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• Quake 1 Original monster roast

Mmm sounds tasty!

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That reminds me of something I've encountered some weeks ago.
From DexterMorgan on "Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon" entry for ProtonDB:

during Steam installation on Arch system it defaults to the amdvlk driver when asking you to select a driver, as opposed to the vulkan-radeon driver. (...) Most other distros default to the vulkan-radeon driver for their Steam packages but if you see horribly broken environment textures and everything else is fine, odds are it's amdvlk.

So one error less here!

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how many people are only using the portability as far as to their sofa and bed.

With the deck that's probably a large percentage like, almost everyone. apart from those sicko's who play at their desktop right next to their gaming PC which is being used only for browsing / watching streams :D

i once bought a laptop table so i could use it on the couch / bed but the issue then becomes where do you put the mouse & now your wrist is bent reaching the keyboard and the fan noise is starting to annoy as the laptop is getting too warm & & etc..

the steamdeck fits it's purpose perfectly

( so does streaming from a pc to a retrohandheld / tablet )

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@UltraViolent I don't know about The Crew, but Forza Horizon without the online "features" are still great games. I only play online if I really have to (for achievements and festival events), and I don't enjoy it at all. Freeroam is the best part of the game for me. To each their own of course.

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You can do that with most laptops afaik.

Sure, you should be able to do this with every laptop (given a power bank yielding enough power).
Never seen anybody actually doing that though.

Part of the appeal of a handheld over a laptop is not having to lug around a giant power brick if you want full performance, having said that given the efficiency of newer slim-line laptops you can get decent performance on battery nowadays. and they can sit on your lap (belly) quite comfortably. A portable PC handhelds advantage is too be ..err portable :p

Well, yes, and to last long without a power chord, which are contradictory goals.
I wonder - I really do - how many people are only using the portability as far as to their sofa and bed.

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strangely designed

On the first image it totally looks like PSP.

The choice of having an external battery depends on your use case. E.g I'm indeed mostly playing my Deck plugged in and have set it to max charge 80%. If this opens up for more powerful hardware... well... it's a solution.

Not sure about the bazzite advertisment though. Cool to see it's "supported", yet if they don't offer it shipping pre-installed... that's weird. Saving some bucks on the Windows licence might be appealing to some folks.

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The decision to have an external battery sounds strange at first. But then, maybe it feels fine, having a lighter device in ones hands while the bulky battery sits on the table or wherever.

You can do that with most laptops afaik.

Part of the appeal of a handheld over a laptop is not having to lug around a giant power brick if you want full performance, having said that given the efficiency of newer slim-line laptops you can get decent performance on battery nowadays. and they can sit on your lap (belly) quite comfortably. A portable PC handhelds advantage is too be ..err portable :p

their own 'pocket 4' model is more versatile than this.

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The decision to have an external battery sounds strange at first. But then, maybe it feels fine, having a lighter device in ones hands while the bulky battery sits on the table or wherever.

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I wonder if this project would have had an easier time if they got some code/documentation/hints from the original dev to work.

…this is sarcasm, obviously. It would have been easier. Publishing specs/protocols for this kind of service should be the bare minimum mandatory thing to do at closing time, and I hope the stop killing game initiative move toward this direction. I understand that publishing actual server software and so on might be problematic (licensing, IP protection, etc.) but unlocking clients and providing some docs? Come on. Even if it's an horrible mess (as any project documentation should be hehe), if there's a passionate community around, they'll handle it.

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Looks pretty neat!

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Wasn’t the social features what made games like this? Very much like the Forza Horizon series if you take away the social online content like leaderboards and actual competitive racing the game wouldn’t be really that great.
Which is why true offline racing games like Ridge Racer, BurnOut, Split/Second (to name just a few) will always be better being preserved

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See, NVIDIA? This is how you do it.

