It looks like Apple's switch to ARM affected the viability of Macs as a gaming platform.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Keep in mind that "globally" doesn't actually mean globally since the Steam Deck isn't selling in every territory, with big markets still left out.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Interesting talks.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I have played this on PS5. So much fun. Highly recommended.
Glad to see it work well on the Deck.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: mad_mesa

Quoting: mitcoesIt will be 6.52% Linux soon, as Chrome OS is going to switch to Wayland

Since when has using Wayland 100% of the time been a requirement to be a Linux distribution? If we went by that standard SteamOS, or a lot of people still using X wouldn't count as "Linux" either.

ChromeOS is already a Linux distribution, all that is happening is it modernizing and moving closer to the rest of the ecosystem. We need to stop splitting Linux apart over relatively minor differences.

Since, forever? To be a GNU/Linux distro the distro would need to support the stacks that Linux binaries would require to run. This includes either X11 or Wayland. Chrome OS currently uses neither of these two, which is why Linux apps in ChromeOS run via a VM and cannot run natively. If ChromeOS does indeed switch from Freon (the currently used display server/protocol) to Wayland it means we should be able to run Linux binaries natively on ChromeOS. Additionally, if ChromeOS switches to Wayland it means it'll have to rebuild it's Android compatibility layer work with Wayland, which hopefully means we can probably get that running on other distros.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Nice.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: nwildner

Quoting: sarmadI have always said it: hybrid graphics is a bad design to begin with and should have never been adopted by anyone. It complicates the hardware, complicates the software, and it also wastes space on the chipset. Complexity results in bugs, and anyone who has used hybrid graphics knows how clunky the concept is.
A fraction of the efforts spent by all parties on getting hybrid graphics to work could have instead been used to actually enable dGPUs to scale down their performance when it's not needed. We could've had dGPUs that can scale down their power consumption to a point close to those of iGPUs when no game is running (lower the frequency even more, power down some of the cores, etc).

Agreed on laptops going full dGPU here, and ditching off the iGPU

When I was using a Muxless laptop 3 years ago, I've made some simple tests [External Link] and configuring Reverse PRIME to start all X on the dedicated GPU entirely, and I was astonished with the results. Setting the dGPU from the ground up as the provided made my system perform better and drain less battery than using the iGPU or the dGPU through "prime-run" even without a mux switch in place.

My current Laptop does not have the BIOS option to set the dGPU only, but I know Lenovo Legion allows it.

The part that I disagree is with the fact that dGPUs don't scale down power on laptops and that is untrue. Here are some tests with optimus-manager set to "Nvidia"(power cord plugged)

1. With Firefox(10 tabs), Telegram Desktop and Steam running:

[nwildner@sandworm ~]$ nvidia-smi 
Sun Sep  3 23:26:29 2023       
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 535.104.05             Driver Version: 535.104.05   CUDA Version: 12.2     |
|-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                      |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+======================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 ...    Off | 00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| N/A   40C    P8              14W /  80W |    674MiB /  8192MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                      |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                                         
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                            |
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                            GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                             Usage      |
|=======================================================================================|
|    0   N/A  N/A      2721      G   /usr/lib/Xorg                               328MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      5175      G   /usr/lib/firefox/firefox                    308MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      5183      G   telegram-desktop                              3MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      6474      G   ...local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam        3MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      6499      G   ...re/Steam/ubuntu12_64/steamwebhelper        7MiB |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

2. With Xorg only running and a text editor opened(buffer for this answer):

[nwildner@sandworm ~]$ nvidia-smi 
Sun Sep  3 23:28:55 2023       
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 535.104.05             Driver Version: 535.104.05   CUDA Version: 12.2     |
|-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                      |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+======================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 ...    Off | 00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| N/A   39C    P8               8W /  80W |    166MiB /  8192MiB |     18%      Default |
|                                         |                      |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                                         
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                            |
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                            GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                             Usage      |
|=======================================================================================|
|    0   N/A  N/A      2721      G   /usr/lib/Xorg                               160MiB |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

nvidia-powerd needs to be enabled for power scaling to work.

I know that dGPUs do scale down, but they don't scale down enough to the point that makes iGPUs totally unneeded. Even with their lowest performance they still draw considerably more power than iGPUs. As far as I know, scaling down is currently limited to lowering down the clock speed and that's it. If they also power down some cores (dGPUs have more cores than iGPUs) I believe they can bring down the power cost to a level close to iGPUs. They will still draw more because of the extra memory (the vRAM), but that won't be a lot and is a cost totally worth it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I have always said it: hybrid graphics is a bad design to begin with and should have never been adopted by anyone. It complicates the hardware, complicates the software, and it also wastes space on the chipset. Complexity results in bugs, and anyone who has used hybrid graphics knows how clunky the concept is.
A fraction of the efforts spent by all parties on getting hybrid graphics to work could have instead been used to actually enable dGPUs to scale down their performance when it's not needed. We could've had dGPUs that can scale down their power consumption to a point close to those of iGPUs when no game is running (lower the frequency even more, power down some of the cores, etc).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Linux_RocksMan, Quake II RTX has native Linux support. Why can't this or Portal? Half-Life 2 and Portal already have native Linux versions. I don't know how modding works internally. But doesn't that automatically help make it possible? </3

Because it's using RTX Remix, which is a tool nVidia built specifically for DX9 (Yes, only DX9, not DX10 or above, not Vulkan, not OpenGL). It sits between DX9 and the driver and on the fly replaces commands/assets with RTX enabled ones. It's designed to enable adding RTX to retro games WITHOUT touching the game's code. So the game having a Linux port doesn't matter because they are not actually touching the game's code at all.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Added support for Indonesian language

Meanwhile Arabic is still nowhere to be seen :sad:

View this comment - View article - View full comments