Comment on Valve still waiting on a 'generational leap' for Steam Deck 2 - but it's coming

• Amir@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Qualcomm is Snapdragon, and that’s ARM, which means half of your games will crash at random in the first 30 seconds or not boot at all

  Intel has not done what you claim they have

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  • InputZero@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Intel is claiming that with the upcoming Arrow Lake series of CPUs will seriously cut down the power budget. Important clarifications on that, the TDP of Arrow Lake is still around 150W TDP but that doesn’t mean it’ll pull the full 150W all the time, and wait for third-party benchmarks before believing anything they say. Still if what they’re claiming is half true mobile devices could be getting a huge boon.

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    • foggenbooty@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It doesn’t always scale down though. There’s always an efficiency curve so we really can’t speculate. I agree, we have to wait and see.

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  • helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Valve is already working on ARM support.

    Intel absolutely has, if you look at the Lunar Lake stuff.

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• WereCat@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  As was already mentioned, I’m not discussing ARM. ARM has its own issues with compatibility on top of the Windows to Linux compatibility.

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  • helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    You may not have been but I am. Valve is already working on ARM support.

    MSI Claw showed quite abysmal performance

    It also didn’t have the new Lunar Lake chips.

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    • foggenbooty@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I think you need to take a step back and ask if ARM makes sense if you’re translating x86 instructions 100% of the time. Unless you’re hoping people will develop new games for ARM and you won’t use your SD to play existing titles much, but that seems like a 180° shift to me.

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      • monotremata@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I dunno, I think you may be underestimating ARM here. I’ve heard that the overhead from translating the machine code is a lot lower than you might think, because so much X86 code is optimized down to a RISC-like subset of the instruction set already. And if that overhead isn’t too daunting in the common cases, the more robust power management on the ARM side of the chip market might be able to make up the difference in a handheld environment for most users. Obviously it’s a huge amount of work to nail the software, and it would be on top of the work they were already doing on Linux, so I’m not saying it’ll definitely be in the next iteration, but I could definitely imagine it happening eventually.

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      • WereCat@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Just to add as we are discussing mainly ARM vs x86 now… that is just a small part of the whole device. Just look at the SD OLED vs LCD. They managed to have OLED screen that is significantly better than the LCD one while using less power on AVG which is a huge deal to battery life and it either allows you to compensate with more power to SOC to achieve better performance at the same battery life or take the saving and go with higher battery life… and that’s just screen.

        Then they optimized the PCB layout, PCB components, etc… to get both better cooling and efficiency.

        I think that what is currently holding them back is both the SOC available and the actual efficiency of given parts combined. Getting improvement in both areas at once will lead to a significant change but one or the other alone will not tip the scales towards significant upgrade.

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      • helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I honestly don’t know. No one does. Valve is working on it. We have no idea of the current state of their progress. Likely rudimentary. I was commenting purely on the efficiency.

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    • WereCat@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yes it did not have Lunar Lake to which I said “Regrading their newest chips, I have no clue as of right now.” because we really don’t have any significant testing done at low power for these chips for gaming to compare with SD.

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      • helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I said “Regrading their newest chips, I have no clue as of right now.”

        You also said “not sure what you mean by Intel.” I was telling you what I meant.

        because we really don’t have any significant testing done at low power

        Significant? No but we have what I would consider sufficient testing done to say that there is a significant improvement in efficiency, on PAR with Apple and Qualcomm.

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• sanpo@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It’s a completely different discussion if you throw ARM into the mix.

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  • nous@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    And given some recent news about Valve working on an ARM emulator and funding Arch Linux to help them start supporting ARM as well they might be working towards that. Though if that is for the deck 2 or something else further in the future is yet to be seen.

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    • sanpo@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It’s rumored to be for new standalone VR.

      But, well, future is a long time, especially on Valve Time. ;)

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    • helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Exactly. They’re already working on ARM support.

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  • TheYang@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    surprisingly not most of the time I checked.

    Laptop/Mobile x86 seemed rather competetive to Laptop/Mobile ARM in performance/Watt

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    • sanpo@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Well, let me rephrase it: it’s a completely different discussion if you want to run Windows games on ARM without ridiculous performance losses due to translation from x86.

      Until we get Proton running with near-native speeds on ARM like on x86 perf/watt isn’t really that important.

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