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Latest 30 Comments

News - Valve amended the Steam survey for December 2025 - Linux actually hit another all-time high
By mattaraxia, 7 Jan 2026 at 7:47 pm UTC

Quoting: Eike
Quoting: mattaraxia
Quoting: mr-victoryI feel that the GabeCube *ahem* Steam Machine will be DOA due to anti cheat, I hope to be proven wrong but Windows on ARM laptops being frequently returned item on Amazon doesn't give me confidence, those laptops' game compatibility issues are not that different from ours... the advantage Deck had was being a handheld so who cares if an fps doesn't work.
If the Deck wasn't DOA because of anti-cheat, why would the cube be?

That just makes no sense. Will it be a bit limited? Sure. Will there still be tons of people who don't care about games like Battlefield? Clearly the answer is yes.

It's not expected to sell 50 million units, even 5 is a . . . huge success.
I'm not sure they're right, but I do see their point: People expect different things and play different games on a handheld.

When I buy a handheld, I expect the handheld games to work (like on Switch). And I wouldn't want to play FPS on it. On a box on the other hand, on a "real PC", I'd expect "every game" to work.
Yeah, and I should have been clearer, but when I said "Clearly the answer is yes" I really meant when you combine the Deck with this data in this article, the ridiculous growth of the desktop, it just doesn't make sense.

The Cube will most certainly sell pretty well, inline with the deck at least. To think it's "DOA" given all those things, just seems like a crazy stretch. No, it isn't going to outsell the PS5. Yes, it will outsell the original Steam Machines many times over.

News - After a poor relaunch, SPLITGATE: Arena Reloaded devs release a statement
By Whom, 7 Jan 2026 at 7:36 pm UTC

The relaunch has been pretty excellent in every way in terms of the actual changes to the game and I've been having a fantastic time playing on Linux. It's even reasonably well optimized for Steam Deck, though I'm not enough of a gamepad player to stick with it there. It's too bad that I don't expect it to last too long unless they make a huge marketing push (as they claim was supposed to come a while after the relaunch for...some reason), because in the putrid realm of live service shooters this is one that actually has the sauce and is worth pushing through the business model. Unfortunately if it goes down sooner rather than later, the live service disease will take another worthwhile game from all of us.

News - 007 First Light gets PC specifications released and that's a lot of RAM needed
By elmapul, 7 Jan 2026 at 7:22 pm UTC

Quoting: KimyrielleTo be fair, 32GB RAM have been sort of standard for gaming PCs for a while now.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam

no 55,69% of the market have less than 32GB of RAM.

News - The Legion Go with Bazzite is an excellent machine for gaming
By chickenb00, 7 Jan 2026 at 6:59 pm UTC

Quoting: Persephone the SheepNot that I can afford a new handheld plus dock. How well do the detachable controllers work?
Exactly my question to Liam also: how is LLGo Joycons support in Bazzite when they're not docked to the unit? I adore the Switch Joycons because I can rest my arms on the back of the couch, or drape one arm over my head and the other tucked under my leg if I so cared to. Freedom from standard controller "locked shoulder" pose, if you will.
How is undocked gyro support in Bazzite?

News - Start 2026 off right with the massive 77 map mod Quake Brutalist Jam III
By rustynail, 7 Jan 2026 at 6:53 pm UTC

Quoting: helloCLDOn the off chance I actually play through all of this, does anyone have any other recent Quake mods they recommend checking out?
The Immortal Lock was another pretty large mod.

Also other than looking for mods at specific quake community websites like Slipseer both official Bethesda Quake remaster and Ironwail are now capable of browsing and downloading mods right in the menu. Iirc both have relatively small mod lists but since it's so easy to just download and play something you may as well try those

News - KDE Plasma 6.6 will finally stop the system sleeping when gaming with a controller
By TheLinuxPleb, 7 Jan 2026 at 6:51 pm UTC

Quoting: Anorelsan
Quoting: kaimanI'm on Gnome, but I could swear that this also is a problem I had in the past. Haven't played many games with controller lately, so no idea if it's still an issue or not.

