I use lgogdownloader, but yeah they should improve their Linux support. At the very least the immediate benefit would be Galaxy protocol support for their Linux builds.
I think it's good. CDPR essentially can be increasingly driven by shareholders. If they are making GOG private now, they can pursue their own vision without being pressured.
Part of the point and usefulness is having a stable target for developers to aim at, that they can test performance on. Also, most phones these days are roughly equivalent from the end-user perspective to ones from 2 or 3 years ago, the only difference is increased waste. So... no, no thank you.
Does anyone want to buy a phone every few years? No, I don't think they do.
You don't have to buy it with each iteration, but at the same time if I'm buying one, I don't want to buy hardware that's many generations behind current one.
If I build a new PC myself - I don't have such problem. With laptops - it's a bit behind (usually one generation for AMD with their APUs approach). I don't think anyone complains that there is a choice.
And somehow above doesn't prevent games being released that can scale according to the hardware and aren't tied to a specific hardware generation target. So I don't really see why this has to dictate handhelds to have way slower refresh cycle.
> And somehow above doesn't prevent games being released that can scale according to the hardware and aren't tied to a specific hardware generation target.
Until the Steam Deck came out, I had no hope of playing a game like Sekiro. And even then, the machine I built to play Seikro would not then have also played the second Spiderman game, because those are different console generations.
Now, both are targeted in part at the Steam Deck, and it can run both of them. This actually is a huge boon for the industry, and like I said,
> Part of the point and usefulness is having a stable target for developers to aim at, that they can test performance on
> And somehow above doesn't prevent games being released that can scale according to the hardware and aren't tied to a specific hardware generation target.
In theory, sure. In practice... just look at pretty much all software out there and you will be proven wrong. Every. Single. Time.
It was released February 2022, that's only almost 4 years ago. 4-5 years is a good target for a refresh, I'll be somewhat surprised if there's not a new one in 2027 (but I was surprised by the lifespan of the Switch, and even the 7-8 years of the 360/PS3 era were surprisingly long, long generations are common now so no new Deck until 2028 or 2029 isn't out of the question), but any more frequently doesn't really make sense as the important components aren't improving in price/capability fast enough, and the initial release was and still is very capable rather than woefully inadequate. The motivations for upgrading are also different from a phone or more general laptop. I think the most common ranking of priorities for improvement would be: having various games run at all (mostly a software problem, Steam Deck already supports hardware ray tracing that various games now require), similar price range, better active battery life, physically lighter, and last would be higher graphical fidelity/performance. The things further down can't compromise the things higher up. Battery life advances being slow is kind of the killer.
There's a point that they could prioritize selling to new owners over existing owners looking to upgrade, and having a more capable device would help with that, but I think the marginal increase is probably not very big. The Steam Deck estimated sales were at 4 million units earlier this year, but that's still a relatively small portion of the whole PC gaming market (132m monthly active users on steam alone by 2021). It has been a big success for them, but it still exceeded their expectations, so I think they also would be skeptical of any large marginal improvement of new owner sales for what would likely be a minor improvement on the important specs. There's also competition from Windows handhelds whose sales don't suggest a large market just wishing Valve had a slightly more capable device that they'd pay more for.
A counter argument - the Switch gave game devs a solid platform to target without being the latest and greatest without compromising the usability or fun factor
I've heard that argument before, but I don't buy it. Whole PC gaming is a counter argument. Let developers make games that scale according to hardware, instead of excusing things with weak specs.
Even in PC gaming, the performance target tends to be the lowest performing current gen console, not the best PC.
Which is a totally reasonable approach and has given my PC years of usefulness even though better equipment is out there.
The cutting edge of PCs is such a tiny minority of users, even amongst PC gamers it's still a fraction of users.
That was not always the case for PC gaming, on modest means in my teens I could at least keep up with graphics card releases. I don't bother with that now, because I don't have to and gain very little from doing so.
> Even in PC gaming, the performance target tends to be the lowest performing current gen console, not the best PC.
I would have said "even static websites don't care about older hardware". I am very happy that Valve doesn't refresh the SteamDeck every year exactly for that reason: developers can target "the SteamDeck" instead of "the latest 3 SteamDecks" and force me to buy one every 3 years.
