Sorry for the rant:

More marketing bullshit. MTr/mm² (million of transistors per square mm) was actually a nice unit. Spitting out stuff vaguely related to a number of nanometers, I can see myself needing to continue to explain for decades to come that no, gate lengths are still about 20 nm and the nanometers you are sold are just a proxy for transistor count (thanks to more and more 3D integration).

Plus, this reads like 20 Amperes, not 20 Ångströms. The symbol is Å. Granted, it's harder to type on most keyboards than it it to handwrite.

OK, besides my gripe about marketingspeech, I'm glad to see they keep investing at the cutting edge. We need more competition!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: kuhpunkt

Quoting: MohandevirWhat is making me wonder it's the fact that Microsoft and Nvidia always walked hand in hand, when it comes to gaming... What is happening?

I guess they also just want to be future proof. Nvidia is working with Valve (enabling DLSS on Proton) and Nintendo on the Switch etc.

Sure, but a PC gaming laptop powered by ARM... It's directly playing on Microsoft's turf. Or is Microsoft trying to gradually abandon the said turf? Afterall, the new Microsoft did say that they envied Google's position...

Totally unfounded and speculative from my part... And probably wrong too (more a wish than a reality). :happy:

Well, remember that nvidia wants to buy (or bought) ARM? Probably related! I'm all for it if it's good for the ecosystem, but I think that nvidia has always been a bit on the greedy side...

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Will you be buying one?

Liam, could you make this a question in the survey? Yes/Yes, reserved/No
Or perhaps: No/64G/256G/512G + a deposit checkbox.

I ended up putting a deposit for the middle one. It's quite a bit more expensive, but 64G feels very limiting... Even though there's an SD card, so I might change my mind on that one.

Edit: changed to the low-tier one, as I should be able to upgrade the SSD :)

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: MayeulCAnybody knows what 6.js could be?

It's the file that contained the SteamPal strings, which got noticed, which let the cat out of the bag about their hardware plans.

Ah, I thought something along these lines, thanks. So it's not an ARG :P

Edit: I wish this thing had a second headphone jack at the bottom :D

I wonder if they're planning on shipping Wayland or X, Pulseaudio or Pipewire?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

BTW, I *love* the montage they did there: https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamdeck/images/fauxrassic-park.jpg [External Link] (they even wrote "Steam Pal").

“Hold on to your butts!” -> "It’s a Linux system, you know this!" on This page [External Link]. Anybody knows what 6.js could be?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Will you be buying one?

I think, yes. I'm in the market for a new laptop since the one I currently have dates back to 2008 (excluding pro. laptop).

Hook up an external keyboard, and this should be enough for doing some sysadmin on the go. Dock it up, and you have a home computer.

I wish they made the form-factor more modular (upgradeable motherboard? Storage?). I might wait for a teardown to see if the nvme drive is user-replaceable. (edit: they explicitly say in a FAQ video that HW will not be upgradeable). I wonder if it will be natively compatible with Steam Controllers and xbox controllers, or require bluetooth (the latter I guess).

Now, I'm a bit disappointed that it's a standard PC. That's fine, mind you, but I would have liked something a bit more battery-optimized, like an ARM+x86 coprocessor (for instance, only half of the cores are 32bit-capable on latest ARM chips), or a big.little x86 like Intel is working on, (while running the kernel on both might be hard, a x86 coprocessor could assist with "emulating" games for x86). Of course, that would require quite a bit of effort and engineering, and maybe revisit FatELF, possibly with some LLVM target to create "battery-optimized" games (that target a more efficient arch)?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: The_Aquabatnice patent trolls lost this one.

Quoting: fagnerln

Unlike other game engine reimplementations (OpenMW, openXcom, OpenRA, CorsixTH and so on), this isn't exactly "clean" in comparison which is why it's much more of a grey area.

Just a curiosity, what make it "dirty" in comparison? Is it because of the reverse engineering method?

Yes. Usually for clean reverse engineering, you need a chinese wall [External Link]: those who write the code must not see any original code, including decompiled sources. This is to make sure that the new code is 100% original.

Take OpenMW for instance: they just reverse-engineer the game file format, and create their own engine from scratch to load these.

Here, they use the original binaries, decompile them, and then change the decompiled output to something that compiles back, while cleaning it up (like giving actual names to the variables).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: TapocoLRecently,

Serious Sam 3 VR: BFE just picked this up to get back into some VR.

How is it? Reviews seemed to be rather mixed.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: grigiMy son is playing Factorio with me. It's the first computer game he actually enjoys :-)
Been playing that, and pretty much only that the last two months!

I feel you. I've mostly been playing Mindustry lately, alone and with friends. I have a lot on my backlog though, half-started, half-finished. I think I'm going to go back and try to finish Bayonetta and Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice next. Nier: Automata too :P

Also some local co-op games when I have some friends over: Boomerang-Fu was a pleasant surprise from the Humble Choice. Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris, Magicka 2. It's a shame Halo MCC doesn't have splitscreen, but I'll revisit the campaign now that there's a workaround for achievements [External Link].

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I wish they also made it easier to play local split-screen. L4D2 hasn't seen much love since the early Steam-on-Linux days.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: furaxhornyx

To do so: right click the game and go to Properties, ensure you're on the General tab on the left, then enter "-vulkan" (without quotes) in the Launch Options box.

Shouldn't this be
 
-vulkan %command%
?

No, launch options are appended to the %command%, unless it's there. So you only need it in case you want to prefix the command with other options, like an environment variable. Here, either `%command% -vulkan` or `-vulkan` works.

View this comment - View article - View full comments