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I've been running Windows 11 on my desktop and laptop since it's been generally available (not the leak) and... I'm undecided. It runs well on my desktop and I like some of the features coming to it and as a game dev won't be able to not use it, but it's definitely heavy and has made some changes I'm not fond of. It also runs super poorly on my laptop, though my CPU technically doesn't meet the minimum requirements (i7-6700HQ).

Been playing with Linux in a dual boot on both machines and I've been enjoying it a lot. EndeavourOS has been my distro of choice running their lightly customized XFCE desktop. It's a pretty minimal set of changes on top of Arch with a much simpler installer and it's been great for the few games I've loaded up and played. Will likely wipe my laptop and go full Linux once Windows 11 officially launches, but I'm sure I'll keep dual-booting on my desktop. Will definitely have to implement a Vulkan path in my toy renderer to be able to continue development across both OS platforms.

That said, I am intrigued by building up my own Gentoo installation to see how minimal and stripped down I can get everything.

I think I ran the original on an OC'd Q6600 and 8800 GTX and it was still a struggle to keep reasonable framerates.

That was a good time for shooters -- not only did Crysis graphically shine, but the AI on the hardest difficulty seemed a step above most other games for the time as well. They flanked, called out your last known position to other enemies within earshot, spoke only in Korean. A lot of things similar to FEAR that brought an illusion of intelligence. I do remember the helicopter being able to see me through a forest while I was invisible though, so there were a few unfair parts.

The remaster looks interesting, but like Creepin I'd be more interested if it were available outside the Epic Games store and included the much more fun Crysis Warhead expansion as well.

I do find it very interesting that the game seems to run in DX11 with some Vulkan interop for the raytracing bits instead of just doing the whole thing in Vulkan like I'd hope any modern game would.

The OG Vive is great. A bit of a screen door effect from the lower pixel density, but mostly unnoticeable in most scenarios. It hurts the most in things like Elite: Dangerous when you're trying to pick up all the small details in your cockpit like the HUD and such. I do wish it had a slightly larger field of view.

I might sell my Vive kit to my parents and upgrade to the Index since I got my mom hooked on Beat Saber and a few other games. Between Beat Saber and Boxing VR you can get a pretty great workout in a short time, and they just generally enjoy some of the other experiences that transport you somewhere else like The Blu.

As for a good launching point for VR, and as much as I hate anything related to Facebook (especially their recent terrible decision to require a Facebook login for anything Oculus), I think the Quest and "rumored" upcoming Quest 2 are likely the best way to get people involved. Stand-alone (no PC required), light, inexpensive, and capable for someone to just pop on and have a great experience out of the box. No setup with camera or tracking boxes, just a headset with hand / finger tracking and a built-in store. Can also plug it into a computer with a USB-C cable for the higher quality desktop experience.

The forum seems a bit upset that I'm replying to an old topic, but it's just going to have to deal with it 

I jump into Linux every once in a while to mess around, but for the most part I haven't made it a primary OS over Windows. I'm generally held back from going all out by primarily gaming on PC and graphics development. Would have to reboot into a Windows partition for most multiplayer games and it's hard to program DX12 on a system that doesn't support it. I do have some old laptops laying around that I've installed various distros on (typically some derivative of Arch as a standard Ubuntu install is a bit heavy for them), and I do have an old 32-bit netbook that I had Gentoo up and running just for "fun". I'm considering installing some variation of Linux on my laptop and hacking in a Vulkan path for my side project renderer since I don't typically play games on it and mostly use it for development from the sofa, so we'll see if I give it a shot after I tear it apart for a few upgrades (re-paste the CPU and GPU, more RAM, swap the HDD for an SDD, solder in a new power port).

I do agree with CreepinDeth that 32-bit should've died out at least 10 years ago now, though I unfortunately don't see it changing for a while thanks to all the low powered single board computers -- I'm running a Raspberry Pi Zero as a Pi-hole DNS sink plugged into the back of my router and that only supports 32-bit and I know many of the other SBCs run similar chips. Thankfully most of the larger RPis run 64-bit.

Same boat as CreepinDeth. I have a PS4 for all the exclusives, but everything else I play on PC.

RTX 3090 all the way!

And I'll probably grab a PS5 eventually for Horizon Forbidden West.

I should see what it's recommending for me. A bunch of my friends from back home started up Sunday game nights, so we've been playing a weird variety of things.

I don't have the Index, though it definitely looks like a great kit. I'm still rocking the OG Vive, which has handled Alyx pretty well. Hardest part is reloading the shotgun -- the wands bump into each other when trying to pull back the lever.

