[HN Gopher] Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck - Native Version
___________________________________________________________________
Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck - Native Version
Author : _JamesA_
Score : 595 points
Date : 2025-09-24 00:26 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (larian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (larian.com)
| snvzz wrote:
| (from the FAQ)
|
| >>Now that there is a Steam Deck Native build, is Baldur's Gate 3
| supported on Linux?
|
| >Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The
| Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck.
|
| Only half a step forward.
| gbraad wrote:
| I don't have BG3, but wondetr if this 'works' on Bazzite in
| that case.
| babuloseo wrote:
| I recommend cachyos over bazzite for steamdeck.
| gbraad wrote:
| Running Bazzite on a Legion Go, and got gaming and
| productivity device at the same time.
|
| My question was about; do they enforce a device label?
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| This is not a huge issue though. The game runs perfect on
| Proton on Linux, the problem is really just on the Steam Deck
| it had poor performance. But on the average desktop it runs
| flawless.
|
| I'm just happy the Steam Deck seems to be pushing devs to make
| sure their games run on low power hardware. Really any game
| should be able to run fine on the Steamdeck, there's no
| gameplay that isn't possible to run on the hardware. It's just
| the lack of engineering time spent on making sure the graphics
| have a proper low option.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| The existence of "steamdeck" as a graphics preset in a bunch
| of games is really a boon for anyone using a gaming handheld,
| especially as hardware improves. Provides a bar for
| manufacturers to clear too.
| jchw wrote:
| I think from Valve's end you can't really do one without the
| other, so at the very least I am sure it will run just fine
| elsewhere. This sort of mentality will probably slowly fade if
| more SteamOS devices hit the market successfully.
| saubeidl wrote:
| I bet it still _works_ , it's just not _supported_. It 's just
| arch on an AMD chip after all.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| And honestly I'm fine with that. Given the permutations
| involved I think it's reasonable for Larian to not commit to
| supporting them all. And as you said, it will probably work
| fine.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| It works, I played the entire back half of the game on Linux.
| A lot of games fall into this bracket with proton of "devs
| not willing to commit to Linux support, but does actually
| work".
| foresto wrote:
| > It works, I played the entire back half of the game on
| Linux.
|
| How could you already have done this with the native linux
| build, which was just released today? I would think BG3 too
| long a game for that.
|
| Or are you talking about playing the Windows build in
| Proton?
| Gigachad wrote:
| SteamOS isn't just Arch, it's significantly custom and
| doesn't have access to the arch repos.
|
| The window manager, package manager, etc are completely
| custom. The OS is a read only image based system.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Meh, useless purity check.
|
| Gaming on Linux is _hard_ because there 's not one Linux,
| there's tons of Linuses. What version of the
| glibc/libstdc++/mesa/xorg/wayland/kernel/drivers are you
| running?
|
| The Linux ecosystem is fragmented in such a way that only open-
| source and an army of volunteers can really work around. It is
| really not binary-friendly at a fundamental, philosophical
| level.
|
| (You're not going to get game companies to open-source their
| games, except as an exception, and after their economic life is
| finished)
|
| The Steam Deck provides one well-known hardware and software
| platform that a vendor can reasonably target. Don't expect much
| more except by the most dedicated developer.
| hurricanepootis wrote:
| Valve provides a common runtime/build environment for Linux
| devs in the form of the Steam Linux Runtime. There is version
| 1 (Scout), which uses an LD_PRELOAD system. There is version
| 2 (Soldier), which uses cgroups (podman) and is deprecated.
| Then, there is version 3 (Sniper), which is the current
| target.
|
| As of right now, proton and proton-ge both build in and
| require Steam Runtime Version 3 to run in. The steam client
| itself is running in a runtime, and I think it is the scout
| runtime, so LD_PRELOAD based. This means that steam has its
| own common platform to "deploy" against, and all Linux native
| games have a common platform to deploy against.
|
| It used to be that games had to be compiled in a chroot for
| Steam runtime 1.0, but now with Steam runtime 3.0, developers
| are heavily recommended to build their game in a "OCI-based
| container framework"--so podman basically--and enable the
| Steam Runtime 3.0 on steam. I know that TF2 and Dota 2 use
| steam runtime 3.0, and apparently so does Retroarch. Of
| course, since there is a podman/docker image, you can also
| test existing games to see if they run in the runtime too.
|
| You can find a lot of more information about the steam
| runtime 3.0 here:
| https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/sniper/sdk
|
| Valve has a gitlab with lots of great docs for developers who
| want to publish a linux native game.
|
| I think all native linux games will run in the Scout 1.0
| runtime by default
|
| Edit: I will say that as an end-user, running an up-to-date
| Linux kernel and Mesa stack is important for gaming. I know
| some people who run Mint and are surprised that their Radeon
| RX 9060 runs like ass. As long as you aren't using a Debian
| based LTS distro, like mint or ubuntu lts, or you are running
| those distro but get a newer kernel, you should be fine. This
| matters less for older hardware, but having a newer kernel
| and especially a newer mesa version is important.
| babuloseo wrote:
| use CachyOS if you are gaming.
| hurricanepootis wrote:
| I use Arch since I enjoy having control over what
| packages I have and how I configure some stuff.
| babuloseo wrote:
| use cachyos repos, they are doing some good work if you
| are on one of the new amd cpus, it turned my TOASTER into
| a RACECAR.
| hurricanepootis wrote:
| I'm not going to use cachyOS repos. I am an AUR developer
| and my target is the Arch repos.
| koolala wrote:
| Would they work fine though? Is there any reason other
| than preference?
| MindSpunk wrote:
| The fact we need containers to ship games is still a
| complete joke. Windows has been shipping binary games for
| decades but to do a best-effort portable Linux build you've
| got to spin up containers with bespoke build environments
| and tie the build to one specific platform's container
| image.
