Another thing to point out. The reason Nvidia are cool now with open source kernel module is becasue they moved most of their driver into their firmware blob which does remain a blob. So kernel module is just a glorified shim at this point.

So comparable to AMD their situation is still much worse. The only improvement is potentially better alignment with kernel releases. So don't think Nvidia is a lot more open source friendly now because of all this.

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Quoting: R3BiRtH2 year refreshes may make more sense for the alternative PC handhelds such as the ROG Ally, and Legion go, which aren't targeted as a standard in terms of games having settings and such tailored for it, but for the Steam Deck that makes no sense, since it detracts from the "Deck Verified" system, as well as the seemingly intented purpose for the device to be the standard "lowest common denominator" target for developers to make sure their games are ready to be supported for handheld gaming PC's. A longer cycle makes more sense for a standard to work as a...standard, which would apply to a new device which would be intended to replace what was the standard target, with a new one.

I don't necessarily view "lowest common denominator" as something good, since it can hold back games progress and not everyone cares to make their games scalable to be able to address it properly.

2 might be tight, but 5+ or 7+ years of the incumbent consoles is too long.

There is such issue as consolization of games that causes them to be limited unnecessarily due to console hardware being way behind current hardware capabilities.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeIf the latter group, it should realistically have a similar cadence of release as the console market does.

There definitely is a difference in thought processes between the people who game on computers, and those who use gaming consoles.

I've always seen that console refresh cadence as indication of lack of competition. Imagine desktop GPU and CPU makers would have a monopoly. I highly doubt they'll invest so much money in refreshing hardware as they do now. Same applies to mobile market. They'll try to market their slow progress as "it's good enough" to make that the user's expectation.

So if console market would have been more competitive, we also would have seen refresh cycles being much shorter. At least that's what I think is the real reason.

I.e. that whole "console expectation" is a marketing construct, not something inherently defined.

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Quoting: eldakingIt is far too early to release a Deck 2

Why? Desktop generation of CPUs and GPUs refresh around once per 2 years. Same happens with mobile phones. Why can't gaming handhelds refresh that way too?

Quoting: eldakinghe benefits of a standardized hardware target are negated by too frequent changes

That somehow doesn't bother desktop gaming.

Waste can be an issue, but you aren't forced to buy new hardware every time there is a generation update.

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If Nvidia will start supporting Nova upstream - that would be good.

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Lol. Let them get lost with these excuses about why their invasive anti-cheat is contradictory to the open nature of Linux. The problem is with invasive, not with Linux.

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Optimizing UE4 sounds impossible, but if the could improve anything - that's good.

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Quoting: Liam DaweYes it has 64bit nowadays, at least on Steam it does, which also has the legacy 32bit version too but 64bit is the default.

Good to know, thanks! I have a GOG version I can check for updates.

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Did they ever make the game 64-bit? I remember giving up on it due to it hitting "large file" bug (very common bug for low quality 32-bit releases which many old Unity games suffered from).

Basically, when building anything 32-bit you need to tell the compiler to handle 64-bit file descriptors, otherwise your program can fail on some filesystems. Search for _FILE_OFFSET_BITS - it should always be set to 64 for games these days, or better everything should be 64-bit already.

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For general purposes archiving I'm using zstd + tar now anyway.

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