Best part of the extension:

=== Final Thoughts

Please consider the environment before printing this extension.

Also the choice of vendor name makes the error codes hilariously insulting: "Out of paper, fool!"

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Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: eldakingThere is a reason Valve and Nintendo made sacrifices to reach the more moderate price points.

completely agree, its just a matter of seeing PS3 lauch price and how it affected it.
or even the last gen PS4 vs xbox one, sony was selling much more than microsoft, due to (among other things) it being more powerfull and the marketing fiasco microsoft did at the begining of the gen.

microsoft removed xbox requirement puting the price on pair with ps4, and that was not enough, then they did an price cut of 50USD, and that was enough for a little bit, the reason why that was not enough is because sony followed their price cuts.

entrey cost is very important for an gaming device to sell tens of millions of units, more than the price of the games after the initial purchase it seems.

But there's a reason why Sony, Microsoft and Valve afford to make something like this cheap, and others can't. They make money from games sold for the console too. So if, say, they make 0 money from selling the hardware it doesn't matter. Even if they lose a little bit it doesn't matter.

But a company that doesn't make any money from people buying games on Steam (but on their handheld) can't afford to bring the price down as much as Valve can. They could only compete in price if either they make their own store, or if Valve cuts them a check for people playing Steam games on their platform.

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Quoting: kalin

Quoting: ShabbyX

VK_EXT_primitives_generated_query

Should be useful for the Zink driver that does OpenGL over Vulkan. Developed by Collabora, Arm, NVIDIA and Google.

Don't get too excited about this. Zink has always used pipeline statistics query to implement this query, which is supported on desktop GPUs. While Zink _could_ switch to this extension, there is little gain to be had (other than some rasterizer-discard optimizations on AMD perhaps). Still, PGQ is a rarely used query to begin with.

The extension is a necessity for ANGLE however because mobile vendors don't support pipeline statistics queries.

Source: I'm the author of the extension.

In that case, can you bring some light on dx12 direct storage. We will have such a thing on Vulkan

Obviously I can't talk about anything that's not yet public.

For direct storage, there was an issue opened in the Vulkan-Docs github repo. I believe the working group responded. Besides, I don't work with or for windows and dx anyway, so I wouldn't know.

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VK_EXT_primitives_generated_query

Should be useful for the Zink driver that does OpenGL over Vulkan. Developed by Collabora, Arm, NVIDIA and Google.

Don't get too excited about this. Zink has always used pipeline statistics query to implement this query, which is supported on desktop GPUs. While Zink _could_ switch to this extension, there is little gain to be had (other than some rasterizer-discard optimizations on AMD perhaps). Still, PGQ is a rarely used query to begin with.

The extension is a necessity for ANGLE however because mobile vendors don't support pipeline statistics queries.

Source: I'm the author of the extension.

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Quoting: Philadelphus

Quoting: ShabbyX

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWell, no it doesn't. The distinction between "verified", "playable", and "unsupported" doesn't actually have anything to do with crashes. Something can be "unsupported" even though it plays smoothly and fairly satisfyingly with never a crash--if there's a cutscene that doesn't play, it's "unsupported". And technically, a game can be "Verified" even if it crashes quite a bit--as long as every single bit of the game plays correctly, and it works well with the screen size and the Deck controls. So no, that heuristic wouldn't tell a thing about the categories as Valve draws them.

Yes, but! The crashes are part of the heuristic, but not all of if. If you paid attention, I also mentioned the amount of time users play. Obviously they can't exactly infer the class the game belongs to, but as an *indication* that valve should look into it, I think that's pretty sufficient (i.e. no need for the users to spell it out)

The point is that crashes are not actually part of the heuristic at all, as Valve have currently designed it; nowhere in the criteria for the categories does it actually say anything about how stable a game is. These are the current four criteria a game must pass in order to marked Verified, as listed here [External Link]:

• Input: The title should have full controller support, use appropriate controller input icons, and automatically bring up the on-screen keyboard when needed.