|
| The alternative is using (what is effectively) a cross
| compiling toolchain to target Linux from itself! Or spin up
| an ancient Debian image (including ancient compiler) to
| build against ancient glibc.
|
| It's hard to blame anyone for just using Proton, with the
| perma-stable Win32 API. No build containers, no chroot, no
| locking the build to Steam. Just the same build infra you
| already have.
| Cloudef wrote:
| Until mesa fixes its dependance on libc, we will continue
| to need games to be dynamically linked and nothing will
| change.
|
| (Not saying mesa should be statically linked, but that we
| should be able to load and use it without libc)
| outworlder wrote:
| Windows might not have build containers, but it has an
| enormous compatibility layer. API calls may work
| differently based on the executable running. Windows goes
| as far as changing the freaking memory allocator to not
| deallocate pages for buggy games. Raymond Chen's blog is
| a good source for some of these compat workarounds.
|
| One could argue that Proton is a kind of a container. It
| has a runtime system, filesystem, wine itself has several
| executables and interprocess communication, etc.
| Cloudef wrote:
| I think valve uses user namespaces if available nowadays.
| This also checks that devs arent accidentally relying on
| libs outside of the runtime. (Aside from mesa and libc of
| course)
| babuloseo wrote:
| AHHAHAHA https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/1nok6qg/
| baldurs_...
| saghm wrote:
| That's a pretty uncharitable take, given that they already
| had it working via Proton for years. Sure, there's always
| more a company could do short of literally providing
| unlimited support and open sourcing everything, but they
| could have very easily stopped without taking the time to
| make a Linux native build at all. Most game developers don't
| even put in this amount of effort, and they did it over two
| years after the game originally came out without making any
| additional money beyond the initial purchase from DLC or
| subscriptions. Linux ecosystems aren't the only place where
| treating everything as a binary is problematic.
| chowells wrote:
| Not supported means they're not debugging your broken system.
| It doesn't mean the game doesn't work when your system isn't
| broken.
| jakebasile wrote:
| This is extremely common. There's a vanishingly small number of
| games that officially support the Steam Deck that do NOT
| unofficially run on any given Linux box. That small number
| seems to be exclusively gacha games. A number of those can be
| made to run by setting `SteamDeck=1 %command%` as the launch
| command.
|
| Anyways, BG3 runs perfectly fine, natively, on my Ubuntu 25.04
| RTX 4090 rig.
| Vilian wrote:
| That's amazing, it would be interesting to see benchmarks
| comparing the two versions
| rbits wrote:
| Yeah that would be nice. Some native Linux versions actually
| have worse performance than Proton when they're done poorly. I
| got ~60fps on the Linux version of Silksong, but 400fps running
| the Windows version through Proton.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| Wow, I wonder if it would be easier to just target proton
| directly
| Telaneo wrote:
| It would be, since targeting proton is largely just
| targeting Windows and not falling into a few traps most
| games don't fall into anyway.
| johncolanduoni wrote:
| It definitely is if you have an engine with a DX12 backend
| but no Vulkan backend. Nothing stops you from detecting
| Proton and then tweaking uses of the DX12 APIs that
| translate poorly to Vulkan, and there's no way adding a
| whole new rendering backend will be easier than writing the
| extra code paths in the DX12 one.
| hunterloftis wrote:
| That sounds like possibly a configuration issue rather than
| strictly performance (although I agree the symptom is worse
| performance). For instance, specifically the value "~60fps"
| vs something as high as 400fps sounds like running with vsync
| enabled vs. with it disabled.
| nullbyte808 wrote:
| sounds like the game was capped to 60
| MyOutfitIsVague wrote:
| That sounds like vsync to me. I'd be worried if I was
| rendering 400fps when my monitor can't get close to
| displaying that framerate.
| WithinReason wrote:
| The linux version gets 340 fps on the SD for me, same as the
| Proton version
| rfarley04 wrote:
| I really appreciate this. But color me skeptical that the late
| game will work on SD. It chugs on PCs. Hopefully they conjured a
| miracle!
| hinkley wrote:
| They are partway through creating two new games.
|
| It's possible that some of the engine improvements could be
| easily back-ported to BG3. Or even just compiler improvements
| could be a little more oomph.
|
| Edit:
|
| > Our Proton version runs on the Steam Deck via the Proton
| compatibility layer, which requires extra CPU processing power.
| Running the game natively on the Steam Deck requires less CPU
| usage and memory consumption overall!
|
| Workaround for a performance regression helps some but I
| suspect more has gone on.
| alexchantavy wrote:
| Shame they said they're not going to do more in the Forgotten
| Realms though, I love this campaign setting
| boltzmann-brain wrote:
| Same.
|
| I would really love them to do a Fallout game. The original
| two games had a lot of properties to them that 3 and
| subsequent games just ignored or straight up went against,
| including NV. To me, as a fan who grew up with the first
| two, it's like a different game series.
| hinkley wrote:
| They are currently building their capacity to do multiple
| games in parallel.
|
| I suspect not wanting to do BG4 is at the end of the day a
| negotiation tactic. There's an amount of money and
| consideration that will make them put it back in the queue.
| But it's likely at least five years out before they start
| on such a thing.
|
| They'll want to avoid the Torchlight trap, where the team
| got sick of doing Diablo clones and the company kind of
| cratered afterward.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| The path to BG3 existing involved people at WotC playing
| D:OS 2 and then convincing their bosses that they should
| partner with Larian. Everyone involved in that on the
| WotC/Hasbro side subsequently left the company while BG3
| was in production, and their replacements are much less
| favored towards Larian.
|
| BG4 will almost certainly happen, but by some other
| studio.
| hinkley wrote:
| I suspect all the awards and giant piles of money may
| change that opinion back.
|
| You can classify a vendor as a pain in your ass but if
| they get results, it's time to look in the mirror and
| think about why you kept telling them to go right when
| they went left, and everybody loves the results.
