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Latest Comments by peta77
Futuristic, mysterious, full of physics and circuits - puzzle game The Long Gate is out
22 Sep 2020 at 6:25 pm UTC Likes: 1

The basic idea and the fact that it's "real" quantum physics sounds very interesting, so I've added it a while ago on my wishlist and do intend to have a closer look at. But your review is quite demotivational as I'm not even close to have a good knowledge of that part of physics. I was hoping to get a nice sneak peak into that stuff by this game (like Bomb Squad Academy was a cool game to play with electronics, though simplified). But doesn't sound like it is any good for that right now. Hopefully it gets an update later which makes it more playable for the quantum beginner. So I'll wait and see how this evolves. Still have more than enough games to play through in my library anyway, so I'm not in desperate need of something new.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 is out today, some details for you (plus new driver release)
17 Sep 2020 at 10:05 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Breeze...
There were other problems too. Computer frozen from using GIMP and Firefox, poor performance in some games, random freezes from desktop with no programs open, 2 monitors not working. I can't remember a time where I had Linux completely freeze and not be able to switch to terminal before getting a 5700XT.
....
It's not like there were never such problems with NVidia. The question is, what's the source/reason. I had somewhat similar problems a while ago where the whole X-session and input was frozen (sometimes within hours, sometimes after a few day) and the only thing showing up having a problem / reporting errors was the NVidia driver. They couldn't reproduce it, I couldn't deliver a simple procedure how to create that procedure. The solution in the end was: switch from KDE4 to XFCE and the problem was gone (no driver or other software update). So who's to blame here? NVidia? KDE? Both? The framework(s) that manages their interaction? Hard to say (as most times with modern software). So you shouldn't be too quick to put blame on AMD or whoever. They might have implemented everything according to spec (it's very often NVidia that does some weird implementations), but when lots of packages / programs are starting to interact, things might still go wrong because people interpret specifications differently or they rely on some special behaviour they know from other implementations which actually might not be mentioned in the specs or marked as undefined.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 is out today, some details for you (plus new driver release)
17 Sep 2020 at 6:39 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: Alm888Hey, AMD! Did you see that? That's how it is done! A driver on a day-1!
They publish their dkms driver (which is open source) pretty much on day one. They can't force upstream kernel release schedule or Mesa release schedule, or llvm and so on.

So you can be in situation when upstream projects are lagging behind, while needed support is already public. What can be improved though, is distros providing their own bundled support in such cases until upstream catches up. But most distros don't care about such use cases.
Separating the drivers and having separate releases for them would improve that a lot. It does't make much sense to wait for a big package with dozens of modules to be tested and make it into the stable release/update if all you want is to upgrade a single piece of your hardware which only needs the update of a tiny part of the package. And from a user's point of view it doesn't matter who's to blame. The only thing that matters is: can you use the hardware on release date or not.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 is out today, some details for you (plus new driver release)
17 Sep 2020 at 6:32 pm UTC

Quoting: CatKiller
Quoting: peta77So no reason for me to even think about replacing my 2080Ti. If there'd be a card with same performance & memory and much lower power demands ( -> less heat / noise produced ), I might think about a replacement.
It depends where your bottleneck is with your 2080 Ti. In many ways, the 3070 is going to perform better, if the bottleneck is compute speed rather than VRAM.

While the 2080 Ti has a nominal 250 W TDP, the power cap is configurable with nvidia-smi. If you're happy with the performance of your card but want it to generate less heat you can change that without buying a new card: just lower the power cap. That's what I do for when my machine's folding proteins.
Powercap is unfortunately not an option because of the few cases where there's actually some performance issue (some maps in War Thunder and X-Plane in general with very high quality settings). I try to ignore the fan noise and additional heating then. Otherwise enforcing VSync does reduce the load in most cases a lot, it doesn't make sense to render more frames than your display can handle anyway. And VRAM: for the work related stuff I'm doing with it even the 11GB are sometimes not enough and I have to use system memory too. So a GPU with less memory? No.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 is out today, some details for you (plus new driver release)
17 Sep 2020 at 2:42 pm UTC

Quoting: The_Aquabat
Quoting: EhvisInitial benchmarks on sites dealing with less useful operating systems shows a fairly consistent gain of 25% over the 2080 Ti
because synthetic benchmarks are not real world gaming.
100% increment in performance is just a buzzword.
And additionally looking at the power consumption ( 320W!!!!! :shock: ) seems to me that they simply added more cores / computing units and performance increase of the actual hardware is somewhere around zero.
So no reason for me to even think about replacing my 2080Ti. If there'd be a card with same performance & memory and much lower power demands ( -> less heat / noise produced ), I might think about a replacement. But it doesn't look like NVidia can deliver that at the moment.