• Display: The game should support the default resolution of Steam Deck (1280x800 or 1280x720), have good default settings, and text should be legible.


• Seamlessness: The title shouldn’t display any compatibility warnings, and if there’s a launcher it should be navigable with a controller.


• System Support: If running through Proton, the game and all its middleware should be supported by Proton. This includes anti-cheat support.

I'm not saying that's how it should be, just how it currently is. The problem is that they've designed this very objective, engineering-friendly system ("does game tick boxes? It's Verified!") without considering the emotional axis of playing games and losing an hour of progress to a crash and a save bug. I don't think you're wrong to assume that Verified should mean something like "plays basically flawlessly, or at least no more than the random crashes you'd get playing it on Windows", and I bet a lot of people are thinking along those lines as well, so I'm glad to see it looks like Valve are polling people's responses and possibly shifting to incorporate some more subjective criteria rather than purely objective ones. (Like, if the one movie that doesn't play in an otherwise flawless game isn't actually that important to the story, maybe it should be moved from Unsupported to at least Playable, that sort of thing.)

Let me clarify by saying there are two things being discussed here:

- A feedback system where valve double checks that their expectation matches the reality (what this article is about): yes that's fantastic, no arguments there.
- A proposed feedback system in an earlier comment where players *proactively* suggest a rating for a game that doesn't already have one. Follow up comment suggested the data could be used by Valve to know which game to verify next.

My reponses have all been about the latter suggestion. I maintain that Valve doesn't need you to guide them towards what game is working well or is popular etc so they would prioritize verifying it, because that information is easily inferable from the aggregate data they collect about how much time people spend on each game. For example:

- Distibution of time spent on Deck matches other platforms: game probably runs just fine
- Said distribution is skewed towards less time played: game probably has issues
- No one played more than 2 minuted on Deck: game is borked
- Distribution of time spent per session skewed towards less time + higher crash reports: drum roll ... the game has stability issues
- etc

Know what I'm saying?

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Quoting: PhiladelphusJust tried Warpinator for the first time yesterday for my use case of, every so many weeks, getting the photos I've taken off my phone and onto my computer, and it worked great. (Much better than connecting via cable, which always seems to randomly unmount if I so much as bump my phone once it's connected.) Thanks for making me aware of it!

Does your cable not get plugged in all the way? You might have gunk in the usb port (of the phone). I used a tooth pick sliced in half to be super thin, then scraped all the gunk out.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: ShabbyX

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: Purple Library GuySo just Verified? Might be good if they could figure something to ask about the other categories including Unsupported and Unknown.

The point isn't to crowdsource but to verify what's done.

Well, perhaps not Unknown then, although I think there's some grey area to "Crowdsourcing"--if they have a pool of "Unknowns" that people say are pretty playable, they wouldn't want to just trust that and designate, but it would be a good way to have an idea what games are good candidates to look at next, both because they have a good chance of going into at least "Playable" and because they know Deck users are playing them.

But both "Playable" and "Unsupported" are also the results of Valve doing an evaluation, and they could also be mistaken (or change), so would also be worth verifying.

They don't really need you to tell them the game is playable or verified. They know when and where and how long you play a game, they know when the game crashes etc:

- If you play a game for many hours without a crash on a steam deck: it's an indication of "verified"
- If you play a game for many hours with some crashes on a steam deck: it's an indication of "playable"
- If the gam crashes within minutes, or if rarely anyone plays it on deck for long: it's an indication of "unsupported"

Of course that's just heuristics, but it exactly serves the purpose you are talking about it.

Well, no it doesn't. The distinction between "verified", "playable", and "unsupported" doesn't actually have anything to do with crashes. Something can be "unsupported" even though it plays smoothly and fairly satisfyingly with never a crash--if there's a cutscene that doesn't play, it's "unsupported". And technically, a game can be "Verified" even if it crashes quite a bit--as long as every single bit of the game plays correctly, and it works well with the screen size and the Deck controls. So no, that heuristic wouldn't tell a thing about the categories as Valve draws them.

