Nik282000

My 1080 from 2017 has 8gb of vram. Still works fine.

3.3k over 19 years isn’t too bad considering I bought an Index and Deck :/ If anything I need more games!

Why? 4k is already at the limit of what your eyes can resolve unless you have an enormous screen.

Virtual Box is probably the easiest to get started but lately I have been using LXC containers because they are a very similar to VMs but with less overhead.

No idea where you are in your trek, but if you can find the time learn how to use virtual machines (or use an old laptop) so you can test stuff without fear of breaking a machine you rely on.

When I want to use a new package or make a change to my setup I will do it in a virtual machine as many times as it takes until I get it right, then use my notes to do it on my daily driver. I went from a Windows only user to daily driving Linux in about a year thanks to keeping good notes.

Windows still hasn’t decided what it’s configuration windows should look like, there are still dialogs with the 30 year old W95 design language. I doubt that they were able to put together a seamless gaming UI over that past x months or years.

Virtual Box. It’s dead easy.

I’m not familiar with it but you might get lucky and it will work with Wine. It took me years before I was comfortable dropping Windows but I am a lot less anxious now about having an update randomly brick my PC or wipe out my settings/tweaks.

Good luck!

For anything that HAS to work and only runs on Windows (eat a dick Siemens) I put it in a VM with no network connection. A physical machine that gets regular updates is too unstable to rely on.

When ever I’m teaching a new guy I try to get them on board with using VMs at at minimum for reliability and a VM under Linux if they are interested.

That sucks. About 5 years ago I put ideology one peg above entertainment and just avoid games that use Windows only anti-cheat, I don’t get to play the biggest releases but there are literally thousands of other games that work perfectly and are just as fun.

If I were you I would keep my Windows gaming machine as a single function device. Play games, get all the MS updates and 3rd party spyware, don’t let it touch anything you want to keep private or safe.

Make the switch, even if it’s on an old laptop first just to try it out. About 90% of my Steam library runs without any extra effort needed, a few games needed tweaks that I found in the steam message boards, and 5 or 10 just refused to work at all.

You can not steal what you can not own. ☠️

They are also a dickbag company with a garbage platform.

I’m a Debian guy but most of the people I know are stuck in the Windows ecosystem because it’s the only one most people know.

I’m not but the majority is.

Like you said though, just buy a prebuilt and you’re already there

As long as Microsoft doesn’t push an update that fucks up your machine, or you don’t boot for a few weeks and have to wait 2 hours for an update…

Even the biggest Steam update takes a fraction of the time of a ‘routine’ Windows update. SteamOS/DeckOS is a huge quality of life upgrade over a desktop.

Totally agree about 4k, it useful for work (its like 4x 1080 screens!) but for gaming it’s so much overkill.

Ray tracing is a conceptually lazy and computationally expensive. Fire off as many rays as you can in every direction from every light source, when the ray hits something it gets lit up and fires off more rays of lower intensity and maybe a different colour.

Sure you can optimize things by having a maximum number of bounces or a maximum distance each ray can travel but all that does is decrease the quality of your lighting. An abstracted model can be optimized like crazy BUT it take a lot of man power (paid hours) and doesn’t directly translate to revenue for the publisher.

The only downside of raytracing is the performance cost.

The downside is the wallet cost. Spreading the development cost of making a better conventional lighting system over thousands of copies of a game is negligible, requiring ray tracing hardware is an extra 500-1000 bucks that could otherwise be spent on games.

Game engines don’t have to simulate sound pressure bouncing off surfaces to get good audio. They don’t have to simulate all the atoms in objects to get good physics. There’s no reason to have to simulate photons to get good lighting. This is a way to lower engine dev costs and push that cost onto the consumer.

Ray tracing is a money grab.