Quoting: Termy

Quoting: elmapulonce they ramp up their production capacity

I'm sure they'll change things once the production surpasses the demand - but as that seems to still not be the case for the Index, i doubt it'll be too soon.

i doubt VR will ever have the demand that deck have, playing almost any game ever launched on the go, will have a bigger demand than playing the few VR games we have, especially considering that not all games work in VR.

Quoting: TermyAnd i'm not sure if that's a bad thing.
As polished as the Deck already is, i wouldn't say it's something a completely oblivious person should just grab from the shelf of a big vendor because they like the packaging.
I'm also not sure if it really needs to compete with the number of switches shipped, at least not for "our" purpose. It "just" has to solve the chicken&egg problem - and seeing how many devs are jumping at it, it seems to be doing a pretty good job at that.

most of thos devs are indie devs, im still waiting to see if big devs will start opitimizing for the deck.
i have to agree that i dont care about marketshare so long we can play any game we want, and run any software or use case we want (use alternatives to the windows exclusive softwares with the same esential feature)
but if we can reach console level of sales (75~150 millions of units shiped) then we might as well solve the chicken and egg problem foreblem as well as optimization problem forever.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: 3zekiel

Quoting: elmapul"It's not like arm is new in gaming. Mobile phones have been doing it for a long time, the Switch uses arm cores."
speaking of it, arm processors would be much better to run emulators for portable consoles.
hell, its possible to run psp(or vita?) apps on a switch without emulators!

It's the Vita which can run without a full emulator, the PSP is using MIPS.
One problem though, at least for older portable consoles, is that they use 32 bit arm ISA, which has been dropped from newer cores. Also, emulating RISCV over modern CISC tend to work very well due to reducing the instruction cache bloat - an x64 instruction might cover 3 or more ARM instruction (think of LEA vs a multiplication a shift and an addition), keeping the generated code small. So it's not 100% sure that emulating ARM 32 over ARM 64 will be faster than emulating on top of x64.

As for emulating x64 over ARM, it is quite costly... The best way to do it is to go semi hardware like Apple did with the M1 (Implement a bunch of x64 instuctions in hw - mostly memory related -, use x64 memory ordering etc etc). Without that, I'm afraid taking a big overhead is mostly unavoidable, making recent games unplayable.

i saw an video explaining it, and it was quite the opposite!
arm is better to emulate x86 than x86 to emulate arm!
the video is in portuguese so i'm not sure its gonna be usefull here, but te explanation was something like:
you can draw an square by drawing 4 lines, but you waste a lot of processing power if you have to draw an entire window with 1px of width every time you want an vertical line, and an entire window with 1px of height every time you want an horizontal line.
x86 complex instruction set is only usefull when most of those instructions get used often, but that simply is not the case, many instructions were put there to cheat on benchmarks or because hardware patents dont last forever and intel priorities were at not being copied instead of designing an efficient chip, in fact, most x86 instructions are already "emulated" using micro architecture or something like that in plain x86 chips.
(i say x86 but i mean both x86 and x86/64, its just laziness)

i dont remember the exactly explanation on why arm was better, but it was somethng like x86 have an number of instruction that vary too much to be predictable or anything like that.
the processor spend a lot of time trying to figure out the instruction instead of executing it.
anyway, i hope someone else who work on the area can figure out what i'm talking about and and explain it in better/more precise words. =p

The designs of each have become far too complex to be summarised properly in just a short paragraph or two, but some highlights:

• arm is a design, which can be customised. Specific instructions can be added to the hardware - not all "arm" chips are equal!


• arm is risc (reduced instruction set), x86/x86_64 is cisc (complex instruction set)


• These days (well, last I checked) cisc is sort of emulated with microcode - that is, smaller instructions are used to build and run the complex ones. This is done to reduce chip size and complexity, but makes the instruction decode somewhat more entertaining from an engineering standpoint.


