Apparently they’re a really good choice for video encoding (e.g. if you’ve got a Jellyfin server or are a streamer or something) because of AV1 codec support. (I think that’s the important one, anyway.)
I agree with cmnybo. If you like the long term prospects for the Intel discrete GPUs, grab one. But currently, drivers are still early in their development, so be ready to experience some growing pains.
For me it’s GOG first. Using lgogdownloader and wine directly (in a custom apparmor profile). No DRM, no forced updates, no annoying client that takes forever to start. Games are also dramatically much easier to isolate and sandbox this way.
If the game is not there, then yes, Steam (as a separate unix user).
While I’d generally rather have Steam’s no-opt-out automatic updates rather than GOG’s manual updates, Skyrim’s update a while back breaking modded play for months was definitely a counterexample.
I mean very rarely the editions of the game itself is different (I’m thinking of the windows epic and steam fallout new vegas versions) and one doesn’t mod properly, but failing something like that I go with whatever has the less obtrusive DRM. So lately I’ve been getting whatever I can on gog.
I tend to prefer the Steam version if I have both, mainly as you say for acbievments and keeping my playtime all in one place. But also the community forums and guides are nice sometimes, and easily accessible with the steam ui.
GoG I’ll pick (and mainly purchase towards) older games and nostalgic favorites where lack of drm feels more important to me. Those often don’t have achievements and such anyway.
Funny enough, I get pretty annoyed about that playtime tracking thing. I wish there was like a last.fm scrobbler but for games. Before my SteamDeck, I rebought several games on Switch because I liked the portability. So now my playtime on those is split across multiple devices. Ah well, truly first world problems.
Yeah, I said it and then got to thinking about it and I’m not sure it’d be that difficult. For PC games anyway, consoles (especially Nintendo) would probably require self reporting.
But Discord seems to be aware of what I’m playing (steam integration?) so theoretically a “game scrobbler” could work through that too? I think if such a service was created, it could also be neat to add community-driven achievements and stats tracking.
Ah, maybe a fun side project to dig into sometime…
That actually reminds me of RetroAchievements. Some modern emulators have an integration with it and they track play time and achievements. I am not sure if it works for any game but in theory a standalone scrobbler could be written.
Your CPU compiles shaders, the GPU runs them. Vulkan shader pre-processing is a form of pre-compiling all the possible shaders your GPU might need before it runs the game (to avoid stutters and freezes later). This is done on the CPU.
I ran into this exact same problem and spent a painfully long week trying to fix it. Unfortunately I couldn’t… My only solution was to switch distros and the problem disappeared. I went with Fedora and now every game works like a dream. I still don’t know what the issue was but it seems to be something to do with having an AMD system and using steam on Ubuntu.
Probably not the solution you’re looking for, but it is a solution!
You can turn off shader precompilation in Steam, but that’s not tied to the distro.
If you have it off, you won’t need to have the pass run before starting a game, but then the problem that it was aimed at solving comes up – shader compilation has to happen during gameplay, and this can cause momentary hiccups when a shader is used for the first time.
Steam can optionally do background shader compilation, in which case it’ll run at some point after updating a game, rather than right before a game runs. That may or may not be what one wants.
Interesting! I think I'll keep it on and just deal with the fact that it runs on CPU and takes a while, then. I was just wondering if it running on CPU was a mistake or something wrong on my part.
Yes i know. But it’s a brand new computer and i want to see it working. Moreover, if it’s not working here it might not work in any other game, so this is something i want to make work.
You need to search for the fix. Done it myself once. I believe there are executables for this. EA messed up their launcher when the remade it a while back. One of the things that need fixing is getting the correct font on your device. It’s pretty fucked up.
Still broken, just different broken. Like somehow showing a single still frame from one game, when i’m trying to play another. This whole thing is honestly janky and broken as fuck, and I don’t understand how they’ve somehow made it worse since the last time i played with steam link like 5 years ago or whatever it was.
I dug my steam link out hte the closet, and after like 2 hours of updating… It does the exact same thing as whats happening with the steamlink app on the RPI.
Its 100% a steam software issue.
and no, I’m not paying 600 dollars on a steam deck just to stream a game to my TV for holiday playing.
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