Quoting: MohandevirBetween my GTX960 and GTX1660 Super, I briefly had an MSI Armor RX 580... It's been the best experience, all round, driver and performance wise, but did that thing was heating/noisy?! The cooling system failed after 6 months.

It made me mistrustful of AMD GPUs, but I was convinced, by more experienced GoL AMD users, to give Sapphire a shot... I'm looking forward to a Sapphire Pulse RDNA2 GPU, atm... Probably what will replace the actual RX 5600 XT. :wink:

The MSI Armor RX 580 OC was the noisiest GPU I've ever owned, and one of the fans died after less than a year of use. I swear I'll never trust MSI again.

My current Sapphire Pulse RX 5700 XT is nice and quiet.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: NasraAnyone have this issue with RadeonSi driver with a navi card (RX5500XT) ?

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/3323 [External Link]

I haven't seen any visual corruption in OpenGL games/apps with my RX 5700XT, if that helps. I'm using Kisak's Mesa packages as well.

Seeing as the 5500XT is a slightly more recent chip, maybe try upgrading your kernel? Plenty of Navi fixes have gone in since Linux 5.4. Mainline [External Link] makes it easy to try Ubuntu's mainline kernels if Pop!_OS doesn't provide one.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Alm888I am forced to use self-compiled vanilla WINE (because Fedora does not provide me that option). So, addition of DXVK as a base Fedora package only complicates things more for me.

In case you're interested, WineHQ provides an official repository [External Link] for Fedora builds.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: scaineI also loved, although never completed, the meta-puzzles of the island. There are optional puzzles you can do in each area, which cause physical effects outside of that areas boundaries. Like, one I did caused a laser/ray to shine outside of its play area, over another play area. I think the intention is that you could then use that laser/ray in that new area to cause yet another effect in another area. The love and attention to detail is astounding.

Some of the optional puzzles do require using lasers from more than one puzzle creatively. I really enjoy this sort of stuff in games.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: fleskEDIT: It seems like the additional 10% discount is only applied if you bought Broken Sword 5 from Steam, and not if you got a key for backing the Kickstarter campaign. I'm not sure if that's working as intended or not, but for me it's totally worth it anyway for a game I've been wanting to play for years.

I see 20% in store, but the extra discount is applied in cart. Final price is 20.99€ for me. My BS5 came in the Humble Classics Return Bundle, so buying from Steam shouldn't be a requirement.

I won't buy this yet, but I definitely will when I've played through some of the adventure games in my backlog.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: BeamboomNow, things are different because piracy is not as widespread as it was back then.

But how do we actually know that piracy is not as widespread as back then? Due to large parts of the world getting broadband access and picking up PC gaming in the last couple of decades, I'd imagine more torrents might be downloaded these days than 15-20 years ago. The market has grown so much that even if piracy was actually increasing and assuming it does have a significant negative impact on sales, direct comparisons to the situation twenty years ago might be very difficult.

For what it's worth, I did a quick check last night and all of my recent purchases would be easily available for download, maybe due to them being almost exclusively single player and rarely brand new releases. I guess if I were a pirate, my gaming wouldn't be significantly hindered by DRM. (The hook and the eye patch might be more of a problem.)

Online gaming is different of course, and I suppose PC games are now cheaper and more readily available in general. And I'm sure the other kind of piracy, counterfeit DVDs and such are much less prevalent due to nobody buying DVDs anymore, not so much due to easily circumvented local DRM measures.

I believe you when you say these things are obvious to you, but stating things in a self-assured and condescending manner isn't how you make a convincing argument. Verifiable facts and sources are more effective. And if these things are indeed general knowledge, in my defence I wasn't following the gaming news for several years starting around 1999 due to various reasons like a stint in the army, switching over to Linux back when Linux gaming wasn't much of a thing and so on.

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: tuubiI'm not claiming to know one way or the other, but the lack of independent studies confirming your claims should at least be noted. You can always find anecdotes to support any hypothesis, but that's not the same as data.