• Branch prediction, long pipelines, decode units, and a whole host of extras are generally somewhat more beefy on x86/64 chips to get raw performance out of it, and all of that takes up an awful lot of chip space. One of the reasons arm can go smaller, more power efficient, is by minimising or removing some of that - at the cost of performance.


• As manufacturing technologies improve, there are fewer gains to be had by x86/64, and arm can catch up in those areas, but it's still going to lack certain instructions that help make software run a lot faster (if the software uses them!).

Basically I can see arm right now being able to take over on normal desktop usage (Apple has certainly shown it's quite possible), but it's still a very, very long way away from what x86_64 can do when the thermal and power designs are more permissive. Only it's not quite so simple as that because hardware aside, there's quite a good deal of back & forth with software as well (just like with GPUs). All the fancy instructions in the world are useless if software never uses them - but x86/x86_64 has had a very long time in the spotlight, and compilers can make various assumptions about what is supported or not. Apple get away with it on the M1 because they control everything (they can add instructions and know they'll be used).

Both arm and x86_64 serve different purposes, but requirements change over time and the lines between purposes are blurring more all the time and there's space for a range of options.

this^ give that man a coockie, not only he explained 99% of what i said better than my self, but he also added some extras.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: elmapulbut it wont be enough to compete with things like switch or give it enough users to compete with windows.

They're already "competing with" the Switch. Both sell to the market of mobile gaming. That's competition.

And both sell well. Though you're sounding like Steam Deck could only be called successful if it sells more items than the Switch...

they arent competing in the sense that:
1)many people simply cant chose the steam deck since its not avaliable for purchase, at least not imediatly, you have to wait for the shipment, that is, if its even avaliable at your country.
2)no developer is opmitizing for the deck, its was valve who had to fix elden ring for instance. (and make it better than even the windows version)

and while it dont have to sell as much as the switch, if we can sell like this, then the problem of games not supporting linux and we having to rely on proton may disapear for ever, proton would be for backward comp, while new games support it natively.
not to mention that competition kind of assume that people chose to buy one instead of another, instead of chose both (if they can afford) they save the money on one of then to buy more games on the other.

another thing to consider is that, if their margin for profit is too small, they might become unable to have an competitive hardware in the future, but that is an stretch.

also i wouldnt count things like android competition, google playstore is a joke, trying to find an good game there is harder than finding an needle in a haystack, i rather port my self an good game or make one than try to find anything google on playstore.
*by good i mean no pay to win bullshit, no lootbox/gacha.

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Quoting: 3zekiel

Quoting: elmapul"It's not like arm is new in gaming. Mobile phones have been doing it for a long time, the Switch uses arm cores."
speaking of it, arm processors would be much better to run emulators for portable consoles.
hell, its possible to run psp(or vita?) apps on a switch without emulators!

It's the Vita which can run without a full emulator, the PSP is using MIPS.
One problem though, at least for older portable consoles, is that they use 32 bit arm ISA, which has been dropped from newer cores. Also, emulating RISCV over modern CISC tend to work very well due to reducing the instruction cache bloat - an x64 instruction might cover 3 or more ARM instruction (think of LEA vs a multiplication a shift and an addition), keeping the generated code small. So it's not 100% sure that emulating ARM 32 over ARM 64 will be faster than emulating on top of x64.

As for emulating x64 over ARM, it is quite costly... The best way to do it is to go semi hardware like Apple did with the M1 (Implement a bunch of x64 instuctions in hw - mostly memory related -, use x64 memory ordering etc etc). Without that, I'm afraid taking a big overhead is mostly unavoidable, making recent games unplayable.

