Jup, I just never buy games with Denuvo these days.
Under Windows, the 5 machine activations per 24 hours limit they impose wasn’t something I ever hit, but under Linux it’s kind of easy because, as the article states, switching Proton versions counts as a machine activation to Denuvo.
Ah, Microsoft. Just when I thought you understood how to properly release a game with South of Midnight and TES: Oblivion Remastered: Steam Deck verified, no Denuvo or other intrusive DRM (doesn’t mean the games are DRM free), available on multiple storefronts. Along comes Doom and they just couldn’t resist Denuvo. Idiots.
A Way Out is marked as “Playable” by Valve, mainly because of Origin (or EA App nowadays?) and some quirks with the controls. Should play just fine though and once in-game controllers should be well supported.
The PS4 Slim was released 3 years after the original model and sold for $100/100,-€ less than the original.
The PS3 Slim released ~3 years after the original model and was significantly cheaper (to be fair, it also had a lot of features removed).
The PS5 saw a Slim model release with no price cut at all, and now they’re planning to actually increase the price of over 4 year old tech that is almost certainly a lot cheaper to produce than 4 years ago, especially the Slim model that saw a reduction in cooler size, lower-powered PSU and other cost-reduction measures.
Gaming is becoming less and less accessible and more and more of a luxury.
Yeah, GeoGuessr is an extreme example as Google basically did 95% of the work for them. Having to image large chunks of the world would mean a huge investment and I highly doubt GeoGuessr would even exist without Google Maps.
If Google would double their API pricing tomorrow there’s very little GeoGuessr can do except maybe switch to Apple Maps (they offer an API, not sure they offer one for their “street view” data though).
Mumble, or maybe TeamSpeak 6 (they skipped 4, had 5 in beta, which now is 6 in beta, oh well).
Depends on what you want. We’ve been using a TeamSpeak (3) server I’m hosting for years, it works as well as ever (they added a couple of QoL features to the TeamSpeak 3 client during the pandemic as well).
TeamSpeak 6 supports persistent chat via the Matrix protocol and you can register to any server and use that to login to any server using federation (as it uses Matrix under the hood). They now added screen sharing so you got the features covered that most users would want. They unfortunately didn’t release self-hostable TS6 server yet (but they say they’re working on it) so you can either use an experimental TS5 server (uses Matrix but doesn’t support screen sharing) or TS3 server, which doesn’t support any of the new stuff. The TS6 client is backwards compatible though.
I just don’t think they actually know where they want to go with it yet. They seem to be advertising the whole decentralized thing as that’s clearly a differentiating factor from Discord, but on the other hand they didn’t exactly prioritize putting out easy-to-setup server software yet. The TS6 client pretty much fully supports TS3 servers including administration, but as far as I know TS6 servers are quite a bit different. There’s also “communities” that work with TS6 servers in some way. So it’s all a bit of a messy mix between legacy support and their attempt at creating a decentralized Discord.
I hope they get it together and release TS6 server software, find a good way to monetize their efforts and get people to use it.
Some people will say that you could just use Matrix directly instead, but if they manage to make TS6 easy to use and understand, allow easy creation of a server (as a service) and also allow full-featured self-hosting it could turn out well. Plus they have the brand recognition, at least with folks that aren’t that young anymore. This might help with adoption. Sure, it’s proprietary still, but it’s decentralized and uses open protocols (Matrix). You can apparently already join TeamSpeak community chats from your own Matrix server, so they aren’t artificially blocking “vanilla” Matrix servers from federating.
…when comparing TFLOPs, and that’s not comparable across architectures (by different companies as well!).
If we take similar-performing (in rasterization) Ampere and RDNA 2 cards (say a 3080 and 6800 XT), we can see the 3080 has 29.77 TFLOPs and the 6800 XT has 20.74 TFLOPs, an RDNA 2 FLOP is worth about 1.4x as much as an Ampere FLOP.
So extrapolating the 1.6 “RDNA 2 TFLOPs” of the Deck we get 2.24 “Ampere TFLOPs” and that’d make the Deck quite a bit faster than the Switch 2 in portable mode, but slower than the Switch 2 in docked mode.
This is obviously all just wild and silly speculation, but I doubt the Switch 2 will match the Deck in portable mode. Samsung 8nm would just eat too much power for this to realistically happen in a handheld form factor.
Input latency for one, because the next frame is delayed where the interpolated frame is inserted.
And image quality. The generated frame is, as I said, interpolated. Whether that’s just using an algorithm or machine learning, it’s not even close to being accurate (at this point in time).
Does the CLI still work? If so, you could download and play all the Windows 7 compatible, DRM-free games in your library just fine. Alternatively, if you already had these games installed, they’ll work fine without launching Steam first.
The feature itself is great. It records the last two hours by default and lets you easily create clips from that. The editor is right there in the Steam overlay, it’s pretty great.
I only used it under Linux, and that’s where I’d say it is still very much a beta experience. I have an AMD Radeon 7800 XT. Most of the time, Steam picks up on its hardware acceleration - sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, it falls back to CPU encoding (obviously) which occupies around 3-4 cores on my 7950X3D to record 3440x1440 at the highest quality setting. GPU encodes are H.264 even though the GPU is perfectly capable of encoding AV1. Performance impact ranges from almost zero to as much as 30%, which seems a bit excessive. On some games that have a splash screen (Sea of Thieves for example), all it will record is said splash screen, even when it’s not shown anymore: you get gameplay sounds, but the video is just a static image with mouse cursor artifacts. It didn’t record sound from one of the microphones I tried. After swapping it out for a different one, my voice is being recorded. At least one session the shortcut for saving a clip just resulted in an error sound instead of a clip being saved.
So it’s a bit disappointing so far. Yeah, Linux shenanigans and relatively small user base, but Valve out of all companies should treat Linux as a first-class platform. Yes, they do a lot for Linux, with Proton and whatnot. But ironically Steam itself is only in an “okay, it kind of works” state. No official packages for anything but apt-based distributions and Wayland (scaling) support is meh at best.
It did seem to work a lot better on the Steam Deck with very little performance impact in my short testing, so there’s that.