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what AMD plan to do with amdvlk for Windows

Wondering the same, but the open source Linux drivers have been much better than the Windows drivers (on the OpenGL side as well) for quite some time. ATI's hardware has always been better than their drivers, going back decades, so having Valve, Google, Red Hat, and the rest solving that for them has been great for everybody.

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It was released a month ago, but it's not in the main stable repos and I don't have time for testing software any more... hence why I switched from Arch a good while ago now.

Also using Arch I learned the hard way that the first couple of releases of a new version aren't stable enough for daily use, despite being deemed "stable" in their own development process.

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Now that is really good news! Hopefully this means they will start working on ray tracing performance and all those features that Adrenalin for Windows has but Linux lacks.

I wonder if mesa 25.2 improves this even further

If you need it, why don't you install it? It was released more than a month ago.

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A bunch of people in that thread are asking what AMD plan to do with amdvlk for Windows if it's not going to be developed?

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I think ray tracing is largely a gimmick at the moment. The biggest difference in most games between max settings and max settings with ray tracing is watching your average frame rate take a dive when you use the latter with little in the way of significant visual improvement. I suppose we'll eventually get to a point when ray tracing is obviously superior without the performance penalty, but we're not there yet.

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Is the Steam version DRMFREE?

From what I see on pcgamingwiki: no. I don't know exactly if/where we can verify that on steamdb.info.

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just played a little bit of it and i love it

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Never had any problem with RADV in the... Gosh, 9 years since? From all the way back with my beloved RX480. I still remember the "RADV is not a conformant Vulkan implementation: Here be dragons!" warning. How far we've come.

Great news in my opinion. I haven't noticed any ray tracing performance gap, but I'm also using a 7900XTX and avoid using raytracing on principle when I'm not checking "max settings" performance with a game.

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This is good news. 99% of people I know didn't even bother with AMDVLK since Mesa is superior in most cases and it ships with most distros. But there's some issues I like to see resolved in Mesa, like bad RT performance and some overall performance jankiness in games, like traversal stutter in Indiana Jones GC.

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@_Mars in my experience, that's already done.
Playing Doom The Dark Ages on mesa 25.0 was a slideshow on the 3rd level and required me to install amdvlk, but when mesa 25.1 showed up in Fedora repositories, performance was on par with amdvlk - and that's using an RX 6600. I wonder if mesa 25.2 improves this even further, but I guess we'll get the answer when Fedora 43 hits our SSDs

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So, surely this means AMD will help with the performance gap regarding raytracing, riiight?

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First I was shocked that AMD discontinues something open-source related.

Then I read the news. Now I am relieved. ^^

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So hopefully Arch won't offer to install amdvlk by default now, because alphabetically it comes before vulkan-radeon?

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people aren't buying nintendo hardware just to play SMB

They're offering various emulated titles in their online subscription plan; so I guess even a clean source port like this *could* be used to make the claim that it leads to a loss of sales.

Having said that -- I just wanted to look up that 'subscription plan' to make sure -- which I thought would be a simple search on their website. Turns out the official Nintendo website is an overdesigned clickity-click-click hellhole not unlike the intentionally confusing web pages of mobile service providers. ... Now, call me crazy (?!?!), but there's an argument to be made about a POTENTIAL LOSS OF SALES for Super Mario World, because the actual content & the link for the godforsaken online membership plan is so well hidden.

-- hey Nintendo, time to cease and desist your own website.

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I should be shocked that it took them so long, but I'm not. Also, it'll be interesting to see what "full support" really means. So much happens behind the scenes. I wonder if Valve played any part in this, especially with all their new rumored hardware on the horizon.

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Only 10 minutes in with my partner and already really happy with it, has all that same charm I loved with builders journey

It has a dedicated button for singing! Best feature

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For things like the original SMB it's stupid nintendo doesn't just release it on GOG, people aren't buying nintendo hardware just to play SMB. It's their newer titles selling the hardware.

They're quite happy to release mobile phone games, I feel like releasing nes and snes games on pc would do more against piracy then them just throwing their lawyers around

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Loved the demo, definitely picking this one up at some point

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