Well . . . despite the old aphorism, anecdotes are in fact data. Not well sampled data, definitely far into the "qualitative" rather than "quantitative" end of things, but still data.

Trust a Library Guy to be pedantic. And absolutely correct of course. :)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: BeamboomBut really, do we need numbers to believe this? Isn't it enough to use our own heads, our logic and rational reasoning?
Would the industry have invested such a massive amount of resources and efforts on intricate DRM systems, online verification etc, if piracy lead to more sales?
Like, seriously - are we really questioning this?!

Sure, relying on data instead of your gut is pretty much always a good idea. No matter how rational our reasoning, it's often based on faulty assumptions or oversimplifications, especially when it comes to the human element.

I'm not claiming to know one way or the other, but the lack of independent studies confirming your claims should at least be noted. You can always find anecdotes to support any hypothesis, but that's not the same as data.

In reality, the PC gaming industry is bigger than ever. Game piracy isn't a good thing, but at least it doesn't seem to have caused enough damage to seriously harm the market. Popular games still make millions. Some of those make millions on the PC platform, even without DRM. Even if you think no pirate is ever going to pay for a game, then maybe a significant portion of pirates are people who wouldn't be buying these games anyway, at least not through legitimate channels? It's only the ones who would have bought if pirating was not an option that are an actual problem to game studios, if you ignore the ethical implications of grabbing a copy of a copyrighted work for free. But you're not talking about the ethics.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Patola

Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: TheRiddickIts the same deal with pirates, whom are MORE LIKELY to buy more games then a regular joe, simply because they get exposed to more games and are likely to buy stuff they enjoy. A regular joe doesn't know what he is missing, basically, thus spends less.

This is faulty logic that's long been proven wrong. Absolutely every statistics in the world will show you that.

Are there any actual statistics showing that pirates buy more (or less) games? If there are, I don't know. Care to tell the source?

Well there's the unpublished EU study from 2015 [External Link] showing that they buy more (just search for "EU piracy study" for more sources on that one), but studies commissioned by intellectual property holders or their advocacy groups tend to show the opposite. And usually it's these groups that have the motivation to fund studies and statistics.

Here's a quote from that Forbes article:

"In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements," it concludes. Indeed, it found that games piracy actually increased legitimate sales.

I started buying more games as soon as I could afford them, and stopped pirating when I was old enough to understand the implications.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: clatterfordslim[All the talking points]

If you're a comedian and the only thing you can do is punch down at different cultures and races, I don't think you're very creative. Come up with better jokes man. It can't be that hard. Joke about people, not stereotypes. Punch up, not down. Or make fun of your own race and culture, like many great comedians do.

Adding content warnings or information about context takes nothing away from comedy. That sort of thing is perfectly fine. And so is taking episodes/movies off of streaming services. These are private companies and they get to decide what they sell. Hard to argue against that. Still, none of that is being "erased". It's still on our DVDs and various other media.

Your silly bit about activism is barely worth an answer. As if these statues (of which almost none are of historical or artistic value) were somehow more important than actual issues. Statues are monuments to people, they're not history. There's nothing you can learn from them that you can't learn better in a history book, a documentary, or a museum. Context is important. Or did we forget about Hitler after (most of) his statues were torn down? Or about Saddam Hussein?

The "erasing history" silliness doesn't make a lick of sense. As if you could erase history these days even if you tried.

PS: If you ever need to start a sentence with something along the lines of "I'm not a racist, but", you're probably heading down the wrong path. It doesn't necessarily mean you're a racist, but it does mean you're about to defend racism in some form. There's no other reason to say those words.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

In case Earthlock is the only thing you'd want from this bundle (and it is a pretty sweet JRPG style game), it's on sale on Steam. In fact, the collector's edition bundle [External Link] is even cheaper than the base game for some reason. :)

View this comment - View article - View full comments