Latest Comments by Calinou
AMD FSR 3.1 announced with Vulkan support, upscaling quality improvements
26 March 2024 at 3:01 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Pengling
Quoting: pete910or find ways of making the hardware more affordable at a given tier rather than £1000 odd for a 80 class card which is just **** ridiculous.
I have the money for a 4090 but be damned if I'm feeding the greed of these companies!
Oh God, tell me about it. I had originally planned to branch out a bit from portables and learn to build a desktop machine this year, but the prices, even on the more entry-level end of things (which is really all I'm aiming for), are utterly insane! I think I might have to put it off 'til next year, at this rate.

If a cheap desktop PC for office/multimedia use cases is your goal, I'd probably point towards prebuilt mini PCs nowadays, which are more cost-efficient than building one yourself (on top of being much smaller). These have laptop CPUs (like the 7840U or 7940HS), which are slower than high-end desktop CPUs but they benefit from the same fast IGPs as you find in these laptops.

AMD FSR 3.1 announced with Vulkan support, upscaling quality improvements
21 March 2024 at 9:03 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: LoftyLooking forward to be able to add this to any game even using Emulators to push games upto 240 FPS.

Frame generation that requires engine-provided motion vectors isn't suited for emulators, unless the emulator is able to perform matrix interpolation on its end (see RT64). At this stage, you might as well have the emulator render more frames by interpolating matrices, as oppoesed to using artifact-prone frame generation solutions.

Lossless Scaling's LSFG1 does frame generation without motion vectors pretty well, but it only works on Windows. AMD's AFMF also works, but is more finnicky due to it turning itself off if too much motion occurs at a time. It also requires games to use exclusive fullscreen and doesn't seem to work with OpenGL-based games or emulators from my testing. It's too bad because AFMF's quality is generally more convincing than LSFG1 (when it doesn't turn itself off).

It'll probably take a while until we see an universal frame generation solution that works on Linux, given it needs to hook onto low-level X11/Wayland stuff.

Generating more than 1 frame per input frame is something I'd like to see as well (outside of chaining Lossless Scaling and AFMF together...). This one can be viable already for games that are forced to run at 30 FPS and nothing more, or 60 FPS on a fast GPU at relatively low resolutions. However, there's no algorithm out there that can do this in real-time currently.

Open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware in Mesa, NVK, is now ready for prime time
2 March 2024 at 10:05 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: CalinouI remember having to run games through Zink just to be able to do that on AMD…

I thought with AMD you could already do it for radeonsi:

AMD_TEX_ANISO=16

For Vulkan it's:

RADV_TEX_ANISO=16

Example:

AMD_TEX_ANISO=16 glxgears
radeonsi: Forcing anisotropy filter to 16x
...

I didn't know about `AMD_TEX_ANISO`, thanks :)

Open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware in Mesa, NVK, is now ready for prime time
29 February 2024 at 3:16 pm UTC

Defaulting to Zink + NVK will be interesting because it's a combination that allows you to force anisotropic filtering on games that don't provide an option for it, unlike stock Mesa/Gallium3D OpenGL :)

I remember having to run games through Zink just to be able to do that on AMD…

DOSBox Staging 0.81.0 out now with new CRT shaders and lots of graphics improvements
14 February 2024 at 8:29 pm UTC Likes: 4

Quoting: Purple Library GuyMy only real complaint about existing DOSBox is that when I use it to play, say, Master of Orion 2, I can't alt-tab out of it. Could I with this?

OG DOSBox runs on SDL 1.2 which doesn't support alt-tabbing in fullscreen on Linux, while SDL 2 and later (used by DOSBox forks) do.

The new Skate from EA will be coming to Steam
5 February 2024 at 11:21 pm UTC

Quoting: TermyHm, i might be blind, but i don't see any indication, that the Steam version gets spared from the horrible EA App bullshit?
I mean, it's possible, some games are indeed free of this nonsense, but the vast majority of EA games released on steam still have the EA App, don't they?

Indeed, there are a few exceptions like Jedi Fallen Order (where the last patch removed the EA app requirement if you launch the executable directly), but this was never officially advertised. You should expect Steam to launch (and require) the EA app for all other games by default.

Quoting: tpauRemember HeroicLauncher Meme ?

Maybe they can get it done in time?

EA app isn't DRM-free (just like Ubisoft Connect). This means Heroic developers would have to bypass it somehow, which is unlikely to happen for many reasons.

Godot Engine 4.3 will have official Wayland support
1 February 2024 at 6:55 pm UTC Likes: 2

Note that right now, you have to enable the Prefer Wayland editor setting for native Wayland support to be used. Otherwise, XWayland will be used until native Wayland support is further tested and polished.

Exported projects will also use XWayland by default until native Wayland is made the default, but you can use the --display-driver wayland command line argument to force it if the game was exported with Godot 4.3.dev3 or later. --display-driver x11 also works to force X11 (and therefore XWayland).

I briefly tested Godot on Wayland on NVIDIA 545.29.06 and it worked pretty well for basic editor usage, although single-window mode is currently forced as multiple window support still needs to be figured out on the Wayland backend.

Team Fortress 2 has a 64bit and Vulkan update for Linux in testing
24 January 2024 at 10:28 pm UTC Likes: 3

This will probably be handy for those 100-player servers, which I assume are pretty draw call-heavy.

Jazz Jackrabbit 2 reimplementation gets a new release with Flatpak support
5 January 2024 at 3:14 pm UTC Likes: 1

I find Jazz
Quoting: SzkodnixThey are making a huge progress, however still they have a lot to do. For now, I can feel that the physics is different (turtle shells are rotating a bit, while doing a stomp you cannot move left or right etc.) but I guess with more time they will create a masterpiece!

Look at the second entry of the "upcoming" changelog :)

The Talos Principle 2 gets Steam Deck Verified, plus a big Beta update is out
21 December 2023 at 9:35 pm UTC Likes: 3

QuotePlayers can now sprint when moving backwards.

At long last! I've always preferred games that let you do that (like Enemy Territory).