Croteam are continuing to be one of my favourite developers, as The Talos Principle [Steam] has been patched with some goodies.

Here's what's changed:

Bugs fixed and performance improvements for Vulkan graphics API.

Fixed some rendering issues under OpenGL graphics API.

Better detection of usable CPU cores.

Fixed problems with Chinese Traditional translation in Road to Gehenna.

Removed usage of D3DX library DLL.

Enlarged FPS graph and added average line.

Fixed problem with imprecise frame-rate limitation on Windows platforms.

Since I haven't tested it for a while, I ran some quick benchmarks this morning to see how much has changed. This is on my Ubuntu 17.10, i7-5960X 3GHZ, 16GB DDR4 RAM, GeForce GTX 980 Ti (384.111 driver).

Not too much between Vulkan, as a lot of the performance fixes might not even be seen during the short benchmark, but when you put them next to OpenGL the difference is clear:

The Talos Principle, Ultra Settings Latest OpenGL + Vulkan vs Vulkan Old Vulkan New 121.8 Vulkan New Vulkan Old 118.7 Vulkan Old OpenGL 80.7 OpenGL Vulkan New 121.8 Vulkan Old 118.7 OpenGL 80.7 121.8 118.7 80.7 0 25 50 75 100 125 Average FPS

Vulkan doesn't just have better FPS in The Talos Principle, it's also noticeably smoother too. On a cold start (first load) OpenGL has a fair amount of stutter, but Vulkan has a lot less.

It's actually on sale with 80% off, if you still haven't picked it up now is an awesome time to do so. Croteam have great Linux support and it is a fantastic puzzle game.