|
| Though it's also true that a lot of key people have now
| left WotC and we are slowly working toward a situation
| where a Darrington Press game is more likely than a WotC
| game.
| vunderba wrote:
| I completely agree, but it's hard to blame them though. I'm
| sure WOTC tightened the proverbial purse strings on their
| D&D IP after the success of BG3.
| saghm wrote:
| From what they've said, they were actually hired to work
| on Baldur's Gate 4 and got partway through development
| but chose to stop because they didn't love having to
| stick with the D&D ruleset and preferred doing their own
| thing: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/baldurs-gate/larian-
| nearly-mad...
| distances wrote:
| It's a shame, BG3 is one of my all time favourite games.
| But I really have to respect a company that can make a
| decision like this, leaving a super successful title
| behind as they feel it's not a good fit for the team.
| saghm wrote:
| Fully agreed!
| spartanatreyu wrote:
| They tightened the purse strings regardless of bg3.
|
| WOTC were completely dysfunctional over the last few
| years and it nearly destroyed d&d.
|
| - They tried to build their own bg3, except it was a VTT
| that they could fill with microtransactions, but they
| didn't know what VTTs needed to actually be used. They
| just thought: "Build something that we can nickle and
| dime all the users of"
|
| - The new "backwards-compatible" edition that de jure
| isn't a new edition, but with the power creep is a de
| facto new edition.
|
| - The OGL fiasco that shattered the community content
| creators who decided to attempt to make their own games
| "with blackjack and hookers". (e.g. daggerheart, dc20,
| draw steel, tales of the valiant, dragonbane, shadowdark,
| ) and bring their communities along to try the new games
| (including older offshoots like pathfinder 1e/2e, lancer,
| 13th age, etc...)
|
| Imagine how much money they've had to pay their major
| community members (critical role, dimension 20, etc...)
| just to keep them playing the d&d branded games.
| gilgoomesh wrote:
| They've supported the Steam Deck for a couple years now.
|
| Here's a review of Steam Deck performance from early 2024:
| https://steamdeckhq.com/game-reviews/baldurs-gate-3/
|
| I'm assuming this is just an effort to slightly improve things.
| rfarley04 wrote:
| Yea, I could also blame steam's SD verification system, which
| just rates compatibility without giving much thought to
| performance. Cause I'm aware BG3 "works" on SD but walk into
| an area crowded with NPCs and it becomes an impressionist
| painting at 10fps
| bigyabai wrote:
| ProtonDB is better for gauging the performance penalty,
| giving different "medals" in accordance with how
| good/easily it runs on Linux: https://www.protondb.com/
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| > but walk into an area crowded with NPCs and it becomes an
| impressionist painting at 10fps
|
| I feel like this describe how I feel about life in general.
| maybe we really are living in a simulation.
| teamonkey wrote:
| My guess is that it's not so much an effort to improve
| performance (there are other, easier ways to do that and it
| runs ok as it is) but to experiment with supporting SteamOS
| as platform in future.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| It runs _fine_ on a SD card on a steam deck for me. It is a
| good travel game.
| shawnz wrote:
| To be clear, did you test the game in Act 3? Because Act 3
| generally has significantly worse performance than other
| parts of the game
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| Yeah, I have played through the game like three or four
| times on a steam deck.
|
| There are some hiccups at times, but it is acceptable, IMO.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Tbh the vast majority of players never made it to act 3
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| > Tbh the vast majority of players never made it to act 3
|
| You seem to comment with generalizations a lot.
|
| Here is some data:
|
| https://steamcommunity.com/stats/1086940/achievements
|
| "The City Awaits (40.3%)"
|
| So 59.7% of all players didn't make it to Act 3 on Steam,
| a bit under a "vast majority".
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Steam achievements say that 90% of players have beaten
| the tutorial and 40% have beaten act 2, so while it's not
| the "vast" majority, it is true that the majority of
| players never made it to act 3.
| andrew_gs wrote:
| Going by steam achievements it looks like 40% of players
| make it to Act 3 and 23% finish it. So majority is
| accurate - but vast is hyperbole.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| When was the last time you played? They've been making
| continuous performance improvements and act 3 hasn't chugged on
| my PC for a long time. Even steam deck seems to get a steady
| 30fps.
| kibwen wrote:
| I played it on Steam Deck when it first came out (docked,
| standard HD display). It was perfectly acceptable, as long as
| you're fine with semi-stable 30 FPS and cranking down the
| graphics a tad. The only real problem that I encountered was
| that the game wouldn't recognize or remember my input settings,
| and would always default to controller-only, so I would have to
| attach a controller to navigate to the menu to switch it to
| keyboard; hopefully the Deck-native version fixes that.
| bmurphy1976 wrote:
| It played tolerably until act 3, same with my M1 MacBook Pro.
| Act 3 was awful on both.
| kibwen wrote:
| I fully admit that I spent 40 delicious hours faffing about
| in Act 1 and then put it down out of fear that I'd never
| get anything else done. :P
| distances wrote:
| One big upside of single player games is that they have
| an ending. After playing MUDs back in the day, this was a
| decision I've kept -- no games without an end.
|
| To be fair, I've still spent a crazy amount of time with
| the Civilization games so let's say that was a partial
| success.
| aleksi wrote:
| You can make it run much better by increasing the game's
| process priority with `renice`. I know that sounds like
| something that should not work, but it does.
| esseph wrote:
| Chugs on PCs? What kind of PC?
| verandaguy wrote:
| I don't want to be one of those unbearable apologists in forum
| threads... but BG3's legitimately my favourite game, and IMO
| Larian have been excellent stewards, so I'll go up to bat for
| them here; have you played the newer patches?
|
| For the first few months, act 3 (in the city) was
| _legitimately_ hard to play. Performance, stability, visual
| glitches, all pervasive. But later patches _did_ do a better
| job of improving those points.
|
| Act 3's still the most intensive part of the game _by far_ so
| on many setups it 's still wise to at least crank down the
| crowd density, but it's come a long way since the launch
| version of the game.
