I know the video drivers for Linux are still catching up with their Windows counter parts, but I didn't know it was this bad of a difference. I'm attaching two screen shots of the same area in Serious Sam 3: BFE. These are both being played on my laptop, specs in my signature. Windows one has the newest drivers for Intel HD 3000. Linux one is running on the current Ubuntu 3.12.5 kernel/Open GL 3 and Mesa 10.1. Linux Intel drivers still have some catching up to do.
That sucks. It looks like the bloom effect is way overdone. I would consider that to render the game unplayable. Nvidia's Linux drivers are thankfully quite good. Performance is great and everything looks great too. However, I'd use the open source nouveau driver if it could give me almost the same performance as the proprietary driver.
I've had the same experience with my Acer C7 Chromebook. It has an Intel HD 2000 chip and some games do exactly that same thing! I've even tried a few games in PlayOnLinux and the models/assets appear, but no textures. Everything is just white. I'm guessing it is a shader issue. Those olde HD 2000 3000 chips just can't handle modern shaders.
The thing is the chip can handle it fine. The top picture is the same PC but playing in Windows. If it can run it that good in Windows then the HD 3000 card is capable of doing it in Linux. It just needs proper drivers in Linux.
I see your point. So I wonder if I installed windows on my Chromebook if the HD 2000 drivers would handle these games too? Oh well, I'm not going to do it anyways, but I'm just curious... Now that I think about it, the Linux drivers for the Intel HD 2000-3000 may have to use OpenGL and it won't support the current shaders... just a chance It has to be an OpenGL thing and not a directX thing.