Yes, but! The crashes are part of the heuristic, but not all of if. If you paid attention, I also mentioned the amount of time users play. Obviously they can't exactly infer the class the game belongs to, but as an *indication* that valve should look into it, I think that's pretty sufficient (i.e. no need for the users to spell it out)

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: Purple Library GuySo just Verified? Might be good if they could figure something to ask about the other categories including Unsupported and Unknown.

The point isn't to crowdsource but to verify what's done.

Well, perhaps not Unknown then, although I think there's some grey area to "Crowdsourcing"--if they have a pool of "Unknowns" that people say are pretty playable, they wouldn't want to just trust that and designate, but it would be a good way to have an idea what games are good candidates to look at next, both because they have a good chance of going into at least "Playable" and because they know Deck users are playing them.

But both "Playable" and "Unsupported" are also the results of Valve doing an evaluation, and they could also be mistaken (or change), so would also be worth verifying.

They don't really need you to tell them the game is playable or verified. They know when and where and how long you play a game, they know when the game crashes etc:

- If you play a game for many hours without a crash on a steam deck: it's an indication of "verified"
- If you play a game for many hours with some crashes on a steam deck: it's an indication of "playable"
- If the gam crashes within minutes, or if rarely anyone plays it on deck for long: it's an indication of "unsupported"

Of course that's just heuristics, but it exactly serves the purpose you are talking about it.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualWith any luck, this will solve most of the visual novels I play not being able to be fullscreened.

KDE has lots of options to force windows to what you want.

If only they had the option to force windows to use the Linux kernel instead of NT...

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Quoting: Marlocki tgink the last point ShabbyX was trying to make is that those 90% that pirated the game wouldn't necessarily have bought the game instead...

it's one thing to get it for free, another to have to pay for it (and yet another to have to pay a lot, like for AAA games, and for gamers in poorer regions) if you're not that strongly interested

there are gamers who pirate a game to test it, then end up buying it later, or the sequels, etc... I'm not claiming to know if that's proportionally big or small, just that it exists and that we don't know how it affects the "with vs. without DRM" scenarios for a single game

there are also clever f...cks like Blizzard (I have to curse them given the current news), who used CD-key and CD-detection DRM on games like Starcraft, then years later released an official patch removing the DRM features from it (~ 1 decade after the initial sales, iirc?)

mother of all conjectures: would PC gaming even have become such a big thing in so many countries if there was no way to pirate software back when it started?! or would it have been just prohibitively expensive for too long?

ps: from personal experience, demos and a couple pirated games got me into it, now I have several hundred games just on steam, all legally purchased

pps: migrating to linux got me into not risking shady software sources on my PC, and that got me out of viruses and into steam for games

Yes. More formally:

* A people buy the game regardless
* B people buy only if they can't pirate
* C people only play if they can pirate
* D people *can't* buy the game due to price or embargo, so can only play if they can pirate (I was one of those when I was small)
* E people buy the game after trying the demo (that they may have to pirate)
* F people buy the game on recommendation of a pirate
* G people become gamers due to piracy (e.g. myself) and then buy other games years later when they grow up

I'm gonna go ahead and claim that the effect of DRM on the above variables has not seen enough research, so everyone is just speculating about whether it helps, doesn't do anything, or it's harmful (to devs' income, no debate here on its harm to users)

---

And on your conjecture, I think we can all agree that windows and ms office would definitely not have been ubiquitous if it weren't for piracy. As for gaming itself, I know I wouldn't have been a gamer if it weren't for piracy, and I'm sure that applies to many others. Can't really say if gaming wouldn't have thrived without it though, it clearly thrives on consoles without piracy.

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