May I ask why you don't like liquid coolers? My last two CPUs have both had liquid coolers, and they are straightforward to set up and work well.

Watercooling takes less space in the buiild, but is overall more prone to failures (not just leaking, but pump failures and air bubbles leading to increased noise). It's a reason I've stuck to aircooling until now, even on a 13900K and now a 9950X3D.

I suppose the 9950X3D2 will work fine on a high-end aircooler (I use a Noctua NH-D15 personally), but you'll want to undervolt it like any high-end CPU to keep the power consumption to reasonable levels. I have my 9950X3D on -30 curve optimizer and it barely throttles at full all-core loads (much less than the 13900K at -90 mV did).

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I've had this game on my steam wishlist for a long time but seeing this trailer only makes me think: -Why, oh why couldn't this game get the same treatment that "System Shock" got with it's remake, or "Half-Life" got with the release of "Black Mesa".

The budgets for these remakes are much higher, I think there's not much more to it. (Black Mesa started as a fan project so there wasn't much of a budget to speak of, but if a commercial studio did it, it would have turned out much more expensive to develop.)

I think this looks pretty good, but I do miss the blob shadows that the Quake 2 re-release had under the character models. Looking at the trailer, I also don't think this is running at a 40 Hz tickrate like the Q2 re-release, it seems to have kept the original 10 Hz tickrate. This means it'll have significant input lag, unfortunately.

I do find it interesting that bilinear filtering is enabled here, while the Quake 2 re-release was generally demonstrated with it being disabled, basically undoing the "canon" treatment where most official Quake 2 media was shown with filtering enabled back in the day.

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Thinking about it, this might be the first Java game to use Vulkan (since Terasology has always remained on OpenGL).

Part of me is like "man now minecraft can't run on anything" but also vulkan support have been here since 600 series nvidia with kepler and HD 7000 series AMD with GCN 1 both from 2012 so as long as your gpu isn't more then 14 years old you can still play as long as they don't go past vulkan 1.2 because of kepler

Vulkan support on those GPUs tends to be pretty broken, to the point most developers don't bother supporting them anymore. (Kepler GPUs also only ever supported Vulkan on desktops, not laptops.)

You generally need a Maxwell or Polaris GPU for Vulkan support to work acceptably in 2026. In practice, you might want to require Vulkan 1.3 on desktop to avoid the use of very outdated drivers, with the exception of some not-so-old Intel IGPs that only go up to Vulkan 1.2.

Even DXVK mandates Vulkan 1.3 support nowadays.

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I guess the other option alluded to is to run something like nGlide to 'pre convert' that path to OpenGL? I also seem to remember something called dgVoodoo2 [External Link] but it looks like the maintainer there has recently stopped & archived it.

dgVoodoo2 still gets updates, but its author doesn't provide tech support since a few years (no issues or even PRs). It's also proprietary (no source code available). Therefore, the author unarchives the repository, tags a new release then archives the repository again to prevent any new community activity on GitHub, although old issues can still be searched.

dgVoodoo2 also no longer works in WINE since a few years ago, so you need to use an older version (2.81.3 IIRC).

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. . . There are things that still use OpenGL?

Pretty much all established open source games still have an OpenGL option (and often, the only option is OpenGL).

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I wish they didn't make DX12 the default on Windows, that's exactly what developers are going to use and target for performance. 😫

The --rendering-driver vulkan command line argument still allows you to use Vulkan, which might help with performance when running through Proton. That said, if a game does not use any modules or GDExtensions not available for Linux, you could technically perform your own unofficial native Linux port by using official export templates to replace the export template supplied with the game. It's the power of open source and game logic decoupled from the engine :)

Unfortunately, Vulkan on Windows didn't turn out as good as we initially anticipated. Many driver issues remain unsolved, especially outside of NVIDIA. (I'm fairly sure people said the same thing about OpenGL in the early 2000s...)

I see something similar happening in various emulators and recompilations, they often provide a D3D12 renderer and make it the default on Windows now. The good news is that it's much less code to target D3D12 + Vulkan than D3D11 + OpenGL, since code and shaders can be reused much more directly now (lower-level APIs make this possible). Even targeting Metal on top of that isn't much more code, and can still reuse the same shaders through translation.

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I thought this was about Less MSIérables [External Link] for a second. :P

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My brother got the Lenovo Legion Go 2, and while it is absolutely overpriced, it is a very capable system. I had to increase the VRAM in the BIOS and choose a quieter fan preset because, even when completely idle, that thing is obnoxiously loud.

Did he run all BIOS updates? Mine gets quite loud on the maximum TDP preset (30W) as you'd expect, but all other TDP modes are pretty reasonable when it comes to noise levels. I have mine on Bazzite, for what it's worth.

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Any way turn off silly pixelated fiter? I cannot stand deliberate 5 gen console filter on modern 3D games.

I haven't seen any mod for it, but it should be relatively easy to make one (not using the game's official modding support [External Link], as it's only designed for tracks and assets). Instead, you'd have to inject Godot Mod Loader [External Link]) and a script that overrides the stretch mode and base resolution after the game applies its own. The game sets its stretch mode and base resolution at runtime depending on graphics settings, so I don't think an `override.cfg` would cut it here.

If you want higher quality rendering, you'd also want to get rid of the polygon wobble and perspective-incorrect texturing by modifying shaders that are used by the game. You may also want to replace dithering with true alpha blending, but this may introduce transparency sorting issues and not be worth the effort as a result.

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So, stay off the chat entirely during matches and you should still be able to play.

Blizzard accidentally implemented a solution to toxicity in chat, but only Proton users may benefit from it. :P

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