| boltzmann-brain wrote:
| To me, BG3 is basically a system seller for the deck.
| babuloseo wrote:
| I streamed BG3 on the deck, I played it with one of those
| logitech keyboards on my living room tv setups, was pretty
| great
| saghm wrote:
| My default way of playing nowadays (for all games, not
| just BG3) is to stream to my Deck from my desktop using
| Sunshine. Surprisingly, I don't really notice any input
| latency even with my desktop upstairs in my office while
| I'm playing downstairs in my living room.
| energy123 wrote:
| It'd be on the order of 10ms extra latency, while at
| 60fps, each frame takes 17ms.
| adezxc wrote:
| Could you share your configuration? (Mostly interested in
| Network) I still see some noticeable latency if I stream
| from my PC through wifi to steam deck which is connected
| to a TV. At one point I just dropped the idea as I wanted
| to actually play the game instead of tinkering for too
| long.
| saghm wrote:
| I play on the Steam Deck directly rather than on a TV,
| which might be part of it. In the past, I've had
| noticeable input lag with some 4K TVs even when playing a
| Switch directly docked into it, so it might be worth
| ruling the TV itself out as a potential source of error
| (e.g. by seeing if the same input is noticeable from the
| PC to the Steam Deck directly, or if you use something
| hooked up to the TV directly).
|
| In terms of the wifi itself, I have two mesh routers in
| the house, one directly connected to the modem in the
| living room, and the other upstairs in my office, with
| the desktop plugged into it via ethernet. I'm lucky
| enough to be in an area with gigabit fiber, which made it
| seem worthwhile to invest in a good mesh setup, and I
| honestly might ended up with fairly low local latency
| mostly by accident from that. I've read some things that
| indicate that WiFi 7 might be a significant part of why
| this works well for me, but having never tried streaming
| games before having this setup, I don't have anything to
| compare it to.
|
| On the software side of things, I mostly use the defaults
| that the AUR `sunshine` package comes preinstalled with
| for the server (although I'm not sure how much of that is
| tweaked from upstream). I don't have any ports exposed to
| the wider internet, and I have LAN encryption disabled,
| which likely reduces the overhead a bit. I'm not sure if
| it matters, but for the sake of completeness, but my GPU
| is a Radeon RX 6900 XT, and I'm running the standard Arch
| repo versions of of mesa, Plasma 6, and the `linux-zen`
| kernel (with Plasma configured to use Wayland rather than
| X11). On the client side, the Steam Deck is using
| Moonlight from the flatpak listed in the "Discover" app
| in desktop mode, with the resolution set to 1440p (since
| that what my monitor has, and I've found a lot of games
| lower the quality of the graphics if I lower the
| resolution to match my Steam Deck's native 800p) and the
| refresh rate set to 90 FPS, which the app then displays
| as converting to a bitrate of 49 Mbps. I have it set to
| fullscreen (since I don't really have any need to use the
| steam deck for other things when gaming, and it still
| does allow me to easily get back in to the local settings
| without much issue even with that set) and Vsync off, the
| boxes checked off for "Optimize game settings for
| streaming", "Capture system keyboard shortcuts", "Enable
| mouse control with gamepads...", "Enable HDR", and
| "Unlock bitrate limit" (the last of which presumably
| overrides the auto-computed bitrate mentioned above), as
| well as turning pretty much every audio setting I can off
| or at least to the lowest possible value since I'm pretty
| much always either watching TV or listening to music
| nowadays when playing. I left the video decoder and
| codecs as "automatic".
|
| The only two things that ever seem to go wrong is that
| the Steam Deck sometimes seems to decide to render the
| on-screen keyboard below the streamed desktop rather than
| above it, and occasionally (maybe once every 10-12 hours
| of playing over several days?) the connection will start
| to degrade over the course of a minute or so and become
| unable to sustain the necessary bandwidth. The keyboard
| issue seems like it might be a bug in Moonlight, since
| I'm able to fix it by disconnecting and restarting the
| client itself, and the connection issue seems like it's
| either an issue with Sunshine or my network itself, since
| I can always fix it by simply disconnecting (without
| needing to restart Moonlight itself). The experience
| overall has been so good that I've almost completely
| stopped playing anything locally on the Deck itself (with
| the only exception being occasional emulation of Gameboy
| Color/Gameboy Advance games, which obvious don't require
| much in terms of hardware). I'm able to play games with
| much higher graphical settings than I could locally on
| the Deck, and the battery life is significantly improved
| (maybe around 6-8 hours of dedicated playing). It's such
| a smooth experience that I've been seriously considering
| upgrading to the Legion Go literally just to have a
| higher-res screen for this setup without having to change
| much (since SteamOS is supported for it nowadays; I don't
| have much interest in the Legion Go 2 with Windows, and
| the more powerful/efficient hardware wouldn't do much for
| me with my current setup).
|
| [1]: I didn't have a ton of experience with mesh wifi
| honestly, but after some basic research I ended up buying
| of two of this mode (which seems to have a version of
| 6.1.0 from checking just now)l, and they seems to work
| reasonably well: TP-Link Deco BE25 Dual-Band BE5000 WiFi
| 7 Mesh Wi-Fi Router https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DKVKLJX3
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| I had no idea this was a thing. Does it work from a Linux
| host? If the Deck is just acting as a streaming receiver,
| can it handle a 4k output? Or is the hardware limited
| such that it can only handle ~resolution of the deck?
| papichulo2023 wrote:
| As you would expect, wayland doesnt make a good host for
| remote playing. X11 should be fine though.
