Quoting: ShmerlIt is a gimmick. More of a marketing tool than a really useful feature. To achieve good quality real time ray tracing, you need really powerful hardware.

I remember viewing an impressive demonstration by SGI at CeBIT, ca. 20 years ago: the rotating earth viewed from space, and then it zoomed in down to street level. Back then it was inconceivable that consumer grade hardware would deliver that in the foreseeable future, if ever. Nowadays, every smartphone could do it, likely in better quality, too. So yeah, real time ray tracing might be a gimmick now, but give it some time and it will be ubiquitous.

Though I'll concede one thing: better graphics (and graphic effects) don't automatically make better games. I'd rather have great gameplay with mediocre visuals than great visuals with mediocre gameplay. So I am skeptical about the usefulness of ray tracing as it is implemented by NVIDIA today, as it's just a bit of extra eye candy. It certainly wouldn't be a decisive feature when shopping for a new GPU; on the contrary, I'd rather not have it if it makes the package cheaper.

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Quoting: LeopardWith 440.59 those games works fine. This regression belongs to previous vlk beta driver , not to stable driver.

The popup that appeared last time it crashed specifically stated a swap chain recreation failure. But I guess it could be pure coincidence and totally unrelated. Meaning one more reason to stay off the beta driver :-).

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Experiencing the swapchain recreation crash with F1 2017 firsthand, but given that the game didn't work at all with the previous beta driver, I'm in no hurry to upgrade. But seems I can stop spamming Feral whenever it does crash :-). (Which, so far, has always been _after_ it saved its state, so it's bearable, if not ideal)

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Quoting: Liam DaweProbably a mix of things, but mostly the game as a whole did not sell well and people largely forgot about it.

Wonder how much the setting is to blame for that. I didn't like it too much either, but at least it was a deviation from the typical medieval European inspired fantasy. But even then, PoE II wasn't to PoE what Baldur's Gate 2 was to Baldur's Gate. Maybe expectations were a bit too high.

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Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoIs not available yet on the Ubuntu PPA for 18.04...

It is now.

For me it fixes F1 2017, which was broken with the 440.43.02 (would segfault when loading any track). Means I can satisfy my racing needs again without having to resort to FS-UAE and Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge :-).

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A bit disappointed that Pillars of Eternity II didn't even make the top 5 of Best 2019 update. That's when Obsidian officially added turn based mode, which basically changed it into a completely different game; and a much better one at that, IMO.

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Quoting: kokoko3k

Quoting: CybolicNow we just need a port of it back to the Amiga where it originally started development :D

[...] I din't know it was originally for the Amiga!

It was never released for the Amiga, but it could be counted as a spiritual successor to a little gem called Ambermoon, which was.

Thalion, the developer of Ambermoon went under shortly after its release, and I assume the remains were scooped up by Blue Byte. Both games basically share the same look and feel, so it's likely a port (or rewrite) of the original engine.

For me, Ambermoon was pretty much the best RPG on the Amiga. But on the PC there were better games than Albion.

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I've only tried one of the early alphas, so I thought it was about time to take another look. And I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. There's a neat intro and then the game does a pretty good job at showing you the ropes without being overly patronizing. Most of it seems to be context sensitive, too: move away from the action and it will teach you the hot-key to center back on your tribe. Click on a mysterious object lying around and the game will tell you what's up with that. And so on ... . I like that approach far better than the kind of tutorials that force you through specific actions.

Now, I don't intend to play more while this is still in beta, but what little I've seen makes me optimistic for the finished game :-).

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For some reason, neither the Edna and Harvey games nor The Whispered World ever managed to really catch my interest, even though I have everything else from their P&C adventure catalogue.

But I really appreciate how most of their games eventually got a Linux release, except for Chains of Satinav and Memoria, which are among my absolute favorites (though I'm glad that those are now available DRM free on GOG, at least!).

If only they would release something new in that genre ...

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Running the latest spectre-meltdown-checker (which has not yet been updated for those new vulnerabilities) shows mitigations in place for all the 14 issues it currently tests for. That's for an i5-4460 on Ubuntu 18.04. So as bad as some of these are, at least they have been addressed. No need to worry.

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