RTX 50 just dropped in, they’re in the “beta early adopter” phase, AKA expensive for people with more dough than smarts. They’re the same TSMC 4N process as the RTX 40, and unless you have a PCIe 5.0 motherboard, the RTX 50 makes little sense. No need to go to used market, but I’d personally stick to the 4060/4070 for the time being, or the Radeon RX 7600/7700.
If you need some serious AI oomph… then go to the pro line, there are some nice RTX Ada for less than $10k, or rent some cloud H100s.
Yes… it will kind of depend on which layer of compatibility will a game require. Debian is Linux + GNU, which is what most people identify as “a Linux system”. Android uses Linux without GNU, but starting with Android 15 it will come with a VM (container?) system to run a GNU userland. Android can already run Linux distros via Termux, which can be set up to run a desktop, but having it by default will mean apps will be able to use it directly. I’ve just tested RetroArch on Android, with DosBox to run Windows 98… but that’s kind of a mindfuck of its own 😂. macOS is BSD, which shares the POSIX interface with Linux, but it does some things in a different way, however there is a GNU userland for BSD, so games using only that, can run on it already. WSL 2.0 is a full first-class VM with full Linux + GNU and a desktop interface that can coexist with Windows… since Windows 10/11 itself runs by default in a Hyper-V VM (the bootloader is Hyper-V).
Some games already use P2P, or provide servers for the community to run, so only the private servers would need replicating. Even in that case, I’d argue that having “some” common API, would make it easier than chasing around everyone’s different implementations.
The nice thing about Steam, is that it’s “too big to clamp down”:
People used to 🏴☠️ on the high seas, for many reasons.
Steam came up as a “single point of sale”, at the same time as Netflix was doing the same for movies and series.
Over time, companies tried to carve out chunks of the pie, restoring some of the original fragmentation…
…but while Netflix has been torn to shreds of its former glory, Steam is still the main “single point” for games…
…with a “single point” DRM
Steam’s DRM only exists because game updates keep coming out with constantly updating DRM versions. The moment Steam tried to act against its clients, and they decided to leave Steam, every Steam game copy at that moment, would get cracked all at once.
Maybe EA, MS, Nintendo, Sony, etc. don’t see that as a great thing… and that’s why they’ve been setting up their own stores… but I think it’s AWESOME! 😁
Well, this has been a blast from the past. Haven’t set up all the drivers, or an internet connection, but with the turbo button it’s been the fastest Win98 install I’ve ever done 😆
Because traditionally there were few Linux devices.
Android 15 is going to change that: it comes with a virtual machine API and a Linux Terminal running Debian for ChromeOS compatibility.
Soon, the most popular consumer OS in the world will be Linux:
3.3 billion: Android / Linux
2.2 billion: Apple iOS/macOS *NIX
1.6 billion: Windows
400 million: Windows 11 + WSL 2.0
250 million: gaming consoles
"millions": SteamOS Linux
Wine might still make sense to keep things standardized for some time, and as a compatibility layer for older games, but native Linux games will also work on the Linux solutions for Android, Apple, and Windows.
It might be fine for non-interactive stuff where you can get all the frames in advance, like cutscenes. For anything interactive though, it just increases latency while adding imprecise partial frames.
Texture packs or not, IMHO the key point is they’re optional, not a requirement for the game to be playable. Games that depend on photorealism, are bound to end up in deep trouble.
The objective part is in whether it matches what the creator intended.
Sometimes they intended crisp contours, like in ClearType; sometimes they intended to add extra colors; sometimes they designed pixel perfect and it looked blurry on CRT; very rarely they used vector graphics or 3D that can be rendered at better quality by just throwing some extra resolution.
Many artists of the time pushed this tech to these limits, “objectively better” is to emulate that.