Quoting: CatKiller

QuoteThere's a few more you can find around and it seems when PC Gamer spoke to Valve, they confirmed that there will be some new API that developers will be able to hook into that will tell games if they're being run on the Steam Deck. That sounds really good, as at least then developers can ensure their game will look good on the smaller screen, and gives developers a chance to set some automatic graphics settings for the best experience.

I'd actually rather devs didn't do this. There is a whole spectrum of performance characteristics that don't fit into the is on a deck or isn't on a deck boxes. If they need to know the resolution, capabilities, or speed, of the hardware they're running on for their game to work properly check for those things.

But Steam Deck can be much more then just small PC,... there is already talks about resuming gameplay on a different device, or ability to quickly switch between multiple games when using Steam Deck, all of that might be easier done if the game can communicate with the device. I mean we can only speculate what that API could do, but I doubt it's only for getting specs, even though just that would also be good. This device can only get better if the games don't treat it as "any other PC" where it doesn't even try to meet halfway and take into account the desired handheld/console-like experience.

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Quoting: Alm888New API? I wonder, what will it be?
In my impression developers just need to target WIN32 API releasing for Windows and Valve will do the "magic". Well, that and Vulkan is preferable. At least Valve has said as much…

Obviously it can be beneficial for the devs to know the game runs on handheld and perhaps act differently and accordingly given the different form factor. Like not trying to push weird launchers, not forcing keyboard/mouse control schemes or maybe change up HUD to fit better, possibilities are endless what might be needed to provide best experience for Steam Deck users. That has nothing to do with targeting or not targeting WIN32 API. There is already plenty of Steam APIs that devs regularly use that are not part of WIN32 API, go figure.

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Quoting: KohlyKohl

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: KohlyKohlI'm also concerned about the switch to Arch. I would have preferred a more stable distribution such as Ubuntu.

It's not like you're going to be installing a stack of AUR stuff. Someone's carefully set up bare-bones Arch is probably very stable.

Arch is inherently less stable by design. Adding in the AUR just makes it more unstable. Arch has its place I just don't think a consumer device is one of them.

Just because it's based on Arch doesn't mean it needs to have Arch issues. The updates are still tested and controlled by Valve. It is SteamOS, not Arch.

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Quoting: dpanterLooking better than native resolution was never the goal for FSR, at least not in the initial stages. It shouldn't be that much sharper as seen in these screenshots... hmm. I wonder if something else is going on here, like CAS which specifically is sharpening while FSR may produce a slight sharpening effect from the edge detection algorithm.

Could it be that Liam mixed up the screenshots?

My guess is that the native resolution example just doesn't have any sharpening applied at all, which might be Liam's mistake or maybe the game doesn't have any sharpening options (I never really played Dota, so I am not sure), but if I am not mistaken you should disable any sharpening options before enabling FSR (because it would interfere), so if the native resolution is missing that effect (by mistake or that's just how it is) then you might get this unbalanced comparison.

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Quoting: ZapporThe AMD Windows driver 21.6.1 says it has "AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) support for select titles" but this is just marketing.
FSR has nothing to do with the driver, AMD confirmed this. So yeah it's just a pixel compute step the game does, and should work everywhere...

I wouldn't be so sure, the pixel compute step is still running on GPU, so driver optimizations for specific GPUs HW capabilities might be possible. While it clearly also runs on Nvidia, it is running slightly slower (for now?).

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Quoting: GuestAs far as I know, FSR is basically a couple of shaders? So I wonder if it could be injected to any game via something like vkBasalt. Pretty sure it wouldn't be quite something so simple. Suppose I should read up on it more to know if that would be viable. It'd definitely be very cool if it was, just from a technical perspective, even if I wouldn't really benefit much personally from this kind of thing.

Well, of course you can upscale and sharpen the image as post-processing effect but then you are upscaling everything, HUD text and all included. By being implemented into the game you can affect only particular parts, and let HUD and text still render in full scale without losing image quality.

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Would be cool to see comparison against the (native) OpenGL and possibly also DXVK.

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Quoting: Liam DaweYup, we're following that too but no new release for some time now.

Yea, they havent made stable release for almost 5 years now. But Fedora for example has 2 years old build in its repos. Although as far as I remember this also had some AI issues last time I tried it, but thats some time ago.

It is still active project and they explain why they dont make big releases.

Quoting: https://wiki.vcmi.eu/Main_PageAs of January 2021, we dont make big official releases anymore, but instead we provide a new version every several days: everytime when there is a new feature finished or new bug fixed.
Although there are no official "big releases", we reccomend updating the game at least twice a year, to make sure you have an updated, best version.
We try not to break savegame files compatibility, so you shouldnt have problem returning to your old games after update.
Please see corresponding "installation on" articles for details for your platform.

Not sure where or how those new versions are provided though.
Edit: I see now, they only offer it for certain distros https://wiki.vcmi.eu/Installation_on_Linux otherwise needs to be build from source.

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Looking at the reported issues it seems the AI might still be problematic.

There is also project VCMI doing the same for Heroes 3 https://github.com/vcmi/vcmi

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VR also quite changes perspective about size of things in games. For example I was quite surprised by the size of headcrabs in HL:Alyx when I had a chance to play it. They are like big turkeys, but you never realize that when playing on normal screen. It makes sense, because they need to be big enough to gobble your entire head and brain, but that scale does not translate well on a flat screen (that illusion can be directly compared when watching HL:Alyx through VR goggles and watching the game on a flat screen).

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