Quoting: elmapuli wonder why its easier to reverse enginering an game than making an free open source alternative to it...
it shouldnt be

Traditionally for game makers, about half the budget goes to marketing. Asset creation is almost all of the rest. Making the game engine, while both critical and often difficult, is only a small part of the whole. Content is also difficult to do incrementally: you need your story to happen in the right order, and you want all of your artwork to look good before people see it.

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Quoting: GuestI'm pretty against tailoring Linux (kernel) towards DRM (digital rights management) because that seems to me against the entire ideal of it.

This isn't really that, though. This is changing the kernel to help Wine. Sure, anti-tamper in Windows applications is a likely source for Windows syscalls being issued directly rather than going through Windows/Wine libraries, but equally some devs just suck. These changes stop those Windows applications messing up your system with their suckiness, by bouncing it back to Wine.

Kernel changes to allow DRM already happened: HDCP support, secure enclaves, and the like.

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Quoting: robredzquestion is what will the drivers be like with ray tracing as it becomes more common, given Nvidia and AMD will have different approaches?

Nvidia and AMD (and Intel) will have the same approach: vendor-neutral DX12 or vendor-neutral Vulkan (when Khronos and the Khronos stakeholders get round to finalising it).

The Nvidia-specific Vulkan extension was a proof-of-concept and a base to work from. Windows and Linux games that use it will continue to work on Nvidia hardware. I believe that's currently two.

Games that use DX12 for ray tracing won't work on Linux at least until the vendor-neutral Vulkan extension is finalised. The VKD3D people have already said that they have no interest in translating to the Nvidia-specific one, plus they've got other things that take up their time. There may well be a delay between the extension being finalised and them getting round to doing the translation.

They've also said that they don't have any interest (and it's likely behind an NDA even if they wanted to) in implementing DLSS, which helps performance. Maybe if there's an open standard for AI-assisted upscaling that becomes popular with game devs they'll implement that. Nvidia could contribute DLSS in the open if they wanted to. Or at least contribute enough so that they can use the (proprietary) library that comes with their drivers.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeThe issue with most wifi adapters is that while the open source stuff, works, the performance is kind of crappy without the firmware blob. It's much like geforce or radeon cards in that regard. What would be nice if there were a project to reverse engineer these blobs (as there are some NICs and other random pieces of hardware that use them) so that we no longer have to use closed source crap at all.

Part of the problem with WiFi devices is that they're radios. There are strict compliance requirements - such as power output - insisted on by regulators around the world. For example, by the FCC in the US. Without being able to show that they restrict the power output of these software-defined radios, they aren't allowed to be sold. If someone can tweak a value and recompile, they can't show that, and the devices are prohibited. So you either have to have some parts that can't be open source, or you have to have different product lines for different regulators.

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Quoting: Avehicle7887Back in my Windows days, my biggest gripe with razer was in their software which requires online access, which I never believed it should be a requirement for basic peripherals such as mouse and keyboard. Maybe in time thanks to these wonderful projects, I'll buy a razer product should the need arises.

I wouldn't. Things like requiring software (with Internet access, no less!) to be running all the time, and needing to be reverse-engineered to function on Linux, are not the things that mean they should get your money. Give these devs some money, sure, but Razer don't deserve it. Maybe if they start officially supporting Linux, and contribute to projects like OpenRazer, then it's worth signalling that you're happy with their approach by funding them.

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For me it's been No Man's Sky fairly solidly. I'm looking forward to the Next Generation update.

My little one's been doing some of that with me, but has also started replaying Qube and The Talos Principle.

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Quoting: dudeYeah, Valve taught me how to spend my money on games like women on shoes. Thanks Gaben

Some of us have to maintain a gaming budget as well as a shoe budget.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyAh, I see. Uh . . . next question: What's big.LITTLE?

ARM big.LITTLE [External Link]

It was an ARM thing to have both performant cores and power-sipping cores that share memory, so that tasks can be run on whichever is appropriate at a given time.

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Quoting: GuestWhat does Intel expect to happen? To out run AMD and NVidia on GPUs now? o.o

Benchmarks have integrated Xe easily competitive with integrated Vega. How it scales up to a dedicated chip remains to be seen.

Quoting: Purple Library GuySo all that Deep Link murfle . . . can anybody tell me if that stuff actually means something or if it's just marketing-speak?

As I understand it, it's big.LITTLE for Intel GPUs (except that they can both be active at the same time if the application calls for it).

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Read more about the whole Linux App Summit here.

It is unfortunate that whoever put that website together has never been introduced to the concept of aspect ratio. No one wants their profile picture turned into a conehead.

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