I haven't picked up either game in the series. I actually forget I have a Switch or PS4 most of the time since they're hooked to the living room TV and I'm always in the third bedroom with my PC.

So this is a build your own Mario level game? Share it with others?

I was part of the Project Stream test for Assassin's Creed Odyssey. I largely played on the super fast connection at work, and it played pretty well.  It seemed better with a controller than a mouse and keyboard, probably because the controller naturally ate some of the latency.

The Stadia announcement showed some really neat integration as well -- playing kicks off the stream that you see as well as an ultra high quality of it to your YouTube gaming channel, viewers can queue up to play against you, you can fire off a link to friends and have them load up in the exact scenario you're in to challenge your score, compatibility across almost any device that can run a web browser or receive a Cast, etc.

That said I think the biggest hurdle is convincing developers to make a Linux / Vulkan port of their games. I'd personally love to get my hands on a dev kit.

I'm looking forward to more benchmarks and OS patches for the 2990WX. From what I've seen from Phoronix some of the testing runs 2x or more faster on Linux than Windows.

I have one, but I almost exclusively lurk. It's great for me to follow other people in my field and all the links to research papers, presentations, and blogs to keep up with the industry.

This generation of AMD chips has a few things going for it.

AMD's previous FX series offered "8 cores", but they were basically four half cores internally, which didn't perform as well as expected. They were also power hungry and hot, leading to worse performance in games than Intel. For some multimedia tasks they matched or exceeded. This led Intel to sit back and deliver minor incremental updates for the better part of a decade, since they had no competition.

Some R&D magic later, AMD announced the Ryzen (desktop) / Threadripper (HEDT) / Epyc (server) series. These chips are all based on the same design -- a "CCX" of cores that talks to another CCX via "Infinity Fabric" (which runs at RAM speed). A CCX is a unit of four full cores and cache, and the Infinity Fabric is the incredibly fast connection between them. This gives AMD two enormous benefits -- any CCX that doesn't have four high performance cores can be lasered off and used in lesser products (1700/1800 is four per, 1500/1600 is three per, and so on) and Infinity Fabric allows an almost endless combination of cores that all have impressive speed for talking between cores and accessing memory. On top of that they increased the amount of work a core does per clock by 56% over the FX series (for first gen Ryzen, more in second, promises of huge increases for third and onward) as well as each core being a full core with SMT (what Intel calls HyperThreading). Best part? Because they're able to use CCX's that didn't make it to their top end parts for the lower ones, they have almost zero waste per wafer and a substantially reduced overhead because of this (and thus a lower cost to produce the entire lineup). Basically the process is a marvel of engineering.

This had a few knock on effects. First, Intel no longer only offers a max of 4 core / 8 thread only in their top of the line i7 because a Ryzen 7 offered 8C/16T for less. Intel has now finally bumped up to 6/12 on i7 and 8/16 on i9. With competition that can't keep doing almost nothing every year and charging a ludicrous amount for it. They also appropriately updated the i3 and i5 lines. AMD has gained significant market share because their processors are not only cheaper but offer far more and have been promised to have the same socket until ~2020. Second, the average core count of users has finally started increasing, meaning we (game devs) can start taking advantage of that.

As for why I'm excited about second gen Threadripper? It provides 32C/64T which will be incredible for compiling code (compiling AAA games takes forever, even distributed across the studio) and building game data. It also provides insanely fast quad channel RAM access, which is another huge bottleneck for us. I want one for home for side projects just to see if I can take full advantage of it.

I'll be honest, I haven't paid for PS+ in years, and even then I only occasionally played Destiny with friends using the stock earbud mic thing. I only use my PS4 for single player games and to connect to my buddy's PLEX server. I do almost everything on PC.

I would love to upgrade to a Pro though, for occasional 60 FPS or 4K. It's the graphics programmer in me.

I picked up a Vive a long time ago and don't use it nearly as much as I should -- my youngest puppy still doesn't seem to understand the concept and makes play difficult.

I think overall it's a lot of fun and there are some solid games, but I hope with the second generation we'll get some much needed upgrades. Wider FOV, larger resolution (rendering resolution can stay the same, just less of the screen door effect), wireless, lighter headsets, and most importantly a killer app. We have some things that are great fun, but there's still no system seller out there.

Welp, rumors are out. @Polygon you going to grab the 32 core 2990X?

I want one so badly -- compile times would massively improve and it would give an interesting coding challenge to keep all cores busy.

What kind of encoding do you do? From what I heard a bunch of the popular encoders have a relative thread limit?

