That feels like a great use-case! I don’t have a wired connection so the bandwidth usage makes it a no-go for me probably, but you’ll have to post about your experience when/if you give it a shot!

I heard one perspective about how LPDDR5X isn’t in as high of demand as DDR5, so maybe the frame will be less impacted than the Steam Machine?

Is it a cope? Time will tell…

On modern devices (pretty much anything that supports 5Ghz) it feels rock solid to me. I can forget I’m streaming. Even my old laptop from like 2013 gave me really good results. In my case I usually stream to something in the same room as that router, so ymmv.

I’ve tried the moonlight homebrew on my “New 3DS” though, which only has 2.4Ghz WiFi, and had less success, even with the ridiculously low resolution. I usually can play for a minute or two, but as soon as there’s one lag spike it’s like it can’t catch back up. I need to try it again though, a recent update may have helped, I just didn’t test it thoroughly. But that’s, like, pretty niche haha!

My solution: I have a second, older (wifi 5 tho) router in access point mode plugged into my computer’s Ethernet port, and when my pc is on it forwards internet from its wifi connection to it. When I’m streaming to a device, it is the only device connected to that network. That also lets my computer have a wired connection to the router.

Additionally, I analyzed the network utilization near me to find which WiFi channels had the least congestion. Tbh tho, as long as the channel is different from your main router, you’d probably be fine.

I originally set it up for streaming wireless pcvr to my Quest 2, but I’ve found it works perfectly with Sunshine + Moonlight.

Whooo!!! That’s really good news for me, I was bummed to miss out on the first drop

Portal 2 already had some awesome mapmaking tools and a solid community. Maybe this is more like Mario Maker 2, where it expands the abilities for mapmakers. Plus some general visual/qol upgrades.

This could be really cool for the Steam Deck and the upcoming Steam Machine, since unlike Portal RTX, this will be vendor-agnostic (and much less taxing on performance).

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, owns the Linux trademark. He is currently the lead developer, and he approves and merges the code contributions from each of the “areas” (idk the right term for them) into the main branch for release versions.

The Linux kernel is distributed by The Linux Kernel Organization, a “California Public Benefit Corporation”. It’s “recognized by the IRS as a 501©3 private operating foundation”.

They are managed by The Linux Foundation which is “a 501©6 non-profit”.

It’s not “sold” to big corporations, because none of these companies are publicly traded.

But companies do use Linux massively. It has a massive market share in the server space. That’s why the Linux Foundation has a board of directors with many people from big tech corps.

Like other FOSS projects, Linux couldn’t really exist (the way it does) without sponsors and contributors. Companies sponsor its development to help improve and maintain the kernel, and in return they can use it for their needs. That’s how maintainers are compensated for their work. Many contributions are also from companies who add code to help adapt the kernel for their needs.

But because of the project’s licensing and leadership, privacy and transparency are protected. The kernel doesn’t collect or send user data to any company or server. If someone writes code that does that, leadership would probably not merge it anyways, but even if, any person could check (more frequently, “audit”) the code and remove it or choose to not use the project. Anyone is free to “fork” the kernel to make modifications or go a different direction, assuming they follow the license.

Now for desktop Linux distros, like Linux Mint, there’s other software that you should also think about its features and management, and whether that is “safe” too. Out of the box, things like Systemd (init process) or Cinnamon (desktop environment) are maintained and distributed by different groups. IMO for Linux Mint: it’s safe and protects privacy. But that’s subjective, it’s always good to be critical and to form your own opinions! :)

This is about micro-transactions specifically. Tim Fortnite is arguing that games sold on Steam should be able to offer in-game purchases with payment options outside of Steam.

It’s very similar to Epic Games v. Apple, where Apple had required in-app purchases for iOS apps, notably Fortnite, to be handled through their app-store so they get a cut.

One big difference that I see here: On PC, a developer isn’t required to use Steam to distribute software. Players often prefer Steam because Valve has made Steam a great option and has lots of good-will with players. Still, Steam does dominate a massive portion of the PC market.

And a 30% cut is high. Especially for smaller games with less financial resources. As a developer, that’s a trade-off you’d have to choose. I think it’d be best to offer the game on multiple platforms.

For Steam-bought games, I think having an option to pay off-platform would be fair, but I think the option needs to remain available through Steam too. For many games, I don’t want to give my payment details to yet another developer, company or third-party.

Apex is a security risk to have installed at this point.

In fairness to Respawn, if what they say is true, that it’s not ACE (which based on the description of the issue, sounds truthful), it doesn’t particularly raise red flags for client security.

But any game requiring a Kernel Anticheat to play is a security risk. At least here it’s EAC, which has a lot of development efforts and doesn’t require running from boot. But as a player, that’s still a trade-off you’re choosing by playing these games.

Letting players manage and host their own custom servers/lobbies helps. Admins can monitor and ban players in real-time. I know that doesn’t lend itself as well to dedicated servers (and thus opaque server-side anticheat), battle royales, ranked matchmaking and SBMM, but I see that as a reasonable solution for fair PvP games, especially older or smaller ones.

