Quoting: legluondunetThe gap between today's consoles and working emulators is narrowing. We had never known an emulator that emulates a console still on sale. I don't think it's ethical to publicly release an emulator of a console that's still on sale, in my view, developers should at least wait for the end of life of a console. Nintendo is an innovative company and produces user-friendly games, switch emulators must be costing them a lot of money.

You must be young because I recall playing PlayStation 1 games on my PC long before the PS2 was out. I had a decent PC so had no interest in getting one but there were a few games I played on my friends PS1 that I loved so I bought Tekken 3, Grand Turismo, and a couple more. If it was not for those early PS1 emulators I never would have bought those games and the Devs would have got zero money from me.

If you are ok with a company holding your saves of many hours hostage behind a pay wall be my guess but don't judge other people because they don't want to be mug.

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Quoting: Guest(2/30)*1000=66+msecs

Ouch that would feel like jelly.

A lot of games do seem to probe during frame intervals sadly. And I think with panels being so fast now with such powerful GPUs (no matter how unobtainable) to back them up with, Devs are taking the easy route rather than optimising input at low frame rates.

I agree it's better to have more in sync input than butter smooth frames otherwise it just gets frustrating and disorientating.

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I was surprised the Steam Deck did not come with a variable rate display (AKA Freesync) as that would have allowed for pretty arbitrary refresh rates. Though from what I understand refreshing at sub 50 intervals is quite challenging on screens which is why many 60Hz VRR screens only drop to 48Hz. If you are thinking all those 144Hz screens can go super low the truth is they don't. With such a high upper limit if your game hits 43 FPS the panel (or GPU driver) will double it to 86 FPS or if 22 FPS it'll be tripled (or more) to 66Hz. Since the Deck is a 60Hz panel you don't have the range for multiplication. Still if it could drop to the typical 48Hz that alone would be a good compromise for most games I reckon. I know many people can often increase (descrease?) their VRR minimum of their panel to 35Hz but guaranteeing that would drive up the cost of the panel through bining.

Quoting: GuestI used this kind of tricks to play Rise of the tomb raider at 48hz, but the input latency was so bad that i opted for 75hz instead.
Can't even imagine the feeling with a FPS.

Couple of things could cause the latency there. If you managed to set the panel to 48Hz it may not truly have been running at that rate and internally stretching arbitrary frames or it may have perfectly ran the panel at that refresh but the compositor was doing a crap effort of syncing to that rate (wasn't mutter notorious for doing that for a while?). If you were using the decks frame limiter you always run the risk of artificially (as in worse than 30FPS input latency should be) inflating latency depending on how clever the game engine is. Some games will hold up processing everything else until that frame time has expired where as others will go "hey I don't need to make another frame for a while. Let's do the other bits". Some games seem capable of the latter if you use their in game limiter but not when an external application holds up the frame rate. Annoyingly most games with their own FPS limiter don't allow very fine grained choices. You'd think 45/48 FPS would be a more common option. 45 FPS would be a good compromise on the Steam Deck as many games can't quite reach 60 and jumping from 30 to 45 FPS is night and day.

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Quoting: Creak

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: Cyba.Cowboy

Quoting: CreakEDIT: looking at Flatpak's wikipedia page, the support out-of-the-box seems as important if not more than for Snap:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatpak#Support [External Link]

Quoting: slaapliedjeWhere flatpaks and AppImages are open.

Well I have repeatedly stated above that this is the reason I think FlatPak is the superior "next-generation" package manager... I find that Snaps have noticeably better performance and they have certain technical advantages over FlatPak; but at the end of the day, being more "open" is more usually more important in the Grand Scheme of Things (at least in my opinion, anyway).

Which is weird, as everyone I have read says that snaps have terrible performance. The main reason I don't like Flatpaks is that they seem to use a lot more space than normally packaged software. I mean sure, part of that is that they don't use linked libraries, but it's large amounts, to the point where I've had to remove all flatpaks so I had disk space...

It does indeed take some disk space (especially the runtimes which are the base for every other packages).

I ran some test using `flatpak info APP_ID`:

Runtimes:
* org.freedesktop.Platform: 736.8 MB
* org.gnome.Platform: 948.8 MB
* org.kde.Platform: 992.1 MB

Applications:
* com.transmissionbt.Transmission: 3.9 MB
* com.obsproject.Studio: 49.3 MB
* org.inkscape.Inkscape: 238.9 MB
* com.valvesoftware.Steam: 40.6 MB
* org.pitivi.Pitivi: 197.3 MB
* org.videolan.VLC: 81.8 MB

But it's the price to pay to have sandboxed applications (I know it's not perfect yet, not completely sandboxed bla bla bla... some pieces of the puzzle need to settle down so that access right will be easier to manage and, overall, the system is rather new, but it has improved drastically in just a couple of years).