Sales numbers are also why Steam isn't in a particular rush to release another. It's popular to adult nerds. Outside of that, it's pretty poor selling when compared to essentially all consoles. The Dreamcast outsold it and Sega gave up on hardware cause of that thing. The PS Vita outsold it and it caused Sony to give up on handhelds. Meanwhile, the Switch 2 has pretty much no compelling reason to purchase it yet (an alright Donkey Kong game?) and outsold the Steam Deck's multi-year sales in a month.
I would much rather a refresh every 5+ years with a more profound hardware improvement. I'm even fine with closer to 10 years if the technology hasn't changed that much at the 5 year mark.
Phones try to emulate PC refresh cycle. Is it healthy? You get new generation of CPUs / GPUs roughly once in two years. I'd say it's OK.
You can easily skip a generation and upgrade say once in 4 years or even less frequently. But at the same I think it's good that there is an option to get newer hardware at that cadence.
> You get new generation of CPUs / GPUs roughly once in two years. I'd say it's OK.
If you look at sustainability, it is obviously not okay.
And for what? Websites and mobile apps that get bulkier and less efficient slightly faster than the refresh cycle. I recently replaced my smartphone - not because I wanted to, but because the main app I use (like banking, nothing that should require a big CPU) were lagging so much that they were unusable. A banking app is supposed to print a few numbers to the screen, and yet it doesn't work on a 5 years old smartphone.
No one would bother optimizing for it at all if it had a yearly refresh.
Not saying that's why they don't, but that would be a side effect. I actually think it's more their business doesn't rely on selling Steam Decks, hardware business where you do a yearly refresh is a very different beast to one you do a new model every few years. Their organization doesn't seem set up for that.
It's been just 2 years since the OLED release, I think we're closing in on a refresh. Unless a deck is a year away from a generational bump. A refresh could include the updated joysticks featured on the Steam controller, though.
Till then I'd think I'd do more good for Valve to focus on their steam app and store experience.
honestly at this point, phones and personal computers probably should move to a 2 year cadence. The R&D costs are going up and the performance benefits are decreasing.
Micron is exiting direct to consumer sales. That doesn't mean their chips couldn't end up in sticks or devices sold to consumers, just that the no-middleman Crucial brand is dead.
Also, even if no Micron RAM ever ended up in consumer hands, it would still reduce prices for consumers by increasing the supply to other segments of the market.
Vulkan isn't a graphics API, it's a low level GPU API. Graphics just happens to be one of the functions that GPUs can handle. That can help understand why Vulkan is the way it is.
> So subpixel-AA is a really neat hack that can significantly improve text legibility, great! But, sadly, it’s also a huge pain in the neck!
Especially when you have a monitor with unusual subpixel layout, which is very common for OLEDs that don't have any standard for it. In practice, developers of common font libraries like FreeType simply didn't bother with trying to support all that. And that trickles down to toolkits like Qt. Surprising the article doesn't mention this major problem with modern displays.
> Retina displays really don’t need it
Assuming this means high resolution displays - unfortunately that's not always what you end up using. So subpixel antialiasing can still be useful, if it can work. But as above, it's often just broken on OLEDs.
Arguably monitors that are not mere TVs ought to allow control of each distinct pixel they drive internally and communicate their layout and if needed distinct brightness/color coordinates to the host.
Exceptions can apply if the consumers of the screen can't resolve details finer than "emulated sRGB pixels" anyways.
Something like that should be done in EDIDs may be, but you still would need to support a ton of different layouts in the end. LCD monitors are a lot more limited in that sense.
Yeah, for sure, but without easy way to access it from the keyboard, most don't bother wasting time inserting it.
Smart tools like LibreOffice and above indeed help with it, but in other scenarios, especially common browser usage that's not the case. Compose key is really useful for that, but it's not widely known outside of Linux.
This dates back to the beginning of the Mac, so it's almost 10 years older than FreeBSD. (I'm unfamiliar with other UNIX compose key tooling that may have predated it.)
https://gogapidocs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
The problem is mostly that their backend isn't wired for Linux builds so you can't use the APIs for native Linux versions.
reply