albeit the game is not playable yet. So, for the moment it appears that Steam users may have access to the Witcher 2 on Linux a little earlier than the people that have picked the game up here at GOG.com. Not a big deal but still kind of odd.

^ It's probably because it's much easier to use Steam for open beta testing. Forced autopatching etc..

Beta installers and patches from GOG do not sound very convenient..

We'll get it on GOG in autumn I'm sure.. maybe then I'll finally get around to play through the other path in the game.

You got a point there.

I do hope it turns up as soon as possible, and is downloadable for everyone that already has it. I just got around to installing it for the first time. I had to do it though wine because I don't have a NTFS partition large enough on my windows side of things (there is some monster like 9GB size file for the game.) It runs fine, but the performance isn't all that great. I'm hoping a native port will fair a little better. Thought my card would be up to it but, I need to do better than 20FPS.

It's a known problem that Wine kills 40% of your DirectX performance on nVidia binary drivers and 60% on ATi Catalyst. Look into versions of Wine that have been patched with the Direct3D Command Stream rewrite.

(They haven't finished squashing regressions, which is why it's not in mainline yet, but it moves the Direct3D->OpenGL translation to a separate thread, allowing WineD3D to actually perform better than Windows Direct3D in some games if you've got CPU to spare.)

Since CD Projekt RED is bringing The Witcher games to Linux at some point, I just ask that it does it right. I feel that the method that Valve used to bring its old games to Linux is the better method to use, not Wine.

Try running it in Wine with CSMT patches (ssokolow mentioned it above already). I run it through PlayOnLinux with such build of Wine (1.7.10-CSMT-a632585). It works very well. There are a few bugs like: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28883 but they are minor.

I was running it with a CSMT build via POL. I will see if it's the same one, but it probably is. I haven't really looked at the sys requirements, so I could just be under spec.

Yeah, it's quite demanding. I run it with Nvidia Geforce GTX 680. I'm not sure what the minimum is, but if your GPU is not high end (not necessarily current generation), you might get performance problems.

It says 650M is the min.

I'm running a 650TI which looks to be lagging a fair ways behind yours.

Don't forget that Wine introduces some overhead (however it's usually CPU related), and while sometimes CSMT makes games in Wine run even better than on Windows, it's still not guaranteed. So I'd bump any minimal requirements when using Wine. My CPU is also recent, so check if CPU isn't a bottleneck in your case. Also try reducing the settings to the minimum.

With my card I run it on max, except for ubersampling which is simply a pointless overkill (always keep it off). Another thing which doesn't work is cinematic depth of field (it makes close up dialogs to appear black), so I keep it off.

And this is related to "Linux support on GOG" how exactly? Methinks perhaps you meant to post that in a Microsoft Windows related thread, considering that DirectX is a Microsoft product.

Re; GOG on Linux, for the very first time since I heard about GOG, I'm actually thinking about spending some money here (instead of on Ouya, Steam, or Humble Bundle as I usually do) due to the announcement of official GOG support for Linux coming later this year.

Re; "year of the Linux desktop", that's been every year for those of us who switched to Linux (as I did more than a decade ago). "The year of the Linux desktop" is any year you use it as your primary desktop operating system.

The CSMT patch author said, during his FOSDEM 2014 presentation, that currently, the code gives a very good boost to performance on high-end configs and a minimal boost to low-end ones. CrossOver comes with it enabled by default but we did find titles that did not wok properly with it and disabled it in crossties (through a registry key). Even with a GTX 660 and an I5 2500k CPU, I find the performance of TW2 unsatisfactory even after tweaking the game settings.

With GTX 680 and i7 4770 it works very well. But it's really high end. CSMT loads the processor quite a bit and even with that setup there are occasional drops in FPS. But they are rare.

Hopefully native Witcher 2 for Linux will be more optimized hardware wise.