kadu
@kadu@lemmy.world
Biology, gaming handhelds, meditation and copious amounts of caffeine.
- Comment on MineClone2, inspired by Minecraft, gets renamed to VoxeLibre 7 months ago:
The download .zip is still called “mineclone2_22662.zip”
- Comment on Fallout 4 is getting a fresh update and will be Steam Deck Verified 7 months ago:
They’re 100% adding more paid mod stuff, aren’t they?
- Comment on Google Is Killing Retro Dodo & Other Independent Sites 7 months ago:
Huh… I’m not sure. Retro Dodo is got nice enough YouTube videos, but their written content could be summarized as:
“Reviews” for devices that didn’t come out yet, with extremely generic predictions and very little content.
“Top games” lists or other low effort retro gaming content, some of which was borderline AI generated given the whole “Super Mario is a classic that all gamers must play, move Mario and jump to excite your day”
And reviews for actual products that came out, though often suspiciously positive and unaware of issues other reviews had caught.
Which ultimately is going to get interpreted by Google as low effort content farming, which is indeed how Google should interpret it, as it’s correct.
- Comment on I used to be a frame rate snob but owning a Steam Deck has made me realise the error of my ways 7 months ago:
To be fair, after getting a OLED TV, I can’t stand 24 FPS content at all. With LCD, the blur between frames is just enough to mask the issue, but on OLED movement gets extremely stuttery, and if you get distracted focusing on it, you can even see the steps in each individual frame. It’s nauseating.
I had to do the unthinkable and enable the less intrusive motion smoothing option on my TV, otherwise I’d straight up get a headache. This does not happen at any higher framerates. And I’m not talking about gaming at all, I mean TV and movie content.
- Comment on Google says Chrome’s new real-time URL scanner won’t invade your privacy 8 months ago:
Firefox will block “dangerous pages and downloads” too.
And I’ll eat my own shoe but will not install Brave nor will I interact with Brave users trying to tell me to use Brave.
- Comment on Google says Chrome’s new real-time URL scanner won’t invade your privacy 8 months ago:
Using hashes to verify against a known bad list isn’t exactly new or concerning, it’s how all these password managers claim to protect you against leaked information.
That being said, I really hate when browsers try to intercept what I’m doing, so I hope this can be turned off.
- Comment on Valve fixes up Steam Remote Play - again 8 months ago:
I love Steam Remote Play.
The Sunshine + Moonlight combo is technically better - the network path is better, you get granular control over the encoder and decoder, and the latency is insanely low.
However, there’s one thing Moonlight gets totally wrong and Steam Remote Play fixes automatically - frame pacing. Even if you enable vsync and frame pacing on Sunshine and Moonlight, if your host doesn’t match your client (say a 144Hz PC streaming to a 120 Hz TV, or a 59.97 NTSC TV vs a 60 Hz host and so on) the experience is terrible - camera movement becomes stuttery. The performance is good, the latency is good, yet somehow you feel like something’s wrong and movement is not smooth at all.
Remote Play will add extra latency by introducing a buffer, but it will also be silky smooth regardless of what bizarre combination of framerate and refresh rates you have. This is super relevant, because with a VRR display, Moonlight really breaks down while Remote Play handles it trivially.
- Comment on [deleted] 8 months ago:
I believe people mostly get annoyed about him because it’s one of these channels the YouTube algorithm absolutely adores pushing to the top of search results and the home page, whilst (and probably because of) using the typical clickbaity thumbnails and titles, and most importantly, being one of these tech channels that optimized the content away from any work - he just opens up a device, fondles it for about 5 minutes, gives shallow opinions after barely testing anything, makes a “spontaneous joke” to the camera man who laughs and replies back, and then that’s the video. Rinse and repeat with any device that can be moderately popular - if no devices are popular today, just review a bunch of USB-C cables, or test if running your computer with tomatoes shoved inside the PSU makes it go faster or not.
- Comment on Helldivers 2 no longer working? 8 months ago:
I got it working! Your solution was helpful, but didn’t fix my issue by itself, even after a full reinstall. However, I was using SteamOS’ latest preview build. I reverted to Stable and after changing the config file again, it’s now working!
Though I might not play it in the Deck after all, performance is just too bad when things are happening.
- Submitted 8 months ago to steamdeck@sopuli.xyz | 6 comments
- Comment on 1 year ago:
As a kid I played Minecraft at the lowest draw distance (around 6 blocks) at 14 FPS. When it rained, I had to dig and hide because it would drop to 3 FPS.
Ocarina of Time was a game running at 240p and 20 FPS.
God knows at what frame rate the first PC games I’ve played ran at - considering it was a non-gaming hand me down PC, and I didn’t know what the hell a frame was.
The point being, while better technical specs do make for a better experience… This isn’t tied to fun.
- Comment on [Game] FSR 2.2 has finally been added to Baldur's Gate 3 1 year ago:
It does indeed help performance on the Deck. Though not much in Act 3, which is still heavily CPU bound and isn’t efficient at all in the way it handles multithreading. In fact, Baldur’s Gate 3 still suffers with treating modern CPUs as if they were Core 2 Quads.
