Uh? "powersave" shouldn't be the default. I think "interactive" is. It provides some sane balance between power usage and performance.

I would generally advise "powersave" only when battery life is a problem, to maximize its capacity (and bear with a bit of stuttering/other), maybe lower the settings a bit as well to minimize the power draw.

Now, on desktop, I think that "interactive" is the default, which is a good one IMO. I would be curious to see some comparison with "performance" on Vulkan, but I don't expect it to change the result by more than 0.5-1%, and you might have much higher idle power draw. I personally never bother to change it.

You might also want to avoid "conservative", which might have lower performance than "powersave".

That's if for the basic performance governors, but I want to point out that, while performance governors and schedulers might seem "dumb" (probably because they are well-documented, and generally don't try the one-size-fits-all approach), they are well-proven and battle tested, from small embedded devices, to Android phones, to supercomputers.

There is also more to scheduling than performance governors, and the schedulers can have a role to play as well, but I don't think that gaming is the most complex scenario to handle, so this should make little difference, except for special cases.

EDIT: Ninja'd by a bunch of people :P Also, it seems that I am confusing "ondemand" and "interactive". I can't check ATM that "interactive" is what I am using, but IIRC, it should be a bit more aggressive on frequencies than "ondemand". Not that much difference, though. And yeah, "ondemand" might be the default.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Meh. Bought it in july 2013. I guess I will have to pay for this one...

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Vuko2000Havent seen yet even one All In One PC (even announced) wit components from AMD. Since years I use AMD Gpu and CPU but now I whould like to buy All In One PC no way to find in POLAND. Everything with Intel CPU

I wouldn't be surprised to see some after they announce their Ryzen-based APUs. I have been waiting on laptops as well, to see what's coming out (still hanging to my Atom Samsung notebook from 2007 until now... :P)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

This is what I got last time I tried it on r600 (using family sharing from a friend's account -- HD6870, epileptics beware of the spoiler):

Spoiler, click me

To protect your privacy, external media requires approval to load.

Source: i.imgur.com

View cookie preferences.
Accept & Show Accept All & Don't show this again   Direct Link

(I tried webp as well, the images aren't as big as apng, but neither Firefox nor imgur seem to support it).

I will give it another go, and will probably buy it if it works.
Just one question: does this count as a Linux sale? Do the porter receive money for it? I seem to recall that yes, this is the case, but I am not sure.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

By the way, I didn't watch the video, but Ars technica [External Link] put the prices down:

There are four Ryzen 5 parts launching on April 11. At the top end is the R5 1600X: 6 cores, 12 threads, with a base of 3.6GHz and a turbo of 4.0GHz, for $249. Below that is the $219 1600. It has the same core and thread count but cuts clock speeds to 3.2/3.6GHz. At the bottom end are a pair of 4-core, 8-thread parts: the $169 1400 at 3.2/3.4GHz, and the $189 1500X at 3.5/3.7GHz.

This is quite appealing, and could do for a very cheap upgrade. Also, given the price of the lowest-end ones, Ryzen 3 will probably be quite inexpensive.

I will need to upgrade at some point, but don't need anything extremely fancy, so I am quite tempted by those. I will probably wait until we have all the benchmarks to make my choice, though.

Plus, I am not sure if the "core cluster" will be useful in games without them rethinking their threading model. The infinity fabric adds around 100ns latency to interprocessor communication (which sits at around 40ns for two cores in the same cluster, and 23ns for two threads in the same core, IIRC). So, it might not be worth having more than one cluster for now.
That said, games can always try to optimize for this, and we might then see huge performance improvements (for example, decoupling physics, rendering and AI in a way that minimizes the need for synchronization, then split them over the different clusters). Time will tell, I guess.
EDIT: I did a bit of research, and it seems they will have their cores in a 2+2 configuration, so it might not be optimal for gaming. Also, it seems to be "core complex", not "core cluster". They might have a better memory bandwidth in this situation, though.

