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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Quoting: CheesenessEven just copying the files is way out of band for standard user experience, and specifically involves circumventing the platform's intended behaviour. From a developer perspective, I don't feel comfortable recommending manual workarounds like that to my customers.

Manually copying files around is the "user-friendly" outcome that you were looking for. I'm not trying to be argumentative here; it's entirely a dev's decision whether they choose to release on Steam or choose not to release on Steam, and that's fine.

The client's intended behaviour is an auto-updater, yes, for Counter-Strike, I believe, but there's a button in the client to easily show a game's files: that is also intended behaviour. It opens up your normal file browser at the appropriate location so you can do whatever file management stuff you'd do if you'd got the files from anywhere else.

That said, if one is cool with copying files elsewhere and adding the game back in as a non-Steam game, that's awfully close to the exact steps one would have to do to download the game from Itch and run it through the Steam client...

Why would you add the game back into Steam? The hypothetical is that not using the Steam client is superior to using the Steam client.

Breaking changes between versions is often not a conscious choice on the part of developers. I put some effort into maintain backwards/forwards compatibility with user data, but statistically speaking, there will eventually be something that I overlook or just plain mess up. That said, I should be free to consciously change file formats if that feels like the right thing to do for the future of the project without that risking a forced update upsetting the files of users who'd prefer to run an older version (even if you make older versions available in another branch, a user still needs to notice an unwanted update and manually switch branches without accidentally launching the game - it's a mess).

The file formats, manifests and scripts are entirely the developer's choice. There's no reason why a dev couldn't copy a game's files to a backup location prior to running an update in preparation for users using those files should they opt in to using an older branch. Each update comes with a News link where a dev can provide information on the changes and instruction on how to opt into an older branch, and the Steam client comes with access to the Steam forum for direct contact between devs and customers.

To reiterate: you can't easily do pay-what-you-want with Steam, and you can't distribute files without the customer using the Steam client. Those are absolutely valid reasons for a dev choosing not to release on Steam, and it's the dev's choice where they release regardless. If a dev wants people to be able to run older branches, and customers want to run older branches, that is absolutely something that can be done with the Steam client; the issues arise when a customer wants to run older branches and the dev doesn't want them to, which isn't the case here. At any point (assuming the game doesn't use Steam features, and so requires the Steam client to run) a customer can also independently take whichever version they're happy with and run it from wherever they prefer.

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Quoting: CheesenessThat manual intervention [External Link] is so far beyond what a typical user is going to be up for, and it needs to be re-done every time the game updates (which a user might not notice and may end up accidentally launching a new game, risking their saves, etc. if there are any format changes or other backwards compatibility breakages).

Not really. If you're running a game without the Steam client (which depends on whether the game dev uses Steam features or not, but is trivial if they aren't) just copy the game files wherever you want and run them from there.

The instructions you linked to were for specifically rolling back an update that a game dev has pushed, where the game dev hasn't made the option otherwise available to use an older version. Breaking changes between versions are also the dev's choice.

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