FSR 2.2 also does still suffer with some heavy occlusion artifacts, but in the Deck I find them much more tolerable than on a monitor.
- Comment on 1 year ago:
The new update runs super well on the Deck - I had a great time with it.
- Comment on Screw stripped 1 year ago:
Opening up a plastic shell? Doubtful.
- Comment on Everything Should Be As Easy to Upgrade As the Steam Deck - Wired 1 year ago:
I’m not going to complain when none of the modern first party console controllers come with hall-effect
I will, when there are cheap third party controllers that have hall effect, and some random company managed to make them for the Steam Deck itself.
- Comment on Everything Should Be As Easy to Upgrade As the Steam Deck - Wired 1 year ago:
While the Steam Deck deserves a lot of praise for the things it does right, like SSD upgrades and Valve’s warranty policies, we should absolutely not take it as an example of the perfectly repairable device.
The battery is glued with super strong adhesive, and it’s an absolute pain to take out. In fact, you’ll inevitably bend it which permanently reduces capacity. If you soak everything in isopropyl, you now risk damaging the screen and a few other components, and the adhesive still won’t fully give out. In 2003, the GameBoy Advance had easily replaceable battery packs.
Also, parts being available on iFixit is a major step forward. iFixit’s arbitrary internacional shipping policies are a major step backwards. Parts should be available on multiple sources, just like the device itself is sold from multiple sources.
Also, if the Dreamcast used hall effect joysticks in 1998, the Steam Deck should’ve used them in 2023 when virtually all game controllers are suffering from drift. Speaking of drift, do you know how many issues on the Deck are caused by not up to standard tolerances when assembling the shell? Several of them: from failing analogue triggers to screen bleed.
I absolutely love my Deck, and in the world of consoles, it’s a miracle just how open it is. But it still is far from what we used to expect from PCs and other consumer goods.
- Comment on Valve: don’t expect a faster Steam Deck ‘in the next couple of years’ 1 year ago:
All I need from Valve is confirmation a Steam Deck 2 will exist - I don’t care how many years in the future that is. I just want to know if this is a “let’s quickstart the PC handheld market, here, take this as an example and go nuts” versus “this is now a hardware category we are invested in, we will make new units”
- Submitted 1 year ago to steamdeck@sopuli.xyz | 2 comments
- Comment on Steam Deck OS 3.5 Preview - Steam News 1 year ago:
You might know VRR from the commercial names from AMD and Nvidia: G-Sync and FreeSync.
Your game/software can render as many frames as it wants or the hardware allows, yet your screen can only refresh at a set interval.
Assume your game is running at 55 FPS, but your screen is refreshing at 60 Hz. If you do absolutely nothing and just feed the display the latest available frame at all times, you get screen tearing: parts of the image shown on screen will come from one frame, and parts will come from the next frame, this results in weird artifacts where vertical lines appear to be cut or mixed. This is bad.
You can then take the classic and most universally used approach: software vsync. In this case, your GPU will hold back each frame on a buffer and wait for your monitor to send a command requesting the next full frame. This fixes the artifacts, but because each frame must be kept waiting on a buffer, you get a delay between when the frame was calculated and when it shows up, this results in increased latency and it’s quite noticeable.
VRR compatible displays will do something entirely different: they won’t just warn the GPU they’re ready for the next frame, but rather the display and GPU will constantly negotiate the refresh rate and adjust on the fly. The game is running at 55 FPS? The screen will refresh at 55 Hz. A heavy scene came up and now the game dropped to 43 FPS? Display will immediately refresh at 43 Hz.
The end result is that if both the monitor and device support VRR, you get smooth frame delivery without latency spikes and without artifacts.
- Comment on [PSA] Swapping your Deck's filesystem to Btrfs is easy to do, and can give you more space for free 1 year ago:
Compressing your filesystem can also shorten load times
At the cost of adding pressure to the already limited CPU.
- Comment on Top 20 Steam Deck games of August 2023, by hours played 1 year ago:
Surprised to see Brotato so high.
Not because the game is bad, it’s amazing, I love it on the Deck. But I didn’t know it was that popular and I thought Vampire Survivors had obfuscated it. Glad to see it represented!
- Comment on [Game] ‘Starfield’ Steam Deck review in progress - "good in some parts but struggles in cities" 1 year ago:
struggles in cities
It makes a ton of sense: the Steam Deck is memory bandwidth limited.
You can overclock the CPU and you get a few FPS extra on some games. You overclock the memory (which only works in models with non-Samsung memory) and the performance gains can be in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 FPS.
Though the GPU is for sure a big limitation, it could offer way more consistency if paired with even faster memory. Cities and other areas filled with multiple moving models are perfect scenarios to demonstrate memory pressure.
One tiny way one can help is reducing or outright disabling anisotropic filtering. We take it for granted on desktop CPUs, we can push it to 16x and not notice a single FPS drop - however, it’s extremely reliant on memory bandwidth so on a device like the Steam Deck forcing it off can help tremendously with 1% lows.