Wdym? I thought dropping Linux support through Proton fixed their hacker problem! /s

Persona 5 is great and already mixes up the formula in many ways (gun). But many players just don’t care for RPGs regardless.

I enjoyed what I played of Catherine! They don’t have to scrap RPGs, just mix it up and release other projects.

Tbh tho I don’t have the best opinion of Atlus. They really screwed the RPCS3 project years ago, at a time when there was no official option for playing Persona 5 on PC. The project survived, but they wiped any mention of Persona 5, even in the game compatibility list.

I watched my friend play Dead Island 2 at its launch. The gore system is absolutely brutal, with zombie flesh and bone all layered and dynamic. Also the game has really solid lighting without (afaik) a heavy reliance on realtime raytracing tech.

I know melee combat is the focus, but I can’t really speak for the gameplay beyond that. I think there’s value in trying it for the gore system alone, especially at that price and if there’s other games in the bundle you would want to play.

I did. Tbh I think there’s plenty of other people who do too. Once you’re comfy in an environment, you stick to it until you have enough reason to switch. And you’ll inevitably become a power-user if you solve enough problems, tinker enough, etc.

This teaser was damn intense at the game awards. I was very much like “what is even going on” and feeling pretty uncomfy. Incredibly gruesome, gorey and explicit.

And then it showed “Larian Studios” and I understood. What a reveal!

A lot of my friends have said they prefer girth, fwiw.

Jokes aside, that’s a good point. HDMI/DisplayPort, like USB, pass digital signals over many small cables in a bundle. With how much data uncompressed high res images consist of, I doubt there’s a lot of redundancy or parity the way there may be for Cat6 cable using TCP. At a certain point, without a powered repeater cable, the image will probably not work (or not reliably). Idk if that would appear as “no signal” or dropped frames, though.

Passive adapters don’t have much power to work with for signal processing… Idk how different the image signals themselves are between HDMI and DisplayPort, but I know from working with EDIDs that there’s many optional modes and features for both, like multiple audio/videos streams (3d video, surround sound, hdmi arc), different colorspaces, HDR and VRR. I’d be surprised if any passive HDMI-to-DP adapter supports more than the most common modes and features.

FWIW, the game has some gorgeous volumetric lighting, fog and effects. I do think it looks more current-gen than many other games, and it doesn’t rely on heavy raytracing options to do it.

It’s still ridiculous though, especially considering the game doesn’t support any modern algorithms for upscaling, but defaults to upscaling anyways.

Though, I know it didn’t have the budget of many AAA games and the engine has been long-since unsupported, so props to Arrowhead for doing as much as they have!

I’m on Arch, with Hyprland as my Window Manager. I use an RTX 3070.

For Wayland specifically, the driver was next to unusable for a while. I jumped ship from Windows in Sept. 2023. Beginning with driver 560 iirc, it got a lot better, plus their engineers pushed a lot of changes across the Wayland ecosystem to implement explicit sync support (a net positive, but before this, Nvidia was too stubborn to implement implicit sync, so bad screen tearing was unavoidable). Also there’s been a slow migration to using the GSP processor on newer cards. They claim it can improve performance, which may be true, but I also recently learned it helps them keep some more parts of their code closed-source, which is likely why it’s required to use the open source kernel modules.

At this point, though, it does feel very smooth and I can play games like The Finals at competitive framerates!

But relative to my performance under Windows, it’s still worse, mainly in average framerate. Like others have said, DX12 games seem to be hit hardest. I sometimes have to run lower settings to compensate. Also, if my VRAM gets filled, Xwayland apps all break, so I have to be very careful with higher quality texture quality especially.

Anyways, to answer your question, I think an average gamer doesn’t notice the degraded performance, without benchmarking or comparing framerates back to back— it still runs pretty smooth and framerates are still pretty high. If they aren’t happy with it, they’ll drop quality settings or resolution, just like they’d do under Windows.

Yep! The article title is a bit misleading, as the Steam Machine is still x86_64. Which is good imo: that’ll have better compatibility and the power draw/thermals matter less there than in a handheld or headset.

The Frame is the arm-based hardware Valve is going to be shipping.

But their work on FEX is taking ARM compatibility into the future, much like how their work on Wine/Proton has taken Linux compatibility to a new level.

Anyways, I agree with the article, that it’s going to extend to more than the Frame as support matures. ARM CPUs (or RISCs in general) are the future for non-desktop processors; I’d argue Apple has already been there with their M-series laptops, though not to nearly the same extent with gaming.

I feel like this is a good argument for drm-free games and stores like GOG. Not that you as a consumer can always choose that, as many games don’t offer that option, but for the ones that do, there’s less barriers towards playing it in the future or in environments where it’s not originally intended.

There is steamcmd, an official command-line tool— I’ve only used it for game servers, and I don’t know if it includes the Steam runtime/resources, but I know it lets you download games.

You could look at Goldberg Emulator too. I know it’s used often for piracy, but idk about its legality on its own.