Quoting: massatt212is there one for mario 64?

https://sm64coopdx.com/ [External Link] is my go-to option nowadays. It's geared towards multiplayer but can play singleplayer just fine too, with support for arbitrary FPS and mods.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: CatKiller

Plus they're also now limiting the CPU cores seen by Call of Juarez: Gunslinger as well to make it playable on high core-count CPUs. They did the same fix for Command & Conquer and The Covert Operations in a previous Experimental update.

It's weird that this keeps cropping up as an issue. High core-count machines have been around for quite a while now, and dev machines tend to have more cores than gaming machines, so you'd think that this was the kind of thing that would be spotted and fixed by game devs themselves.

In terms of performance, negative core scaling is still a common issue in modern AAA games. A fair amount of games perform better if you only expose 8 physical cores to them at most. It's usually caused by games spawning too many threads for tasks that can only be parallelized so much, simply because you have a CPU with more than 16 threads (assuming HyperThreading).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Why? Turns out fixing these new extensions also fixed "an ancient 3D graphics feature in an actual game". Since it fixes issues in one game, it no doubt fixes issues in others too.

While shader derivatives are a 20 year old feature, they're still pretty important for modern games (and even some non-game applications) as they're used for things like smooth line drawing (without needing expensive MSAA or non-portable GL_LINE_SMOOTH).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

The armadillo timing is impressive considering the news that was published just after: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/04/atari-revives-infogrames-and-acquires-totally-reliable-delivery-service/

Coincidence? ;)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Every Ubuntu LTS release feels special, since it's often treated as the baseline for shipping apps that are portable across distributions. Of course, the oldest still-supported Ubuntu LTS is usually the one developers are targeting (currently 20.04), but in a few years from now, this will be Ubuntu 24.04.

While I don't use Ubuntu anymore, it's still a distro I appreciate for this reason.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: PyrateRealistically speaking, what could be so bad if Proton became the de-facto Linux support method for all games, including games that would've had Native Linux support if the developers were generous enough? I'm a new Linux user and I've been thinking about this.

There are a few practical issues with WINE/Proton that are more or less unsolvable by design:

- Slower startup times (compare `wine simple_program.exe` with `./simple_program` of a native Linux binary). This is especially the case if the WINE prefix needs to be updated following a WINE update, in which case it can take 10+ seconds.
- Larger file size – a WINE prefix isn't small, especially if you use one prefix per game. WINE updates often tend to dominate in terms of file size compared to other programs (at least if you use system WINE, but it's a similar deal with Proton). I think only LaTeX competes here in terms of large updates in distribution repositories :)

These are not dealbreakers for gaming, but a native port is still ideal when it's well-maintained.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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! :shock: 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.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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 :)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

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…

View this comment - View article - View full comments