And also, I'd rather use Flatpak to run the closed source applications such as Steam, Teams, Slack, Unity Hub, etc..

You may not be checking the true file size correctly there. Flatpak uses OStree and it de-duplicates files. Most runtimes only add a few files ontop of the core freedesktop runtime. To get the correct size you have to do something like:
 
du -sh "org.gnome.Platform/x86_64/3.38" "org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/20.08"
You should see then that the first folder is roughly as you said but the next will be much smaller (would be good if flatpak info could do that for you). An app plus its runtime should not use much more space than a native package when you add up all the native system components it depends on. Especially once you have many flatpak apps using the same runtime. Also don't forget to run `flatpak uninstall --unused` from time to time to remove old unused runtimes.

I think I remember reading at some point that SNAPS' developers intend to add similar de-duplication features. No idea where I might have read that though! :grin:

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Quoting: poiuz

Quoting: MagicMythWhy is the power rating so high given its about 33% less performant that the 6800? You'd think it would be no more that 200W! Seems RNDA, despite AMD's claims, is struggling to efficiently scale down which does not bold well for their laptop range. […]

Since the 6700 XT has much higher clocks & probably runs closer to the limit, it simply should be the less efficient card. But this doesn't say anything about the architecture, raw performance (12,4 TFlops vs 13,9 TFlops) & the comparisons with nVidia suggests the 6700 XT is pretty close to the 6800. The 6700 XT should at least reach the performance of the RTX 3060 Ti (about 15% slower than the 6800). If this is true then it scales pretty well, but we need actual benchmarks for anything conclusive.

I twigged to that a little later (too many specs to see these days! :dizzy: ). This might mean if you drop it a few MHz then you might be able to drop the voltage a fair bit and get some sizeable drops in watts. Hopefully then the 6700 vanilla will be sub-200 watts. Though I just want a sub-$300 card that is double the performance of an RX 480 after 5 bloody years!

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Why is the power rating so high given its about 33% less performant that the 6800? You'd think it would be no more that 200W! Seems RNDA, despite AMD's claims, is struggling to efficiently scale down which does not bold well for their laptop range. Perhaps this is why the APU's still use Vega. Though I wouldn't be concerned about noise with a good cooler (which you should expect at that price point.) Most of the 6800 series card seem to run almost silent under load. Not so great for smaller cases though.

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Quoting: aokamiI've never had great use on my Steam Link, but that's always nice seeing improvement over there! :)
Despite discontinued is the Steam Link hardware still being updated with latest software updates ?

Steam Link (Hardware) still gets regular updates and keeps adding new controller support. All the latest console controllers have had support added and I think you can even use the Google Stadia controller with it now. I use mine all the time for couch gaming.

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Another thing I think worth mentioning is that this fixes controller hot plugging with Proton 5.13. It had broken due to Proton 5.13 being built and run in the soldier container which prevented access to the udev events I think? Seems Valve created some SDL patches [External Link] to work around the issue. I've just given it a quick go in a Lego game before opting into the beta of Soldier and hot plugging was broken as expected, switched over to the beta and right away things work again! This was driving me mad over the last month as one of my Bluetooth controllers has a very short idle to sleep time. Now someone can make a cup of tea without the other needing to keep waggling the controller! :grin:

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Quoting: M@GOidValve adding the controllers must not be seen as a guarantee those will work in all games. Some games, mostly older ones, tried to implement their own support for gamepads and only work correctly with the XB360/Logitech ones. XBOne and PS4 gamepads still don't work correctly to this day in a number of titles.

They should as Valve emulates the original XBox 360 (xinput). If its not working for you then you might simply need to go into your controllers setting in Steam and enable "Configuration support" for said controller. Optionally you can enable that on a per-game basis. I've not found a single game that does not work with my PS3, Switch, Steam Controller or the couple of generics I have as well. Even my classic MS SideWinder Game Pad Pro works with modern games through Steam and also via Steam Link.

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Emulation is great simply for the preservation of great games but this takes that to a beautiful next level that not only enhances that nostalgic retro experience but is a brilliant way to get kids to try out and experience what us old folk once considered ground breaking new experiences!

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