i saw an video explaining it, and it was quite the opposite!
arm is better to emulate x86 than x86 to emulate arm!
the video is in portuguese so i'm not sure its gonna be usefull here, but te explanation was something like:
you can draw an square by drawing 4 lines, but you waste a lot of processing power if you have to draw an entire window with 1px of width every time you want an vertical line, and an entire window with 1px of height every time you want an horizontal line.
x86 complex instruction set is only usefull when most of those instructions get used often, but that simply is not the case, many instructions were put there to cheat on benchmarks or because hardware patents dont last forever and intel priorities were at not being copied instead of designing an efficient chip, in fact, most x86 instructions are already "emulated" using micro architecture or something like that in plain x86 chips.
(i say x86 but i mean both x86 and x86/64, its just laziness)

i dont remember the exactly explanation on why arm was better, but it was somethng like x86 have an number of instruction that vary too much to be predictable or anything like that.
the processor spend a lot of time trying to figure out the instruction instead of executing it.
anyway, i hope someone else who work on the area can figure out what i'm talking about and and explain it in better/more precise words. =p

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Quoting: TermyI'm glad they DIDN'T do that - otherwise you could be 100% sure that 99% of Decks would be grabbed by scalpers..

sure their strategy is good for the short run, while their production capacity is small and the world face suppy issues at an global scale.
but it wont be enough to compete with things like switch or give it enough users to compete with windows.
once they ramp up their production capacity, they will face issues regarding paying for storage and distribution costs.
big suplies with tons of products can solve the storage problem with scale+the fact that every piece of space not being used to store one product can be used to store something else.
as for valve wich is mainly an software seller, they will need to outsource that part, especially if they want to sell world wide.
not to mention that revendors can share part of the risk of making more units than they can sell.

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"It's not like arm is new in gaming. Mobile phones have been doing it for a long time, the Switch uses arm cores."
speaking of it, arm processors would be much better to run emulators for portable consoles.
hell, its possible to run psp(or vita?) apps on a switch without emulators!

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Quoting: elgatilThis! This is what I think the future of the steam deck of gonna be. With a powerful enough ARM soc (something similar to the apple M1 for example of the competition ever manages to catch up *sigh*) we could get a big expansion in battery life.

And actually, I have been following these projects for some time and I have the impression they are picking up speed largely. I wouldn't be surprise if in a couple of months it is revealed the developers are being funded by Valve. Like it happened with DXVK. Pure speculation here of course.

On a different note, the stack of Linux gaming is getting pretty funny:

x86 win game -> proton -> pressure vessel -> box86 -> the actual OS
I wonder how many more layers we manage to put in between :D

i dont think we will have the raw power to do those translations for cuting edge games any time soon.
but who knows, most of the heavy processing will be done by the gpu anyway.

one thing is for sure, accuracy would be dead
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/ [External Link]

on a side note, maybe its a bad idea for valve, they dont want to harm the good relationship they're having with AMD.

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next gen.
first they should fix their supply issue, sell the deck on direct sales instead of pre order reservations and sell in major stores.
once they have an console that can compete in sales numbers with switch/playstation/xbox then they can think in entering other markets.
the most important thing in this gen is geting almost all games to run on steam deck, then on then next gen they will have some interesting offer for the living room, but they should relase an deck 2 as well.

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Quoting: StalePopcornIronically(?), Inside Mac Games (IMG) forums has a popular "Mac Gaming is Dead [External Link]" thread.

Aspyr has taken that step even earlier, and has shifted towards consoles. After having bought by the Embracer group (i.e. THQ Nordic) earlier this year to develop completely new games, they cannot be expected to port games to the Mac at all.

interesting, that explain why they dont port games to linux, i always wondered what their fate is.
im happy to know they didnt went bankrupt, it would be a shame if the few companies that beted on porting games to mac/linux went bankrupt as a result of such decision, but fortunately that was not the case.

i hope we no longer need proton (except for backward comp) and feral in the future as well, but i dont hope that anything bad happens to valve nor feral once we dont need then anymore.
just that we dont get an monopoly, currently its "ok" because valve is the onlyones beting on linux anyway, and even now they dont have an monopoly realistically.

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There's been times recently it felt like I woke up in a different world, when sites like PC Gamer told people to stick with SteamOS and not Windows a

to me, that was the biggest surprise:
https://www.windowscentral.com/why-you-shouldnt-install-windows-steam-deck [External Link]

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