The Vega cards seem to dominate Blender from all the tests that I've seen done. This is kind of surprising since AMD swore up and down that they wouldn't be releasing another consumer level Vega GPU again. I was planning on going all AMD this year. Was hoping that I wouldn't have to wait until Summer for a Ryzen 3700x. Oh, well.

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Problem solved.

https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/08/alienware-4k-oled-55-inch-gaming-monitor/ [External Link]

During a brief demo at CES, the Alienware OLED looked just as good as the 55-inch LG OLED in my living room. Colors popped off the screen, and inky dark blacks drew me into the image. It did a great job of showing off the insane contrast I'm used to from OLED -- the sort of thing I typically miss when looking at LCD TVs. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see the display actually running any games, but it looked great while running 60 FPS 4K HDR demos from YouTube. While it supports HDR, Dell is still working on Dolby Vision support.

From the looks of things, Dell is just using LG TV panels and bolting display port 1.4 to them( and hopefully adding Freesync). A touch too big for me, because again I think best screen size is 40in, but if this is as small as these get I will buying one later this year. I used to use a rectangular kitchen table as a computer desk and have a desk with almost that much depth now, which is the real issue with large screens.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13790/asus-at-ces-2019-rog-hdr-gaming-monitor-lineup-up-to-49inch-displays [External Link]

ASUS has announced their upcoming lineup of gaming monitors at CES under the Republic of Gamers branding, and as with everything in Las Vegas, bigger appears to be better. The Strix XG32VQR is a 32-inch 2560x1440 144Hz display, the Strix XG438Q is a 43-inch UHD HDR with a 120 Hz refresh rate monitor, and the Strix XG49VG is a massive 49-inch 32:9 3840x1800 144 Hz beast.

The Strix XG438Q fits all of my criteria for EXACTLY the perfect monitor.

Asus ROG Strix XG438Q: The perfect size gaming monitor?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZjSHegW_nQ [External Link]

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So far the number of games that just work with SteamPlay has been going up quite a bit, at least for me. I just got Far Cry 3 working. I had to hunt down the No-UPlay crack and the game runs great. In fact it runs better than Far Cry2 which I also have installed. Something I noticed on the vegetation FC2 and has carried over into the water on FC3 is a visible grid pattern being displayed - I think that it's a quirk of DXVK but I'm not sure.

I'm still waiting on Sleeping Dogs, and the Batman Arkham series. So far no one can get Arkham Knight working and the others are kind of a pain owing to dot-net framework. As for anything release this year? I have a Phenom II bottlenecking a GTX1060 6GB so I don't play any new games LOL.

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Quoting: trawzThat's really nice, I hope that sometime AMD will support G-Sync Displays aswell. I'm very happy with my Dell S2417DG, but it would suck to lose functionality if I want to switch to an AMD card.

AMD actually CAN'T. AMD went open standard with Freesync and did the whole thing in software. NVIDIA went the proprietary hardware route to lock users into their ecosystem and charge manufacturing partners for the Gsync license. And it should be said that NVIDIA WILL NOT be supporting Freesync because AdaptiveSync is NOT Freesync. Freesync is AMD, and Samsung and LG and other brands have been adding it to their TVs/monitors because it adds a cheap selling point to sell their TV's as monitors, which has been gaining in popularity for a decade. AdaptiveSync is a VESA standard - VESA is the same organization that sets the standards for all displays.

Quoting: rkfg

Quoting: dpanterTLDR: Multi-monitor G-Sync in Linux sucks goat nads. My next card will be AMD. Period.

Is Freesync better in this regard? I thought it's a display hardware or Xorg's limitation as it's all the same on Windows. But I haven't researched that.

I honestly don't think that it's a good time to buy a display. In fact I think that it's a TERRIBLE time, to buy either a video card or any kind of monitor. I have been using a 45in 1080pTV for eight years or so as a monitor and started jumping for joy when I discovered that 43in monitors are a thing. The problem is that they are all 4K @ 60hz and I want 120hz. And HDR. And Freesync/AdaptiveSync. Well, LG just announced their OLED TV line will be supporting all of that with the inclusion of HDMI2.1. Expect Samsung to follow up with the QLED line, and just maybe ASUS and Dell too.

I don't know what kind of display you prefer, but I noticed a long time ago that the way to make life easy was to buy the standard for whatever Hollywood had decided on with the home video format. Do that and you never have weird resolution issues. And then you go big but not too big. For most computer desks that screensize is 32in. For mine that's 40-45. Okay, once you've got your display picked out, only then do you shop for the video card to drive it.