|
| * Based on my experience
| fyrabanks wrote:
| fwiw, my wife played through it on SD while i played through on
| my PC. it's a completely different experience, but it's very
| do-able. she also went on to replay it 4 more times after that,
| which is 5 more times than i finished the game.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Slick! Worth noting that _Baldurs Gate 3_ runs fine through
| Proton already - I played it on Linux at release with zero
| issues.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Worth noting that some games run better on Linux than on
| Windows and have for a few years now. Crazy.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Yeah, I noticed this myself ~4 years ago when I was playing
| _Overwatch_ on a relatively low-spec PC. Gave me 10-20% GPU
| headroom and ~2gb of extra RAM I never had on Windows.
| Podrod wrote:
| And sometimes the Windows version runs better under Proton
| than the native Linux build due to the port being so poorly
| done which is kinda funny.
|
| Occasionally I do still run things under Windows though like
| Cyberpunk 2077 as I got about 15 more frames under Windows
| which let me bump the graphics up a bit more.
|
| Or Assassin's Creed Mirage which got me double the FPS
| somehow. Currently playing AssCree Shadows on Windows too as
| it just refuses to run at all via Proton. Other people seem
| to get it running fine so I dunno why I can't. Ah well.
| keyringlight wrote:
| As much as linux for PC gaming has made huge strides over
| the past few years, it seems really hard to avoid having a
| dual boot to keep windows available if you're serious about
| the whole breadth of available games. Or if you want to
| avoid pitfalls on those titles that run with a list of
| caveats, you can go exploring on protondb and some games
| need a collection of commmandline tweaks to get going well.
| It'd be nice to have a better experience for enabling those
| or opt-in to commonly used configs on particular games
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Maybe I'm cheating by using a 1080P monitor, but I have
| only ever installed Windows once and that was for
| Starfield since it didnt work with Proton OOTB, once they
| fixed it, I purged and havent gone back. In the future I
| wont be doing that. I love Bethesda games, so in the
| future I'll just wait it out. I did make sure to play the
| heck out of it while I was on Windows though.
|
| In hindsight, I really didn't need Windows, but I was
| impatient.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| Yep 1000h+ on Linux here, it's flawless
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| After some patches, that is debatable:
| https://www.gamespot.com/articles/baldurs-
| gate-3-companions-...
| lyu07282 wrote:
| Complete nonsense, of course there were bugs d'uh! But none
| of them had any major impact on anything and none of that
| has anything to do with the fact that the game ran
| flawlessly on Linux from day 1.
| saghm wrote:
| I think they meant it was "flawless" in terms of not being
| a degraded experience compared to Windows. Bugs will
| obviously still happen, but I'd also argue that the sheer
| breadth of the bugs they continue to squash over two years
| after the full game came out without having charged a cent
| for any new content that got released after the fact very
| well might be unparalleled by any other popular mainstream
| game. Over the summer, they released a set of fixes that
| included bugs like "one specific set of gloves were
| rendered poorly when worn by one specific race in
| combination with one specific set of armor[1]. When plenty
| of live-service games have much worse bugs than that they
| don't even get acknowledged for months at a time, it just
| doesn't seem useful to criticize a relatively small studio
| that's clearly going above and beyond to continue
| supporting a game with the only benefit for them being
| continued goodwill.
|
| [1]: https://baldursgate3.game/news/room-temperature-
| fix-33-now-l...
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Was a joke. The bug I linked was regarding how trivially
| easy it was to romance the companions. Such that it
| spawned its own speed running category (Sex %). New
| versions of the game have since fixed the bug so the
| companions will try to keep it in their pants.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| Whatever they are doing to make the image fit 100% is not
| retaining aspect ratio on mobile Safari. The cookies banner was
| initially full width and the content was in a small column to the
| left and I had to zoom to get to it. I've never viewed a Steam
| Deck web layout outside of its element before.
| bigyabai wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Please don't complain about tangential annoyances--e.g. article
| or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage.
| They're too common to be interesting.
| nsagent wrote:
| Bought the game when it came out, but still haven't had the time
| to play. Just flew out for a three week vacation with my Steam
| Deck in tow. Unfortunately, I left it on the plane and I haven't
| heard back from lost and found yet (seems unlikely I'll get it
| back considering it was an international flight). Oh well.
| jsheard wrote:
| If it's any consolation, the Deck LCD is discounted by 20% for
| the next few weeks if you need to pick up a new one.
| brokencode wrote:
| May as well get a Switch 2 at this point. Then at least it's
| something new.
| petralithic wrote:
| A Switch and a Steam Deck are orthogonal purchases.
| brokencode wrote:
| Not really. The Switch 2 has many of the most popular
| games available on other platforms. Plus a lot of
| Nintendo exclusives. They are not the same for sure, and
| YMMV for specific titles.
| baby wrote:
| I have both and I would agree with GP on that, the switch
| is really exclusively for Nintendo games. Cross platform
| games don't run really well, I just get them on the deck
| instead.
| myko wrote:
| Cross platform games tend to run better on Switch 2 than
| the Deck, which is showing its teeth. E.g., Cyberpunk
|
| The Deck is amazing but a hardware refresh would be
| helpful
| baby wrote:
| wat
| MyOutfitIsVague wrote:
| > Cross platform games don't run really well
|
| Wouldn't that depend heavily on the game and developer in
| question? The Switch 2 has more than sufficient hardware
| to compete, with a particularly beefy GPU for a handheld.
|
| I'd be more ready to blame the game and developer in
| question than this console, unless there are a lot of
| examples from capable developers performing measurably
| worse.
| OtomotO wrote:
| "Cross platform games don't really run well"
|
| Leaves the question who is to blame completely out.
|
| And as a consumer I couldn't care less why it doesn't
| work. I paid for it, it doesn't work: I am not
| recommending it.
|
| Easy as that. I don't have to write thesis about such
| stuff.
|
| You're probably right though, if it's any consolation.
|
| It doesn't change the reality though, that currently many
| of the cross platform titles don't work well on the
| Switch 2.
| izacus wrote:
| So why does it matter?
|
| On Switch, I had to expensively rebuy games at high
| prices, which then ran poorly and didn't support any kind
| of settings to try to fix the situation.
