I'd also like to see them sort out Family Sharing so that you can share your library with your family. Not having to put Steam into offline mode when you're playing something on the desktop and your family wants to play something on the handheld would be sensible. It's a completely unnecessary pain point currently.

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Quoting: on_en_a_grosBut honestly I'm absolutely not interested in a handheld console / pc, and I don't really see what the target audience is for these product.

I'm very interested in this. I have a beefy gaming rig where I do most of my gaming. I also have a laptop and a NUC where I do some other gaming that favours a controller, either light games that run locally or games streamed from my desktop machine. This device could replace both of those, and be more portable and convenient to be able to play more games more often. People playing more games more often is good for Valve.

Anecdotally, with people having done more working from home recently, they don't necessarily want to be tethered to the same machine for entertainment. Being able to do PC gaming while flopped on the sofa could be quite attractive to them.

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Quoting: 0aTTI read in an article with this new AMD APU ("Van Gogh"), it should have the performance of a PS4 (slim). Can that be true and how power hungry would such a device be?

Based on the rumours, I think Van Gogh (or its successor, Dragon Crest) is likely. It's a thing that exists in engineering samples and has Linux support already, but the rumours were that AMD hadn't finalised a decision on whether to mass produce it because they were waiting for a decision from a customer.

The configuration is really weird for a general purpose machine from AMD in 2021/2022, since it uses brand-spanking-new RDNA2 and old Zen 2, but would be a very good fit for a dedicated gaming device. It's the same configuration as the PS5 and new Xbox, but way lower TDP. The rumours say a bit lower than the Switch in power draw, at around 7-12 Watts.

If they can also use their new cache stacking technology on it, that would be awesome. Better performance and lower power draw because you don't need as high bandwidth to main memory. But cutting edge fabrication techniques might be too expensive. The engineering samples don't have any L3 cache at all which you'd expect if the final chip doesn't have L3, but you'd also expect to see that if the L3 is entirely in a separate layer whose inclusion hasn't been finalised yet.

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On shader compilation: Steam already downloads pre-compiled shaders if your machine has a familiar configuration. This would definitely have a familiar configuration, so it shouldn't have to compile its own shaders for games from Steam.

On streaming media: BPM has easy access to a browser using the shoulder buttons. Valve will likely just lean on that rather than picking and choosing services unless the providers of those services put something in the Steam Store. They will have to make sure they have hardware accelerated playback and decryption for DRM out of the box, though.

On the OS: gamescope has features that are perfect for this kind of device. In particular, automatic decoupling of render resolution and refresh rate from display resolution and refresh rate, with automatic upscaling. I expect the device will be running Wayland and gamescope for those features.

On the size: I think that bigger than the Switch will be the sweet spot. 8 inches and 1080p. That gives more room for battery and cooling, and game designers struggle with low resolution interfaces. 1080p is a resolution that they already test for. I'd personally prefer 1920×1200, and there is movement back to 16:10 displays, so that would be good, too. That combination would have a sharper image than the Switch, but not so tiny that it's hard to see, and not so high a resolution that you're burning battery for things you can't see.

One thing that they really have to change from what we've heard is the name. "Steam Pal" is a terrible name. It sounds like something made by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

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I find myself wondering how much these changes represent the other Liam and team being given some autonomy internally, and how much represents a culture change at Nvidia as a whole. It's getting results for us either way but, as we saw with Croteam, the former is fragile with respect to personnel changes.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeThere is still not really a reason to move to Wayland. Like sure maybe architecturally it's better. But as a user and needing my things to actually work correctly, then why would I move to Wayland?

The people who used to work on X11 don't want to any more. They only work on Wayland now. No one else has taken over the X11 work. Wayland will become adequate or it won't, but, either way, there's no viable alternative.

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...Northgard...

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Quoting: scaineI honestly wouldn't have minded just "Pop", but Pop!_OS is just crass.

They could have tried to fit a # or a smiley face in there, too. My brain just immediately replaces whatever it is with simply "Pop" anyway. Although now I'm gonna be thinking of them as the po-po.

Quoting: scaineGoogling Pop!_OS issues is fun too - google ignores the !_ and you often find references to "popos" which is an old blighty nickname for the police (apparently now popular in Hong Kong too).

"This real hip-hop
And it don't stop 'til we get the po-po off the block"

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Quoting: Termyif i recall correctly, it's more about better compatibility with games doing something outside the official windows-system-calls?

No, that's a different thing. It's syscall user dispatch that bounces stray Windows system calls back to Wine for processing.

This one is about adding capabilities to futex that weren't thought of back in 2002 - including some that are in Windows' later implementation, which are used by developers making applications for Windows - without breaking userspace applications that are already using the original futex.

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Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: gustavoyaraujoI have 3 Steam Controller and I should say it's an awesome piece of hardware, I hope Valve will keep supporting it to work with Steam.

Same here. The nicest support is when they properly support the Steam Input API. Then it should detect which controller you have, and map the in-game button graphics to correspond to it! One of the most annoying things I encounter in games these days is that they standardize on the Xbox button layout, even if you're using a playstation controller. Not enough developers utilize that though.. :(

That really winds me up. Games generally have a PlayStation port; they've got the assets already, and the means to choose which to display. But... they don't.

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