Xfce desktop environment sees a 4.16pre1 release, better fractional scaling
14 Sep 2020 at 9:31 pm UTC Likes: 1

XFCE is still the first choice if you want a stable, resource and user friendly desktop. Unlike memory hogs like KDE (I have to run some computers 24/7, and then it becomes a serious issue since first version of KDE4).

It's cool to hear they add a little bit more usability. What I'm still missing though is more configurability of shortcuts. They seem to have a Mozilla attitude regarding that (we decide, no you can't change anything about it).

NVIDIA announce the RTX 3090, RTX 3080, RTX 3070 with 2nd generation RTX
1 Sep 2020 at 7:46 pm UTC

Quoting: Patola.....
New players on the market will appear trying hard to get their niche, boom, prices drop. This is actually happening with VR sets right now.
....
Nice thought, but I don't think things are that simple. GPU development is a complex and expensive process. And production (plants, etc.) of those things also add to the cost that has to be recovered by sales. More vendors, lower sales -> higher prices. Like there was before when many others were there. The differences in performance where surely very big, but so were also the prices, up to 20k $ for the high end stuff. Now you get the max. available performance for about 1k or 1.5k (the Quadros or FirePro aren't really faster). It's like with car production: manufacture only a couple of dozen of them and a compact car will cost the same as a Ferrari. The production amount really makes a huge difference.

A weekend round-up: tell us what play button you've been clicking recently
15 Aug 2020 at 10:31 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: scaine
Quoting: soulsourceI dug out the very first PC game my parents bought for me: The Settlers 2. 24 years after release it's still an incredibly awesome game, and of all Settlers games I've played it's still my absolute favourite (though it might be the nostalgia talking :tongue:). Runs perfectly fine in Dosbox.
Apart from that I've been playing Death and Taxes, and while it's fun, it lacks a bit of challenge.
I spent many hours in Settlers 2 - it has an atmosphere which is hard to describe, but which hooked me in. Combined with that perfect learning curve and mid to late-game challenge, it's a classic.

I might try Widelands, after Liam covered it a few weeks back: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/07/inspired-by-settlers-ii-the-open-source-widelands-has-a-new-test-build-up
Settlers 4 was my favourite of the old ones. I especially loved the animations of the "people". Was a lot of fun to watch even if nothing special was going on.

A weekend round-up: tell us what play button you've been clicking recently
15 Aug 2020 at 9:27 pm UTC

Drag, which is my newest acquisition. It's already really cool and very nicely working with good performance. Considering it's early access, it's already in a pretty good state. But it doesn't recognize my wheel, and it's very tricky racing with keyboard as it's a very demanding game. More towards sim than arcade. But I've managed so far to get all challenges I tried with carbon (=silver) times and one with diamond (=gold). For those who are interested but don't want to buy yet: they've put the demo from the Steam Summer Festival back online.

Other than that, it's my never ending story: Tanks in War Thunder

Chrome OS appears to be edging closer to Steam support with Linux
2 Jul 2020 at 4:34 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: NanobangWhenever I think of Google using Linux, I think of how Google make things from that can't be used in Linux.

I can't get any more excited about Chrome OS than I can about Android ... both of which are based on Linux, but neither of which are actually Linux --- thus the need for a VM to run Linux's Steam client.

I really don't feel gaming on Chrome OS is any more appropriate to Linux gaming than gaming on Android is, really.
Well, one thing to remember here: Linux is just the kernel! It's not a full OS like MS-Windows, MacOS, etc. So Android & ChromeOS are Linux but that doesn't mean they're compatible with GNU/Linux distros and LSB-compliant.

So this makes would make it rather questionable if it would help for the type of Linux gaming discussed here if Steam and the games would be native versions for ChromeOS. But as they seem to have a VM with Ubuntu it will surely massively increase the audience / possible customers for SteamOS compatible games which might attract more developers. Though a VM seems rather inappropriate. I remember the Wrapper-stuff VirtualProgramming did and that had some issues that never got fixed (or the early "ports" didn't get patched).

So the question is, how long it will stay in that state and if google tries to "force" getting native ChromeOS versions and how Valve and other developers will react to that. I think it will have an effect short-term, but long-term I'm very unsure where this will be heading. But I'll keep hoping that developers will realize that platform independence is the best way to keep their customers with dynamic OS environment situations as we're experiencing shifts right now.