A few picks from me:

Native

• Hellpoint is 30% off, which I'm quite tempted by.


• Eagle Island is 40% and I've had it on my wishlist for months. Now might be the time...


• Jupiter Hell has it's usual 20% discount. Liam raves about this and I enjoyed its free weekend, but I'm waiting for it to exit EA first as I really want to spend some time with it.


• It's getting mixed reviews, but I really like the look of A Long Way Down. It's giving off CardHunter meets Slay the Spire vibes. Only 25% off, but for a tenner, I think it might be worth the risk.


• Beautiful Desolation is now just a tenner with the 30% discount.


• Pine looks promising. And it's only just over £7.50 with the 60% discount.


• Finally, not a great discount, but I've been wondering if I should pick up The Long Gate. It just looks really intriguing. Only 15% discount though.

Proton

• Prey is platinum, and they've recently removed Denuvo, which was preventing me from buying it until now. At 80% off, only £4, I'm picking this up, finally.


• Quantum Break is only £7.50 with its 75% discount, but as it's only silver-rated, I'm probably going to give it a miss.

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What on earth causes that situation?? Why would they only release Win only on GOG when they support all three platforms on Steam?

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Quoting: jensThe dotnet4-something is fortunately no longer needed, the alternative wine-mono installer mentioned in the proton GitHub issue for ED(I don’t have the link at hand now) works much better.

I heard that, but haven't tried it yet. Apparently it doesn't let you login yet, but if you link your E:D account to Steam, you can use that button and it works. The most annoying part of the whole rigmarole is that you only need dotnet47 (or the new mono approach)... for the launcher! The game doesn't need it at all. So much pain, just so they can show a couple of adverts before the game launches. Infuriating.

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If you're on Discord, you can chat to Michael Cerquoni
about his experiences too - he's using a 5700XT, albeit in 2D. You can see his E:D video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1dGXlrSsg4&t=812s

My experience of E:D in VR is absolutely top-notch though. A perfect experience (outside of the cross-platform freezes I mentioned earlier). Smooth head tracking, high frame rates, no crashes.

I would say though - an absolute pain to set up. The donet47 install takes ages - nearly 45 minutes on my nearly top-of-the-range rig. But at least it's one command (assuming you have ProtonTricks installed) and then it "just works".

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It's the Valve Index, slaapliedje. I bought the pack - HMD, lighthouses, knuckles.

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Big XCom feels from the gameplay sections, but the art style is actually reminding me more of Shadowrun. If they can pull off that combination this is going to be epic! Very excited for this one.

2021 is just over 5 weeks away, right? (sorry...)

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Quoting: childermass

Quoting: slaapliedjeIf you're planning on Elite in VR, wait and get either a 3080 or a 6800 XT. I have a 2080, and it's playable in Windows, but gets ~100 fps less in Linux/Proton. And while it still runs ~190fps outside in space, inside stations you'll yack as the framerate drops a whole lot! I'm hoping if I get either a 3080 or 6800xt (haven't decided yet) I can finally play Elite: Dangerous in Linux.

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll think about it, although those cards might be beyond my budget and I was also hoping to get this set up before Christmas, so availability might be a problem. Besides, I got the impression from scaine and at least one other person in the comments on this article that the 5700XT performance for Elite in VR was pretty good?

Yep, I play E:D in VR with my card (it's a "AMD Radeon Sapphire Pulse RX 5700 XT 8Gb", btw). I played about 80 hours 2D on my GTX1080, which was a decent experience, and then played a further 100 hours or so in VR with my 5700XT. The VR experience is next to flawless. I had to enabled "hardware cursors" in the settings or my mouse didn't work. Very occasionally, I'll get a one or two second lag when exiting Supercruise when approaching a station. No idea what causes it, but it's rare enough that I don't care - maybe 1 in every 20 stations will get this weird pause. It's not a graphical pause either, the whole game locks up, then springs back into life. It happened in 2D on my 1080 too, so I think it's maybe just a weird Proton issue. Hell, it might even happen in Windows.

But that's the only glitch I've encountered. In VR, the game is simply breath-taking on the 5700XT.

EDIT to note that apparently the supercruise lag is really common, and across all formats... even consoles! I play in Solo and it even affects me there, so it sounds like it might be a market update from their server hanging? It doesn't sound like it's fixed, that's for sure!

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My Sapphire 5700XT is super quiet. I have my PC sitting under the desk and it's barely audible. The fans on the Sapphire don't spin at idle at all - 0rpm. If I play a demanding game, they'll spin up around 1200rpm - audible, but certainly not over the game sounds.

It's a great experience and VR will happily sit at 120Hz each eye. I haven't noticed any performance issues at all. I generally game at 4K, 60fps with this card. In fact, GOL reader Michael Emory has a Youtube playlist on his experiences of running various native and proton titles at 4K with a 5700XT. He's very active on discord if you have further questions.

As for the high idle power consumption - nope. I'm running Mint 20, with Cinnamon as I write this and I'm on 8W, as you'd expect. If I run `watch sensors`, scrolling rapidly on Firefox can jump it up to 18W. Bigger graphical effects like Workspace Zoom can push it to 24W. No idea what it jumps to "in game", but certainly no idle issues on my rig.

As for recommendations - I'd highly recommend the 5700XT... but of course, the 6800 series just launched, so that recommendation is now tinged with a) will the price of the 5700XT cards come down now? and b) should you still buy a 5700XT when the faster 6800 and 6800XT cards will eventually become available? It'll depend on your timescales and budget, of course.

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I'd love to try this if there were pre-built campaigns for Gloomhaven, but unlike Tabletop Simulator, there doesn't appear to be a really strong "repository" of pre-built campaigns.

TTS is amazing, but it needs a really strong graphics card. I like the idea of FVTT, but if I have to import and build everything myself, I'll be sticking to the workshop support in TTS.

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Quoting: CatKiller5.6 was released on 29 March 2020 and 5.7 was released on 31 May 2020, so 63 days between them.

Huh. According to the mainline repo link I posted in my first comment, 5.7 wasn't released until 15th July... but you must be right, because 5.8 then released on the second of August, just two weeks later! Must just be the directories that are incorrectly dated for some reason.

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