Then, they are already a good fit for other tasks, such as video encoding, compiling, raytracing... And multitasking, of course. So, don't strike them out just yet.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

@Liam, I would be curious to see the figures. How many new users, how much of an increase is this compared to the previous userbase? Compared to the usual account creation rate? :P

View this comment - View article - View full comments

This really is a mixed bag. I think what I would be OK with would be:

- If the game already has multiplatform support when you buy it, you should get cross-compatibility included in the price
- If a new platform comes up after you bought the game (there, we could say more than 2 months, for example), you have to pay for it (possibly and preferably at a discounted price, because the first option includes the port + the game, and the second one only the port).
I think I could discuss at length why it makes sense to me.

I guess they are also using it as a way to track the buyers, but I don't think that's the only way they could do it.
I think that one of the call of duty games had to be bought separately for Mac as well, for the record.

Regarding what you wrote, Liam, I would argue that I wouldn't be against paying more and getting a game that works across ps, xbox, PC, etc... I've dreamed of it, even. But that's not coming soon :P

Small rant on economics (feel free to skip, I wrote that a bit impulsively)

Spoiler, click me

Now, it is also a question of how developers see you: some will see the cashcow you have to milk to its blood, other will see a member of a community to conquer by making small sacrifices. Usually, the second are the ones that fare well with a reduced number of games, and the first ones are big corporations with lots of titles; but that's not always the case.
I thought a bit about this (I am not an economist), and tried to draw parallels with how economy works in other domains. I think that the problem is, like most artistic content, that the product is not a commodity. If you want a carrot, you have tons of producers to choose from, all selling more or less the same products. There, you can negotiate your products, weight the quality against the price. That's simply not the case with art products, or games, since they are individual products.
If you want *that* game, you have to talk to _this_ publisher. The only thing they have to do is to make it good enough so that you will buy it for its price, that they choose according to the quality of the product. Now, that's pretty similar to the previous case, excepted for the fact that you can't go buy it elsewhere if you don't like them.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

To answer my own question, it seems from your video that vortigaunts still have trouble aiming properly :P

That makes the game *a lot* easier.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I personally prefer to use the magnum to deal with the black ops. One bullet, hitscan (infinite bullet speed for this weapon) as far as I know. It's one of my favorite weapons, actually. You just have to keep some ammunition.

I did encounter those issues as well, I am a bit disappointed that they aren't fixed yet. Especially the crash near the dropship. I guess they are focused on Zen right now (lat time I heard about this, they were planning for a summer release). The one that was pretty annoying and that they fixed was the movement code, though. I was always getting stuck in the pipes, and had to resort to noclip on several occasions.
Did they fix the vortigaunts' aiming? They couldn't hit you reliably 3 meters from them, standing in a corridor, making them ridiculously less dangerous, last time I played. And, by the way, they are by far the most dangerous enemies of the original game, in my opinion, if only because of the damage they deal.

I really enjoy the remake. I've been following its progress since 2 years before it was out, and played it day one on its original release (non-steam, but I still have screenshots in my steam library). I'm still a bit disappointed some features didn't make it, such as randomized NPC models. Didn't see any "WD-43" sprays as well in this release :P (but we have a Tux mug!)

The game can be a bit hard at times, especially the sequences with a lot of marines. I finished the game on hard, and I agree, the enemies can be a bit too much on the bullet-sponge side, especially the marines and the helicopters. (Thankfully, it looks like they put a lot more tau/gluon ammunition than in the original game).

The multiplayer is pretty fun as well, with some classic maps such as crossfire. But the experience still seems a bit light at the moment; I guess they are still concentrating on Xen. I wonder what will come next, once they are done, though. Cooperation? They abandoned the idea some time ago, but could pick it up again. They also stated that they were not interested in the Gearbox extensions (blueshift and opposing force), but another modding team is working on it, IIRC.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: liamdaweNote: All future give-aways will only be open to accounts older than one day, to prevent mass sign-ups to take keys :)

Welcome to the new people though, hope you do stick around ;)

I was expecting this, to be fair. Has the spike been that big? I don't expect so, there weren't that many keys.
On the other hand, it might have decided some regulars (lurkers) to finally register on the site :)

Edit: just had a look at the newsfeed for this game on Steam, I must confess that this bit made me laugh:

We've been very keen to translate the game into Chinese, but unfortunately, we can not find people who would help realize our desire. All our translations are done by activists, if you want to join them and help translate the game into Chinese, write to us, please - [email protected]

Good luck trying to find some Chinese activists to translate your game! :D

View this comment - View article - View full comments