Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: jeisom

Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: jeisomWhy are there comments about vendor lock-in. This should work just fine on an RDNA2 or newer gpus, if be a bit slower. RT is part of the vulkan standard afterall.

The problem is DLSS. I much prefer an open source standard like AMD FSR whenever I can:

"DLSS 3 is exclusive to Nvidia's “Ada Lovelace” RTX 40-series graphics cards"

Thus, vendor lock-in. Keep in mind that much of that new stuff about RTX is tied to DLSS 3.5.

The developers is welcome to implement both FSR and DLSS and DLSS isn’t required for the RT. It just looks better upscaled than with FSR. NVidia claims they don’t limit that. AMD on the other hand... DLSS3 only added frame generation. If NVidia implemented DLSS across platforms it would look alot like XESS. Looks good on 1 platform and so-so on everything else. Then they’d get shit for “degrading” it on competing platforms. Maybe FSR3 will look better than FSR2 and still work everywhere. We will see.

AMD FSR runs everywhere and is open source. No need for an ultra expensive RTX-4000 gpu. That's my point. DLSS 3 is limited to the tensor cores on these Nvidia GPU (vendor lock-in). Not AMD FSR that goes as far back as the RX 500 series and works with Intel and Nvidia too. I use it on my GTX980m laptop, atm. Yes, you may use RTX with AMD FSR 2 or DLSS 2 on other GPUs (including RTX 3000 and older), but performances will tank. All of what this article is about will be moot. Have you tried Portal RTX on such hardware? It sucks! Even on GeForce Now. So yeah, my point stand. Not going to pay for that. I have a founders edition of GeForce Now for 60$/year (I own an Nvidia Shield). I'm going to keep it and when Nvidia will update it's servers to RTX 4060 (actually RTX 3060), I'll benefit from it, on my Steam Deck.

Anyway, for my part, RTX is no game changer. It helps create awesome still frames in optimal conditions, but while driving, running and being shot at, in the likes of CP2077, these optimal conditions are rarely met. I seldom stop a game to wonder about the RTX thing... In fact I'm always wondering if there is that much of a difference. We were good without it. There was other ways of getting awesome lighting effects that didn't drain the GPUs that much. When all considered, not enough added value, imo.

I've always assumed the appeal of RTX was mostly on the developer side. Presumably it's simpler--rather than come up with various tricks to get the lighting to look good, probably even tweak them scene by scene, you just define the light sources and the surfaces (which you would be doing anyway I think) and it happens. Of course so far that's irrelevant because as far as I know there are no ray-tracing only games, and just adding an option can't make anything simpler.

The only 100% raytraced games (not even sure) I know of are Quake RTX and Portal RTX... 25 and 20 years old games on which they patched RTX. Like I said, performances are meeh, at best if you don't own an RTX 4000 gpu. No gpu can handle 100% RTX on any modern AA or AAA games. No wonder why they used old titles as RTX demos... Caviar on Kraft Dinner! Why not Nethack RTX?!

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I'm not sure it's going to have that much of an impact, anyway. Steam has become unavoidable. Even more with the Steam Deck's success.

On the other hand, devs already got 88%... So 100% is just 12% more of what was before... And you must trade your freedom for that by limiting yourself to the Epic Game Store, which is totally dwarfed by Steam. I'm not sure it would mean more money, not to release on Steam, on day-1. Better to take the 88% and release on both platforms, imo.

Personally, I don't care much. Never used EGS and will never use it. I put my money where my mouth is and with all that EGS crap (exclusivity deals) and because of the character, I despise Tim Sweeney and Epic Games. Not going to get a penny from me.

Edit: Anyway, the experience as proven me, time and again, that waiting for the end of the deal, when it releases on Steam, is an excellent idea. When it happens, the game his patched and is in a much better state... Sometimes with a discount on top of that!

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I smell desperation

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Quoting: jeisom

Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: jeisomWhy are there comments about vendor lock-in. This should work just fine on an RDNA2 or newer gpus, if be a bit slower. RT is part of the vulkan standard afterall.

The problem is DLSS. I much prefer an open source standard like AMD FSR whenever I can:

"DLSS 3 is exclusive to Nvidia's “Ada Lovelace” RTX 40-series graphics cards"

Thus, vendor lock-in. Keep in mind that much of that new stuff about RTX is tied to DLSS 3.5.