But even then it annoys me at times: screen going blank during lengthy cut-scenes. Or the opposite: screen not going blank when Firefox with Youtube is open, and no video playing (happens only on occasion, though).
On my system with Archlinux + GNOME, if you are playing with the controller the screen doesn't go blank. If you don't touch the controller, a lengthy cut-scene as you say, the screen goes blank and you have to touch the mouse or keyboard (the controller don't work¿?). I have my power saving config to go blank after 5 min of inactivity so it's not a problem anymore for me.

And that applies on steam, emulators etc.
Don't know if it's KDE only, but recently Steam made it so finally that when a game is running it won't take you to a lock screen which in my opinion is most welcome change as games might behave bit badly when power saving is enabled.

Heroic launcher did this already, but for some reason Steam was lacking it before.

News - Mesa RADV driver on Linux looks set for a big ray tracing performance boost
By rustynail, 7 Jan 2026 at 6:45 pm UTC

Quoting: JarmerNice! Gotta love these huge improvements for same hardware.

Although: that said, I'm not sure I notice/care that much about raytracing just in general. It makes things look SLIGHTLY just a tiny bit better at a huge frame cost? But maybe with this the frame cost will be minimal so that slightly better look will be okay?
Apparently some developers are mostly using ray tracing not to improve the visuals but as a crutch that allows them to not bother implementing lighting at all as they normally should, like iirc the latest Doom game doesn't work without ray tracing at all, although when you set it to low the performance is not as horrible as you may expect from ray tracing (but still pretty horrible)

News - Mesa RADV driver on Linux looks set for a big ray tracing performance boost
By SlayerTheChikken, 7 Jan 2026 at 6:37 pm UTC

I like raytraced reflections, the rest I don't really care about personally. Most of the time it's not implemented correctly and it has lots of noise so I don't use it, but for example Cyberpunk is good enough that I would, even though it has light bleed.

News - After a poor relaunch, SPLITGATE: Arena Reloaded devs release a statement
By Cley_Faye, 7 Jan 2026 at 6:22 pm UTC

Kernel level anti-cheat? Well, that's a way to push me away. Knee-jerk reaction aside, of course.

Although according to protondb this does run. I'm curious on how these works with proton/wine. Or maybe the store page is outdated.

News - Mesa RADV driver on Linux looks set for a big ray tracing performance boost
By lejimster, 7 Jan 2026 at 6:17 pm UTC

I was wondering this when watching some Windows 11 vs Linux benchmarks recently. It seemed like RT wasn't as performant on Linux.. Idk why but I always get a kick out of seeing performance gains on Linux, even if I'm not directly benefiting.

News - After a poor relaunch, SPLITGATE: Arena Reloaded devs release a statement
By Liam Dawe, 7 Jan 2026 at 5:43 pm UTC

Quoting: NumerfoltAnd of course, there's no alt text anywhere to be found. But it's probably never been aimed at vision impaired people anyway?
I added alt text to the image when the article was originally published, it is there.

Edit: or do you mean specifically in the article (I've additionally added that now)? As the image alt text was always there.

News - After a poor relaunch, SPLITGATE: Arena Reloaded devs release a statement
By Numerfolt, 7 Jan 2026 at 5:38 pm UTC

And of course, there's no alt text anywhere to be found. But it's probably never been aimed at vision impaired people anyway?

News - After a poor relaunch, SPLITGATE: Arena Reloaded devs release a statement
By dpanter, 7 Jan 2026 at 5:01 pm UTC

Devs should read the hundreds of negative Steam reviews from the last month or so.
This soulless statement almost comes off as condescending, which I suppose fits their general style of... lets be generous and call it 'communication'.