|
| On the Deck I get all my desktop Steam library and I can
| change game settings until they run as I like (within
| reason).
|
| I don't see how those two are comparable purchases - I
| either get a console which runs poorly and demands 40$
| for games that are like 5$ on Steam... or a console that
| already supports my existing library AND on top of that
| allows me to stream games from main PC at full detail and
| framerate.
| baby wrote:
| I have no clue, but I've had enough experiences to know
| better now. I just got Split Fiction, you'd think as a
| starting title that's made for couch coop it would run
| pretty well. No, it's horrible. We stopped playing it and
| we'll just buy it on a different platform.
| pezezin wrote:
| The Deck can play most of those Nintendo exclusives
| better than the Switch itself ;)
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| If you like indie games, the selection is generally
| better on Steam. And everything that is available on both
| runs better on the steamdeck. The Switch only makes sense
| if you particularly want to play Nintendo games.
| hug wrote:
| May as well replace all of your apples with oranges while
| you're at it.
|
| The Switch 2 and the Steam Deck are hugely different
| machines, despite sharing a form factor.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| To some people, they are like xbox and playstation. Both
| are different machine with different game store, but
| still, they are console.
|
| Obviously SD can be more than just "handheld console",
| but a lot of people won't need that.
| baby wrote:
| I got the switch 2 and day one and I've mostly been playing
| the deck since then. There isn't much on the switch
| (besides mario kart and donkey kong), and the stuff that is
| cross-platform doesn't run well (the new "it takes two" is
| really laggy).
| MBCook wrote:
| I've been having a lot of fun with my Switch 2, but due to
| its size I find it far less ergonomic than the original.
|
| I spent like 98% of my playtime on the original in
| handheld. That has switched completely. It's not just the
| size but especially the weight I think.
| boltzmann-brain wrote:
| Big tip: get the LCD and a DeckHD. The mod takes a long time,
| but it's not _technically difficult_.
|
| Yeah, I know most people will say the Deck is already too
| slow for 800p, so why would it pull 1080p well?
|
| I have two decks, one's got Deck HD, the other doesn't. I
| render the Deck HD one at 540 native and upscale 2x with FSR.
| It looks way better than the stock display one and runs
| better as well. Similar with HZD and other highly demanding
| games.
|
| That said, 99% of my time on the Deck is spent playing retro
| games. Does that need 1080p? No. Can it use it? Yes, very
| much so.
|
| I never pick up the original deck anymore - the Deck HD
| modded one is just better.
| bhaney wrote:
| The DeckHD website says it's sold out. Can I get the same
| display component without the installation kit from
| somewhere else? Is there a model or part identifier or
| something?
| boltzmann-brain wrote:
| sadly no.
|
| i guess that's that then!
| foxbarrington wrote:
| I tell people to get an LCD and xreal or viture AR glasses
| with the saved money. AR glasses are a WAY better display
| than a small OLED screen.
| kelvie wrote:
| And solves the wrists problem mentioned earlier
| corysama wrote:
| So, you've got a portable deck wired to augmented reality
| glasses. Just need a chordic keyboard and you'll be a
| full-on Neuromancer/Snow Crash gargoyle :)
| lolive wrote:
| Strange days !
| phs318u wrote:
| Would the latency be good enough for gaming though?
| boltzmann-brain wrote:
| they're wired, so probably.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| Just checking DeckHD, sadly it's still 60hz.
|
| I mostly use SD to stream from my main rig, so i can always
| have >60fps on my SD.
| boltzmann-brain wrote:
| yeah, wish it was higher than 60 hz
| rxyz wrote:
| Can you stream games at over 60fps?
| mrheosuper wrote:
| Yes. I can stream 120fps with moonlight and sunshine
| boltzmann-brain wrote:
| That's kind of misleading though given that the deck
| can't display 120 Hz
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| IMO, there are better ergonomics on competitors. Over a
| thousand + of hours using one, a steam deck is death for your
| wrists in comparison. When I was playing Elden Ring on the SD
| for a few hundred hours, I almost thought I needed to have
| surgery. There are strategies to help with this, rest it on a
| pillow on your lap, or whatever, but you won't experience
| that with some of these.
|
| - https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/handheld/legion-
| go/len106g000...
|
| - https://rog.asus.com/gaming-handhelds-group/
|
| Honestly, I think a gaming laptop and a controller makes more
| sense for most things, if you don't need that little bit of
| increased portability.
| sweetgiorni wrote:
| Glad I'm not the only one with that issue. I ended up
| connecting a Bluetooth controller to my Steam Deck because
| holding it hurt my wrists so much. At that point, why
| bother with the thing?
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I do the same with my Switch 1-- just set the thing up
| with its kickstand on the tray table and use a normal
| pad. No amount of slide-on grips or whatever else really
| make the joycons usable for more than a few minutes with
| adult hands.
| rexysmexy wrote:
| I ended up 3D printing some larger grips to help when I
| have nerve pain flare-ups. Love using the deck with them
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| Yeah the SD has pretty bad ergonomics. It's too wide and
| too heavy. I still like it as a portable system. It's like
| a console I can pack in my bag and plug in to a TV wherever
| I'm staying.
|
| I'd love to see a steamdeck lite, with a similar size and
| weight to the switch. But still with the rounded hand grips
| of the steamdeck. The deck as it is feels like a HN
| designed product with way too much stuff jammed in it with
| no regard to size and weight. The trackpads are cool for
| desktop mode but the space taken up for something so rarely
| used isn't worth it.
| AstroBen wrote:
| as the owner of a Legion Go, I think you're better off with
| the gaming laptop. This thing is just as inconvenient to
| carry (it's big and heavy) and way less powerful
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| My go to for gaming has been Steam Deck on the couch or bed
| though. The whole weight of it NOT on my wrists.
|
| This has been so comfortable that this helped me ignore the
| pain in my arm after a fracture/surgery this year.