The developers is welcome to implement both FSR and DLSS and DLSS isn’t required for the RT. It just looks better upscaled than with FSR. NVidia claims they don’t limit that. AMD on the other hand... DLSS3 only added frame generation. If NVidia implemented DLSS across platforms it would look alot like XESS. Looks good on 1 platform and so-so on everything else. Then they’d get shit for “degrading” it on competing platforms. Maybe FSR3 will look better than FSR2 and still work everywhere. We will see.

AMD FSR runs everywhere and is open source. No need for an ultra expensive RTX-4000 gpu. That's my point. DLSS 3 is limited to the tensor cores on these Nvidia GPU (vendor lock-in). Not AMD FSR that goes as far back as the RX 500 series and works with Intel and Nvidia too. I use it on my GTX980m laptop, atm. Yes, you may use RTX with AMD FSR 2 or DLSS 2 on other GPUs (including RTX 3000 and older), but performances will tank. All of what this article is about will be moot. Have you tried Portal RTX on such hardware? It sucks! Even on GeForce Now. So yeah, my point stand. Not going to pay for that. I have a founders edition of GeForce Now for 60$/year (I own an Nvidia Shield). I'm going to keep it and when Nvidia will update it's servers to RTX 4060 (actually RTX 3060), I'll benefit from it, on my Steam Deck.

Anyway, for my part, RTX is no game changer. It helps create awesome still frames in optimal conditions, but while driving, running and being shot at, in the likes of CP2077, these optimal conditions are rarely met. I seldom stop a game to wonder about the RTX thing... In fact I'm always wondering if there is that much of a difference. We were good without it. There was other ways of getting awesome lighting effects that didn't drain the GPUs that much. When all considered, not enough added value, imo.

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Quoting: jeisomWhy are there comments about vendor lock-in. This should work just fine on an RDNA2 or newer gpus, if be a bit slower. RT is part of the vulkan standard afterall.

The problem is DLSS. I much prefer an open source standard like AMD FSR whenever I can:

"DLSS 3 is exclusive to Nvidia's “Ada Lovelace” RTX 40-series graphics cards"

Thus, vendor lock-in. Keep in mind that much of that new stuff about RTX is tied to DLSS 3.5.

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Maybe... One day... On GeForce Now... On my Steam Deck. There is no way I'm going to pay for an overpriced GPU, just for the sake of this RTX vendor lock in.

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Quoting: Penix

Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: Penix

Quoting: ssj17vegetaGenuine question here : what's the benefit of having an emulator on Steam, apart from the automatic updates ?

As someone else said: Cloudsaves. Especially with the Steam Deck an absolute game changer compared to manually setting up semi-working auto-sync systems like syncthing or mega. Fortunately, all the big emulators are absolutely fantastic in terms of controller support, so Steam Input isn't that big of a deal compared to games not being on Steam. Steam Deck has better compatibility with games from the Steam Store compared to the desktop mode generic linux app store. While dolphin has a good forum and you can find a lot of stuff on reddit, having an official Steam discussion board is always a big win for finding help with issues of software, exchanging opinions, etc.
And yes, visibility and user base is a big perk of Steam that could potentially heavily increase the Dolphin users and emulator users in general.

But the cloud saves are the biggest perks of having any game/emulator on a gaming platform such as Steam.

Are you close to the project? Because you seem to know much...

Just an idea and I don't know for sure about it's feasability (more like brainstorming for a solution), but couldn't it be an app that manages all emulators and cloud saves at a "higher level"? Some kind of a custom EmulationStation for Steam BPM/Steam Deck that lets you manage, integrate and save your emulators/roms/saves (all or in part) to the cloud?

Edit: Personnally, I'd be willing to pay for that because having to copy my emulators setups from one rig to another is a pita... Emulators configurations (custom controller configurations) and save games backed up on the cloud, not just for Dolphin, would be a boon!

No, I'm not. Everything I said was knowledge unspecific to Dolphin. Except for the Dolphin forum, all those arguments are just arguments for having games Steam in general (maybe filtered a bit to arguments that I felt would make the most sense for emulators specifically) which I learned dealing with other launchers and having to set up emulators over and over again. While I'm a dev myself, I haven't done any work on emulators yet. ^^