I'm sure the 970 came about as something they could do if absolutely necessary, since the tech allowed it, and higher-ups decided that 4 > 3.5. Either way I'm sure you could turn some settings down from Ultra to High and it'd look just about the same and run tons better. Shadows especially, if you're already using soft shadowing, can benefit from lower resolution.

At home I'm mainly on a 144 Hz 1440p monitor with a 60 Hz 4K that I enable when I'm coding. At work I have a variety of 1080p and 4K monitors, but we're trying to bring some more HDR in so we have a better test bed.

As a graphics programmer I think my ideal for gaming would be some 144 Hz ultrawide 3840x1600 legitimate (Dolby preferred, legit HDR10 with the brightness to back it up) HDR monstrosity with GSync. Probably 34" at that point for appropriate pixel density. For work I think I'd still prefer 2-3 4K, ideally above 60 Hz since they give me a headache and ideally HDR since we always have late bugs that come in involving HDR.

Is anyone still playing Battlefront 2? I picked it up at launch and played a little back then, but I just can't get into it anymore now since everyone's so wildly overpowered with their fancy four star cards. I still kind of want to finish the story though.

PC BTW.

I like the new theme and would of course switch to dark ASAP, but is there a way to modify it so the left bar is anchored to the window and not the top left of the site? So it's always floating and accessible as we scroll down through a topic? Maybe move the hamburger "minimize sidebar" button to it as a left / right arrow?

I've been tagged (and apparently don't have email mentions set up). I agree with @medataoh though -- the easier it is for people to just import all the information from somewhere (Steam API seems great) and have it populate as much information as possible would be best. Time played, most popular games, common games with other members, etc.

I guess a lot of that the Steam profiles already have, but coalescing console games as well into one group would be cool. Don't think Sony / MS / Nintendo have public APIs though, so might have to do some profile parsing if we wanted things to be automatic. I don't know if other PC vendors have APIs either (Origin, UPlay, Battle.net, Bethesda.net).

Would be cool if we could differentiate it somehow -- maybe add a "Looking for something to play" and other users could vote on the backlog. LFG could compare games people are currently playing that have online. Maybe some sort of genre weighting could be applied to the "Looking to play" category if someone's in the mood for a twitch FPS vs a comp stomp RTS.

Yes it definitely has its limits but it can be great for certain games.

Maybe I'm just too used to KB&M, but I wasn't able to use the most popular config for Divinity: Original Sin 2 in any capacity. I think it just really depends on the game you're playing and the level of play you're at (I don't expect pro Rocket League players to use it, for example).

Recky#11496

I've switched cases many times over the years. While I thought the acrylic cases with lights were cool in the store, I was always a fan of something dark and hidden. Through college I rolled an Antec P180 until I started water cooling, where I picked up a Corsair 800D to fit 2x120 in the (modded) bottom and 3x120 in the top. Still using the Corsair with no lights on the inside and it's holding up great.

you're beating me right now.   Mine is 3-4 and still maxing everything at 1080P.  I haven't gone higher resolution with the monitor yet.

You'll probably be good for a bit as well. Some studios have gone wide with their engines, I know Ubisoft and EA do what they can to spread the load across multiple cores, but with Intel's past few years of minimal IPC improvements you might be good for a while depending on how many hardware threads you have. Older i7's are still holding their own since they're already well above and beyond XB1 and PS4 CPUs (base models).

Unfortunately the graphics card shortage affects more than just gamers. My studio is struggling to get cards for engineers and QA, which negatively affects our PC teams for both minimum and recommended specs across both vendors.

I'm also upset that the rumors swap daily between "NVIDIA will" and "NVIDIA won't" for releasing new cards this year. I need something to replace my SLI 980 Tis, and preferably something with better support for DX12 / Vulkan.

After a bit of customization, it works phenomenally with Elite: Dangerous in VR. The extra buttons really come in handy, and the grip buttons work great as lateral thrust. Customized the left pad as a hub for a ton of different commands as well.

I've had a few other experiences in VR where it worked better than a 360 controller, but outside of that I'm hard-pressed to find a reason to use a controller over a mouse and keyboard.

FWIW some manufacturers sell cards directly through their websites. You can auto-notify from EVGA, for example, to get a 1070 for $470.

Been doing custom water loops for 10 years or so now and have been a huge fan of EK, which I have on both GPUs and CPU.

Considered going Threadripper as it'd be a huge help when I'm compiling code, but figured I'd push an 1800X as far as I can and then upgrade to Ryzen 3rd gen and save some money.