| bentcorner wrote:
| I have a g-cloud and it's about 30% lighter than a steam
| deck and pretty ergonomic to hold.
|
| Yes it can't play Cyberpunk but it'll handle native Android
| games, classic emulation, and any cloud streaming very
| well. You can also install moonlight on it and stream full
| fat desktop games too.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I went the other way and got a portable monitor and a
| keyboard & mouse. Plug those into the SD and it's
| effectively a gaming desktop that fits in a backpack.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| This type of setup is very popular at lan parties
| nowadays.
| nullbyte808 wrote:
| Bazzite on PC is much better.
| blahlabs wrote:
| Or Bazzite on a Legion Go if you would like to keep that
| portability.
| alias_neo wrote:
| Or Bazzite on a ROG Ally (X), which is what I run, very
| happy with it.
|
| Though if I was buying it now, I'd want to see what the
| next generation offers.
| cortesoft wrote:
| How did you leave it on the plane!?!
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| Maybe they had a tight connection and were in a hurry.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Sure, but no matter how big of a hurry you are in, you are
| going to be sitting on the plane waiting for the door to
| open and the people in front of you to leave. I always use
| that time to gather everything up, and a steamdeck is
| really quite big.. you can't leave it in the seat back
| pocket or something.
|
| I am not trying to victim blame or anything, I just can't
| imagine a situation where I could forget something so big.
| bartvk wrote:
| It's a shame that the Steam Deck has no such a thing like
| Apple's "Find my".
|
| I used to be a great fan of Prey Project, but I don't think
| it's installable on the Steam Deck without leaving Steam mode.
|
| https://preyproject.com
| nopurpose wrote:
| When I left my phone (out of battery) on a plane, I went to the
| flightradar and checked all airports the airplane was visiting
| after. Then contacted lost&found at each of them individually
| and eventually got my phone back. It was found only a fifth
| flight!
| danso wrote:
| Wow, I would read a write up about that. I think I would've
| given up after the second try
| stavros wrote:
| I think you just read the writeup!
| babuloseo wrote:
| Nice the steamdeck sub that I mod will be happy to hear this.
| boltzmann-brain wrote:
| Which one is it?
| daemonologist wrote:
| Judging by their username, probably r/steamdeck
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| I wouldn't brag about that if I were you.
|
| That sub is mostly pictures of "jUsT bOuGhT a StEaM DeCk", sob
| bait, random steam sales, and rarely ever anything useful
| related to the Deck itself.
|
| Every now and then I go to check top posts from the past month
| to see if anyone has posted anything significant, like the
| DeckMate or EmuDeck or actual useful stuff. Inevitably, it's
| all standard reddit garbage.
| Taek wrote:
| That type of community may not be your cup of tea or what you
| are looking for but that doesn't mean GP shouldn't be proud
| of building it.
|
| The world is plenty big enough for all types of communities.
| Its okay for people to be proud of the things they lead, even
| if they aren't things that are interesting to you or me.
| boltzmann-brain wrote:
| I agree, building a community is very difficult, I've built
| a few myself.
|
| But sometimes something merely existing can prevent other
| things from flourishing, e.g. due to the mechanism of
| Schelling points:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schelling_point
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| I don't have a problem with communities existing that I
| don't care for, but it's furstrating when those low effort
| communities squat on the most relevant search
| terms/domains/subreddits/etc
| bartvk wrote:
| Thanks for your work as a mod. It's a decent sub.
| moelf wrote:
| >Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The
| Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck.
|
| huh? but Steam Deck is just normal Arch Linux with x86_64
| ~~aarch64~~?...
| pxx wrote:
| it's not even aarch64. but what they're saying is they don't
| want to deal with the support nightmare of supporting anything
| but the unmodifiable SteamOS image.
| moelf wrote:
| oh right, it's just AMD Zen2...
| armada651 wrote:
| Yeah that was my take as well, it's more of a nod to the fact
| that you _can_ run it on other devices but you should expect
| not any help from them.
| viraptor wrote:
| Every distro is a bit different though. And there's kernel /
| libc versions and the whole gui server on top of that. Windows
| gives you a few configurations to check, Mac does as well. But
| Linux means hundreds of possible setups before you even get to
| hardware differences. They just don't want to deal with that.
| tapoxi wrote:
| Steam runs all games in a container called the Steam Linux
| Runtime, so the only difference is the kernel and host Mesa
| drivers.
| demonshreder wrote:
| Not to nitpick, there is a 'native' option. Atleast it has
| been available on Arch for many years now (when SteamOS was
| on Debian?). In most cases we just the symlink the newer
| versions of libs to the older versions and the games run
| fine / better.
| clhodapp wrote:
| I think their point is: don't complain to them if you have an
| issue, unless you can reproduce it on the Steam Deck.
|
| They don't want to deal with esoteric Linux bugs.
| babuloseo wrote:
| The trick to playing BG3 is to play it on your deck by streaming,
| you can play so many games via streaming via usb-c to ethernet,
| always wire your house and every room with ethernet PEOPLE.
| m00dy wrote:
| I just finished playing all the acts in the game. An amazing
| game, what can I say ?
| yugioh3 wrote:
| Yeah it really was a revelation. I didn't know much at all
| going in and was constantly amazed.
|
| I've since tried a number of highly touted recent CRPGs and
| RPGs... and gave up on all of them; BG3 really spoiled me I
| guess, but I'm also a pretty selective gamer.
| somenameforme wrote:
| If you have the tolerance for dated visuals a lot of the best
| stuff is in the long since past - Planescape Torment and
| Baldur's Gate 2 are amazing. The Neverwinter Nights series is
| also great. Fallout 2 is probably one of the best games ever
| in terms of atmosphere as well as gameplay, but the visuals
| there are _extremely_ dated. And finally there 's also
| Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura.
| infofarmer wrote:
| Holding Fallout 1/2 as the best gaming experiences of my
| life for a long time, just recently discovered Fallout
| Nevada and Sonora that some kind talent also ported to
| WASM/Web -- and it finally hit the spot for me after ~25
| years.
| PetitPrince wrote:
| > The Neverwinter Nights series is also great
|
| To be noted: the main appeal of Neverwinter Nights 1 is the
| player created content. In particular the main campaign of
| NWN1 is pretty "meh" and is better thought as a showcase of
| what's possible with the scenario toolkit (the expansion -
| what we call now DLC - are better in that regard though).
| The creativity deployed by some creator is quite
| astonishing; shootout to the Bastard of Kosigan (James
| Bond-esque adventures in a kinda alternate historical
| France), and HeX Coda (magipunk setting where you fight as
| a champion of open-source magick against corporate
| wizards).
|
| But as somenameforme noted, you have to content with early
| 2000 production value .
