Mad max releases support for vulkan in its new public beta for linux

According to an announcement recently made by Feral Interactive, their new Mad Max game has been updated with a public beta for Linux that has support for the Vulkan API and provides various performance improvements.

The first thing to note is that support for Vulkan is only available in the Linux version of the video game, and not in the Windows version. And in order to enjoy this beta, it will not be possible through SteamOS, but only through standard Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc.

Index of contents

How to access the Mad Max for Linux beta

If you want to access the new beta of Mad Max for Linux, you must follow these steps:

1. In the Steam library, right-click on Mad Max. From the drop-down menu, select Properties and then the Betas tab. Enter the password " livelongandprosper " in the text box, and then click Check Code. You will see a confirmation message with access to vulkan_beta. From the drop-down menu that appears above the text box, choose "vulkan_beta". Close the properties window and remember that if Mad Max is already installed, an update will automatically download on your PC. If Mad Max was not already installed on your PC, go to the game page on Steam and choose the option to install it.

Technical requirements to access the Mad Max Beta for Linux

In order to avoid any problem, you will need the following versions of drivers on your computer:

• For NVIDIA you will need driver 375.26 or later, for AMDGPU-PRO you will need drivers 16.50 or 16.60. The 16.60 controller may cause a regression problem that makes the game appear darker than normal, so it would be best to opt for version 16.50 at this time until the company publishes a fix. In the case of MESA (radv / anv), you will need to have the latest Mesa 17.1-dev package compiled with Vulkan support. You can achieve this in Ubuntu through the Padoka PPA found in THIS LINK. Meanwhile, Intel ANV requires Broadwell or Skylake as Haswell is not currently supported. Lastly, make sure Steam is updated to the latest version on March 22, 2017 or later.

Feral Interactive also incorporated a benchmark mode in the game that can be opened by entering "—feral-benchmark¨" in the advanced options of the Launcher. It is an exclusive feature for Linux that aims to demonstrate to players the huge performance difference between using Vulkan and OpenGL.

If at any time you want to disable Vulkan to use OpenGL again, you can uncheck the “Use Vulkan” box in the Advanced section of the Feral Launcher.

Screenshots: Mad Max with Vulkan vs OpenGL on Linux

Benchmarks: Mad Max with Vulkan vs OpenGL

Below we also leave you some screenshots of some benchmarks made recently in the game where you can see the huge difference in performance (frame rate) between using Vulkan and OpenGL in the case of Mad Max.

Comparative video: Mad Max with Vulkan vs OpenGL on Linux

In this video, you can clearly see the differences in game quality and performance when taking advantage of the Vulkan API. Quality settings were set to Very High.

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