Heroes of Newerth and the open source Radeon drivers don't go well together

Since Warcraft 3 seemed to be working fine with the Gallium3D-based drivers on Ubuntu 11.10, I thought I'd give Heroes of Newerth a go. I've been rather curious about the game play for a while now.

Installing the game is simple enough. Just download the latest installer (it's pretty hefty) then fire up a terminal and run it:

~$ sh ./HoNClient-2.1.10.sh

You don't even need root access. In fact, the installer will tell you to run without root access if you attempt it. Nice.

The game even starts up without any apparent errors.

Unfortunately, it lags too much to be playable. Just the login screen lags horribly. I didn't bother trying to start a game.

Maybe when Precise Pangolin is out come April 2012, we'll see if things got any better. The open source driver in Ubuntu 11.10 doesn't have the latest improvements and it's supposed to be much better now.