So basically, don't worry about your display upgrade until this summer when AMD has NAVI and the new wave of tvs/monitors are out to choose from.

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Quoting: jarhead_hAt some point I might have to try Far Cry 3 again and see if it's any better. My last attempt featured a 1060 6GB averaging ~20FPS with a lot of settings turned down. The Far Cry series does not like WINE/Proton.

I was mistaken. I checked ProtonDB and discovered that Far Cry 3/ FC:Blood Dragon both run fine with the Uplay crack. Been playing for hours and it runs great. Do a little digging. There's a video with link on Youtube.

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Quoting: kuhpunkt

Quoting: jarhead_hHe's there to work on Half Life VR, a prequel to Half Life 2, because prequels are always beloved and never screw anything up. After all, we all know that what we really wanted was to find out what Darth Vader was like as a little kid.

I'm curious what the 7 Hour War looked like.

Of course you do. That's how they hook you. And then Suddenly a beloved character is getting a his last name from a random extra or to quote stand up comic Patton Oswalt, "I DON'T CARE WHERE THE STUFF I LOVE COMES FROM, I JUST LOVE THE STUFF I LOVE."

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He's there to work on Half Life VR, a prequel to Half Life 2, because prequels are always beloved and never screw anything up. After all, we all know that what we really wanted was to find out what Darth Vader was like as a little kid.

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At some point I might have to try Far Cry 3 again and see if it's any better. My last attempt featured a 1060 6GB averaging ~20FPS with a lot of settings turned down. The Far Cry series does not like WINE/Proton.

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Quoting: GuestNot at all surprised.

Or bothered for that matter.

Right there with ya. If they don't want our money, we won't give it to them. It's that simple.

Quoting: 1xok

Quoting: kuhpunkthttps://twitter.com/flibitijibibo/status/1073377254569320448 [External Link]

It's a paradox to read that from a Valve employee. But we all know that he is somehow right. On Steam, DRM never bothered me because I felt respected as a customer. Just something like "Family View" might have prevented millions of pirated copies.

I don't think that's paradoxical. I think that makes perfect sense. Valve has never mistreated me, although I will admit that it took Valve way too long to institute a refund system. I wish that Valve would demand that developers deliver games without massive bugs, but on the whole I have no big complaints. Valve has even invested significant visible resources to cater to our ecosystem when it makes Valve no short term benefit.

Steam may be DRM, but it's DRM that never hassles me, never messes up my system, and actually makes my gaming experience convenient. And it's even neutral with regard to operating system - Valve will come to me, to where I live, to cater to my small circle, because they want me as a customer.

Meanwhile, EPIC and Bethesda are set to lock specific games into their platforms on one operating system which really is guaranteed to increase the rates at which those games are pirated. If game devs don't want to come to our ecosystem, some of us are going go without, and some of us are going to just take.

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Quoting: mylkanot the best idea to use an unsupported OS. also must be a very old PC (i know winxp has a higher market share on steam than linux)
win7 doesnt even support new CPUs. AMD and NVIDIA wont make new drivers for win7 in 2020

Not always. Ryzen CPUS will continue to support Win7 for a few years yet. Third party security apps can fill the gap. But for practical purposes you can keep an OS running until they stop issuing graphics drivers for it. Win7 is my cutoff line. I will never own a system with a newer version of Windows than that, and I don't even have that any longer. But the people that do are still easily able to get by with it and not have to worry about hassles like Microsoft deciding to update their system while they are using it.

Quoting: jarhead_hWell, maybe they think there's a bunch of RTS players in the linux ecosystem and want to sell copies. The economics of different genres really are different. Stardock was one of the first devs to go DRM-free, and the reason they said that they did so is because no one steals RTS games. The pirates steal the hell out of shooters, but not strategy games.

Quoting: mylkawhy stealing? i dont think piracy is a big issue on linux. i know there are some linux games on warez sites, but they are mostly from gog.
rust also is a MP game. dont know if you can play a cracked copy online.

Piracy isn't an issue on Linux, because we barely get anything to pirate, and when we do we're so happy to be able to pay for whatever it is that we do so. But that's not what I'm talking about. Fans of real-time strategy games tend to be a different type of person than a shooter fan who is in turn a different type of person from a car racing fan and so on. Real time strategy games don't get pirated at anywhere near the rate as shooters do, presumably meaning that RTS fans are more willing to buy than steal. Stardock picked up on that years and years ago, and stopped using DRM in their games because the people that liked their games were going to pay for them, but at the same time the guy in charge said that if Stardock made shooters there was no way they'd take that approach.

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