News - 007 First Light gets PC specifications released and that's a lot of RAM needed
By such, 7 Jan 2026 at 4:55 pm UTC

Quoting: Kimyrielle
They may have hoped for that 50xx refresh that ended up getting postponed for at least a year.
Well, typically you don't design games for hardware that's not even out yet. You go for stuff that has been out for 3-4 years, so there is an installed basis. Even IF the upgraded 50XX GPUs become a thing (there are rumors that they might get canceled), the game will likely launch before any of these has reached a customer.
You'd think that... When was the last time you tried cranking up a game to max settings? A 5080, arguably the top consumer card right now, straight up crashes if you try that at 1440p in Indiana Jones, a game from 2024, one released prior to the paper release of this generation of GPUs. And that's after a year of patching and some optimisation. Not enough VRAM. 007 was supposed to release roughly at a point where nVidia typically released (or would've been close to releasing) their refreshes. 12GB VRAM for 1080p60 sends a clear message here, from my point of view.

I mean, just a peek at raster performance a notch above 1080p (a reminder that nVidia was advertising Turing GPUs as 8k-capable) tells you where the current ceiling is, and it's not at 16GB VRAM where the top consumer cards card are, which is also well past what's reasonable to spend on graphics.

007 will function on 8GB, I don't doubt that, but if you need a current xx90 GPU to play a current game possibly on max settings that game isn't designed with current-gen hardware in mind on the high-end. What used to be GPUs intended basically for professionals is now needed for silly games to not even run that well at resolutions that match the current TV standards?

Basically, looking at those requirements I don't see how IOI wasn't counting on the industry to finally move on from 8GB to 12GB, and consequently from 16GB to whatever nVidia would deem us consumer peasants worthy of...

News - 007 First Light gets PC specifications released and that's a lot of RAM needed
By Brisse, 7 Jan 2026 at 4:54 pm UTC

I remember seeing similar reactions towards Indiana Jones and the Great Circle before that released, and once it actually released it turned out to be better optimized than people first expected. It scaled quite well towards modest hardware and still looked quite good even on lower settings. IOI's recent Hitman games were also running quite well in my opinion so I won't judge this one solely on these requirements, rather I will wait and see.

News - 007 First Light gets PC specifications released and that's a lot of RAM needed
By Kimyrielle, 7 Jan 2026 at 4:23 pm UTC

Quoting: Liam Daweou go by averages. [...] Going by the Steam survey, over 50% have 16GB or less RAM.
Well, if 50% have 32GB, that's pretty much your median user. I fully agree (and said so above) that it's silly to design for hardware without an installed basis, but the 32GB RAM I'd give a pass, personally. In the end you don't design games around the slowest PC out there either, and people shouldn't reasonably expect to be able to run the newest visual wonders on a 10 year old potato.

12GB VRAM is still way out there, when only a handful of GPU models have more than 8. In the end, your point still stands. It's pretty ridiculous.

News - Humble Choice for January 2026 has a great overall selection of games
By Liam Dawe, 7 Jan 2026 at 4:19 pm UTC

I know price rises suck, but look outside the box for a moment. The problem is really a question of viability.

Sure, they have a certain level of purchase mass due to the amount of users, but you split that across each individual game and then Humble as a business need their own cut to remain a viable business too. Add taxes into that and it gets reduced even further. Even the current £11.49 really is not a lot when split across 8 games.

News - 007 First Light gets PC specifications released and that's a lot of RAM needed
By Liam Dawe, 7 Jan 2026 at 4:14 pm UTC

Quoting: KimyrielleTo be fair, 32GB RAM have been sort of standard for gaming PCs for a while now. Also, these decisions were very likely made before the RAM prices went out of control, which started only a few months ago.
Not as long as you might think, and you don't design games for the top-end. You go by averages. Part of the point of PC gaming is having settings to bring things down to more acceptable levels is it not? Going by the Steam survey, over 50% have 16GB or less RAM. It's absolutely mad to make 1080p at 60FPS need a minimum of 32GB lol, locking away over half your potential sales for what people expect from a game.

News - 007 First Light gets PC specifications released and that's a lot of RAM needed
By Kimyrielle, 7 Jan 2026 at 4:06 pm UTC

They may have hoped for that 50xx refresh that ended up getting postponed for at least a year.
Well, typically you don't design games for hardware that's not even out yet. You go for stuff that has been out for 3-4 years, so there is an installed basis. Even IF the upgraded 50XX GPUs become a thing (there are rumors that they might get canceled), the game will likely launch before any of these has reached a customer.

