Quoting: hardpenguinThe ones released fairy recently are most interesting to me, like what decision or technical debt made people still use it in the 2010?!

Note that many games like Half-Life 2 and Portal still feature optional Direct3D 8 modes, which are useful for using RTX Remix on them (since Direct3D 8 is fixed-function). Without this mode, Portal with RTX would not have been possible.

Most recent entries you see on this list are remasters of old games, games using old engines for legacy reasons, or a leaked game from 2001 that became available in 2022 (Duke Nukem Forever 2001). For this last example however, a Direct3D 9-based renderer was developed by the community and is the preferred way to play. Bless Unreal Engine 1's swappable renderer system :)

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QuoteSGSSAA

That's an acronym I haven't heard of for 10 years now (in official engine implementations, that is) :)

It's bound to driver-specific APIs and isn't part of standard Direct3D/OpenGL/Vulkan, so it's pretty hard to enable from the application side.

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Quoting: lejimsterI wonder if this work will easily translate to the M1 successors.

Seeing this question, it should be easy to get it working on M2/M3 (and most likely M4 when it releases).

M2 GPUs and later support image atomics though, which I don't know if NVK supports yet. Some apps/games might require this to run optimally (or at all). One application of image atomics is for volumetric fog rendering in Godot. A non-atomic fallback is used on macOS when running on MoltenVK, as image atomics were not available at all when volumetric fog was implemented.

M3 GPUs and later support hardware-accelerated raytracing, which is not supported in NVK yet.

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Quoting: massatt212is there one for mario 64?

https://sm64coopdx.com/ is my go-to option nowadays. It's geared towards multiplayer but can play singleplayer just fine too, with support for arbitrary FPS and mods.

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Quoting: CatKiller

QuotePlus they're also now limiting the CPU cores seen by Call of Juarez: Gunslinger as well to make it playable on high core-count CPUs. They did the same fix for Command & Conquer and The Covert Operations in a previous Experimental update.

It's weird that this keeps cropping up as an issue. High core-count machines have been around for quite a while now, and dev machines tend to have more cores than gaming machines, so you'd think that this was the kind of thing that would be spotted and fixed by game devs themselves.

In terms of performance, negative core scaling is still a common issue in modern AAA games. A fair amount of games perform better if you only expose 8 physical cores to them at most. It's usually caused by games spawning too many threads for tasks that can only be parallelized so much, simply because you have a CPU with more than 16 threads (assuming HyperThreading).

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QuoteWhy? Turns out fixing these new extensions also fixed "an ancient 3D graphics feature in an actual game". Since it fixes issues in one game, it no doubt fixes issues in others too.

While shader derivatives are a 20 year old feature, they're still pretty important for modern games (and even some non-game applications) as they're used for things like smooth line drawing (without needing expensive MSAA or non-portable GL_LINE_SMOOTH).

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The armadillo timing is impressive considering the news that was published just after: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/04/atari-revives-infogrames-and-acquires-totally-reliable-delivery-service/

Coincidence? ;)

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Every Ubuntu LTS release feels special, since it's often treated as the baseline for shipping apps that are portable across distributions. Of course, the oldest still-supported Ubuntu LTS is usually the one developers are targeting (currently 20.04), but in a few years from now, this will be Ubuntu 24.04.

While I don't use Ubuntu anymore, it's still a distro I appreciate for this reason.

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Quoting: PyrateRealistically speaking, what could be so bad if Proton became the de-facto Linux support method for all games, including games that would've had Native Linux support if the developers were generous enough? I'm a new Linux user and I've been thinking about this.

There are a few practical issues with WINE/Proton that are more or less unsolvable by design:

- Slower startup times (compare `wine simple_program.exe` with `./simple_program` of a native Linux binary). This is especially the case if the WINE prefix needs to be updated following a WINE update, in which case it can take 10+ seconds.
- Larger file size – a WINE prefix isn't small, especially if you use one prefix per game. WINE updates often tend to dominate in terms of file size compared to other programs (at least if you use system WINE, but it's a similar deal with Proton). I think only LaTeX competes here in terms of large updates in distribution repositories :)

These are not dealbreakers for gaming, but a native port is still ideal when it's well-maintained.

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Quoting: Pengling

Quoting: pete910or find ways of making the hardware more affordable at a given tier rather than £1000 odd for a 80 class card which is just **** ridiculous.
I have the money for a 4090 but be damned if I'm feeding the greed of these companies!

Oh God, tell me about it. I had originally planned to branch out a bit from portables and learn to build a desktop machine this year, but the prices, even on the more entry-level end of things (which is really all I'm aiming for), are utterly insane! I think I might have to put it off 'til next year, at this rate.

If a cheap desktop PC for office/multimedia use cases is your goal, I'd probably point towards prebuilt mini PCs nowadays, which are more cost-efficient than building one yourself (on top of being much smaller). These have laptop CPUs (like the 7840U or 7940HS), which are slower than high-end desktop CPUs but they benefit from the same fast IGPs as you find in these laptops.

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