To your suggestion: I've always used direct emulators for specific platforms (Mednafen, a few different SNES specific ones, Dolphin, Cemu, Citra, Yuzu, Ryujinx, PPSSPP, Duckstation, PCX2, RPCS3, Cxbx-Reloaded and Xemu), afaik Retroarch is already a summarized frontend that can load the kernels of different emulators. And Retroarch is on Steam. So at least for the platforms that Retroarch supports, this would already be kind of what you suggested, though chained to the specific versions in Retroarch and not a general way to add your own emulator installations. But I'm not sure if Valve would have a problem with an App that just uses the cloud saves for a completely different purpose. Also, depending on how Steam Cloud Sync works and detects your local save files, it could be hard to add the different saves for different emulators in different locations. At least if it costs something, Valve should have less of a problem of "kinda abusing" the cloud save function^^ I don't see any way that Valve would allow saving ROMs in the Steam cloud though. For newer systems, they are too big anyway and would most definitely be seen as massive Steam Cloud Save Abusement. But roms are usually not as often updated/changed as saves and the library path can usually be completely different from the save path and is usually even suggested to be changed / customly set in most installation processes, so this could be done pretty easily by a private git project and simply having a "EmuLibraries/[GameSystem]/" folder system in your documents or home or "D:/" or whatever folder.

But for saves, that's definitely something that could be worth looking into. And those few bucks that the app would cost could definitely be given to emulation projects. But the most important part of such a cloud save is that it automatically works. For your suggestion, you'd need to have an app through which you always launch all your emulators, so when you close any emulator, it automatically syncs the cloud saves (so you need to be able to add the emulators to your app the same way you can add non-Steam games to Steam and then have the app act as an launcher for all emulators). And if you played on different systems without syncing inbetween (e. g. one system was offline), Steam only gives you the option to use one of both save versions (override local save or override cloud save), so even if you played different games or even different emulators, the save sync could be a problem. But this would have been a problem in its own way if Dolphin got released on Steam directly.

Btw sorry for the long reply. Kinda got lost in your idea and its pros and cons and its possible implementation :D

No offense taken.

This said, yeah I wrote Roms, but I knew it could get quite massive. No doubt it wouldn't be included in any form of cloud saves and since roms are static data, I don't think it's a big issue, either.

Like I said, I was just brainstorming. I'm no dev. Thanks for your input.

Quoteso even if you played different games or even different emulators, the save sync could be a problem. But this would have been a problem in its own way if Dolphin got released on Steam directly.

That's interresting. I would have been curious to see if possible at all and how the Dolphin team would have solved this issue.

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Quoting: Penix

Quoting: ssj17vegetaGenuine question here : what's the benefit of having an emulator on Steam, apart from the automatic updates ?

As someone else said: Cloudsaves. Especially with the Steam Deck an absolute game changer compared to manually setting up semi-working auto-sync systems like syncthing or mega. Fortunately, all the big emulators are absolutely fantastic in terms of controller support, so Steam Input isn't that big of a deal compared to games not being on Steam. Steam Deck has better compatibility with games from the Steam Store compared to the desktop mode generic linux app store. While dolphin has a good forum and you can find a lot of stuff on reddit, having an official Steam discussion board is always a big win for finding help with issues of software, exchanging opinions, etc.
And yes, visibility and user base is a big perk of Steam that could potentially heavily increase the Dolphin users and emulator users in general.

But the cloud saves are the biggest perks of having any game/emulator on a gaming platform such as Steam.

Are you close to the project? Because you seem to know much...

Just an idea and I don't know for sure about it's feasability (more like brainstorming for a solution), but couldn't it be an app that manages all emulators and cloud saves at a "higher level"? Some kind of a custom EmulationStation for Steam BPM/Steam Deck that lets you manage, integrate and save your emulators/roms/saves (all or in part) to the cloud?

Edit: Personnally, I'd be willing to pay for that because having to copy my emulators setups from one rig to another is a pita... Emulators configurations (custom controller configurations) and save games backed up on the cloud, not just for Dolphin, would be a boon!

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Could it be possible to include the Emudeck (because that's the one I know and use) or any automated script that deals with Dolphin/Emulation installation/Configuration in the Steam store? There is no Wii key in the codebase of these scripts, I think?

It reminds me of ubuntu-restricted-extras, back then...

Seriously, Dolphin doesn't need a Steam release. It's quite easy to find with google when you search for emulation and/or Steam Deck and these scripts are taking care of everything. The result feels fully integrated to BPM.

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It doesn't affect me personnally, because I avoid Activision/Blizzard at all costs, but for others... One less barrier is always good. Bring in Diablo IV and COD:Warzone (if ever the anti-cheat gets supported by Proton) and it's going to look quite positive for Steam Deck/Linux.

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