News - Humble Choice for January 2026 has a great overall selection of games
By g000h, 7 Jan 2026 at 4:03 pm UTC

Wasn't long ago that Choice was £8 for a month (i.e. A 44% inflationary increase). Also, the bundles used to be much better value propositions, for instance only paying £1 for the lowest tier and getting 3 titles. This cash grab followed their change of ownership.

News - SteamOS 3.7.19 arrives with a bunch of essential bug fixes
By Doktor-Mandrake, 7 Jan 2026 at 4:03 pm UTC

Is anyone else having issues with source engine games on steam deck lcd?

Unless with HL2 I have shader detail set to 'low' it will just crash

L4D2 crashes if effects aren't set to 'low'

And Portal crashes if shadow detail isn't set to 'low'

Anything higher then low on these specific settings seems to make them crash, also l4d2 still crashed when set to proton (tried various versions)

News - KDE Plasma 6.6 will finally stop the system sleeping when gaming with a controller
By mr-victory, 7 Jan 2026 at 4:00 pm UTC

Quoting: BrokattIt may be something unique for Steam Controller? I will post a pic when I get home. It's similar to the one @mr-victory linked to.
When looking for a post with a pic, I did come across a post about the warning appearing with a Steam controller.

News - See the new trailer for Antivirus Survivors 2003 Professional taking survivor-likes to an infested family computer
By ShabbyX, 7 Jan 2026 at 4:00 pm UTC

I have this idea of making a game about fighting computer viruses, and the difficulty settings are Linux and Windows, and then the Linux difficulty doesn't have any enemies 😁

News - 007 First Light gets PC specifications released and that's a lot of RAM needed
By such, 7 Jan 2026 at 3:57 pm UTC

Quoting: KimyrielleTo be fair, 32GB RAM have been sort of standard for gaming PCs for a while now. Also, these decisions were very likely made before the RAM prices went out of control, which started only a few months ago.

What I don't get is the 12GB VRAM. Even in the 50xx series, NVidia stubbornly refuses to put more than 8GB in most GPUs, so what's the target audience here?
GPU chop shop customers?

https://www.techpowerup.com/340880/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-gets-a-48-gb-mod-and-step-by-step-tutorial

They may have hoped for that 50xx refresh that ended up getting postponed for at least a year.

News - Mesa RADV driver on Linux looks set for a big ray tracing performance boost
By Jarmer, 7 Jan 2026 at 3:53 pm UTC

Nice! Gotta love these huge improvements for same hardware.

Although: that said, I'm not sure I notice/care that much about raytracing just in general. It makes things look SLIGHTLY just a tiny bit better at a huge frame cost? But maybe with this the frame cost will be minimal so that slightly better look will be okay?

News - Mesa RADV driver on Linux looks set for a big ray tracing performance boost
By Purple Library Guy, 7 Jan 2026 at 3:53 pm UTC

Surely no one would ever do that, especially not one of the most ubiquitous high-fidelity game engines out there in their widely-adopted ray-traced global illumination solution...
That's some great snark there.

News - See the new trailer for Antivirus Survivors 2003 Professional taking survivor-likes to an infested family computer
By Tethys84, 7 Jan 2026 at 3:52 pm UTC

Ooh! Looks great! I just got a similar game during the Steam Winter Sale called Desktop Survivors 98, and it's been pretty fun.
[Desktop Survivors 98 (Steam)](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3339780/Desktop_Survivors_98/)

News - 007 First Light gets PC specifications released and that's a lot of RAM needed
By Kimyrielle, 7 Jan 2026 at 3:41 pm UTC

To be fair, 32GB RAM have been sort of standard for gaming PCs for a while now. Also, these decisions were very likely made before the RAM prices went out of control, which started only a few months ago.

What I don't get is the 12GB VRAM. Even in the 50xx series, NVidia stubbornly refuses to put more than 8GB in most GPUs, so what's the target audience here?