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| Larian's previous game, Divinity Original Sin 2, is pretty
| close. Planescape Torment with a guide is another good one.
|
| The default campaigns in Neverwinter Nights are a mixed bag
| but the fanmade content is amazing.
| outworlder wrote:
| It has a billion different branches and choices you can take.
| It's pretty surprising. Replayability is great.
| Podrod wrote:
| Shame the final act seemed a bit rushed though with the Upper
| City completely axed. Having the coronation in a gatehouse was
| pretty funny.
| gambiting wrote:
| I've played it three times now, start to finish, and I still
| enjoy Divinity 2 a lot more. Story wise BG3 I think has a
| slight edge, but combat wise Divinity is just a much better
| game(imho). Partially this isn't BG3's fault but it's the
| consequence of relying on D&Ds rules for its combat, but
| then.....it was their choice to go that way. BG3 but with
| Divinity's combat system would be my #1 game of all time.
| CivBase wrote:
| > Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform.
|
| This is a huge nitpick but I wish they'd just say "other Linux
| distros" instead of the "Linux platform". It's fine to pick and
| choose one (or a few) popular distro(s) to support, like SteamOS.
| It's not reasonable to expect support for all possible Linux
| software environments. It's already crazy that they support so
| many hardware combinations, even on just Windows.
| pretzel5297 wrote:
| Makes me think they might not have the most knowledgeable
| people on the job. Hopefully they didn't just throw some
| unwilling Windows devs into the unknown.
| acc348 wrote:
| They have native macOS version too.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| I have played a couple hours of BG3 on PlayStation (time-limited
| demo), and a couple hours on my Mac (purchased on Steam), and I
| found the controller UI to be _really_ weird and counterintuitive
| compared to the mouse-driven UI on the desktop computer.
|
| Does it get easier? Does anyone have any suggestions for coming
| to terms with the controller weirdness? I would much rather play
| BG3 on my Steam Deck than on my computer.
| moonshinefe wrote:
| yeah I played bg3 with controller split screen with my wife the
| entire playthrough. Normally, I would've strongly preferred
| KB+M for such a game. We definitely got used to it after
| several hours.
|
| I'm not sure if I can recall any tips other than just keep at
| it and it'll eventually become muscle memory. I don't think
| it's as good as KB+M but it wasn't something that was bugging
| me once we got significantly into the game. YMMV.
| saghm wrote:
| As a Steam Deck player (who mostly streams from my desktop at
| this point but still pretty much exclusively games with
| controller inputs nowadays), I got frustrated with a lot of the
| "automatic" management of the radial menus. Quite often, when
| the game adds a new ability to the radial menus, it completely
| rearranges them, and for some reason it _really_ likes to
| automatically add things even if you manually remove them, so
| it becomes very unwieldly especially for spellcasters at higher
| levels. My frustration reached the point where I realized I
| either needed this problem solved or I just wouldn 't be able
| to play anymore, which was disappointing for me given how much
| I've enjoyed it, so I decided to bit the bullet and start
| developing a mod to try to impose some semblance of order on
| the radial menus myself. Unfortunately it relies heavily on the
| Script Extender, which isn't available on consoles (and also
| doesn't work on the Steam Deck native version, since it's
| provided as a DLL that gets loaded by the game and presumably
| would require a non-trivial amount of effort to port to a
| native Linux shared library), but so far I've implemented a
| number of specific settings (which can each individually be
| enabled or disabled) around automatically preventing changes to
| the radial menus in certain certain circumstances and clearing
| them in certain other ones (e.g. for new games or when changing
| ca character's class). Most recently, I added a way to define a
| custom keybinding to manually lock the radial menus for the
| currently controlled character until manually toggled off by
| hitting the keybinding again (which currently doesn't persist
| past a reload, but I'm fairly close to being done integrating
| it with a Script Extender feature to preserve arbitrary data
| alongside save files so that it's possible to save them so that
| they get restored to the same state they were when a given save
| was made. Given the reception when I starting publishing this,
| there seem to be a small but passionate set of players with the
| same frustrations as me, which helped motivate me to spend the
| time to keep working on it.
|
| To me, the modding ecosystem is probably one of the two most
| important things about this game (the other being that Larian
| seems to be pretty awesome as far as studios go nowadays, with
| their CEO taking a firm stance against "crunch" to get games
| out and in favor of the model of offline games that don't
| require paid DLC or microtransactions, as well as their
| continued support of the modding ecosystem itself). Long before
| I ever considered writing any mods myself, I started referring
| to BG3 as similar to Skyrim in that the mods will likely keep
| things fresh long after new official content stops coming out.
| I still think this is true, but I also keep being surprised
| just how much work they're continuing to put into the game even
| with new content presumably finally having come to an end.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| You can just plug a keyboard and mouse into the Deck if you
| prefer that.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| tbh, I've thought of doing this, but it seems kind of
| outlandish given that I primarily play my Steam Deck in bed.
| I'd rather just take my laptop with me.
| drclegg wrote:
| I got used to it after a few hours. M&K is probably the better
| experience overall, sure.
| klardotsh wrote:
| This 12GB update managed to trigger the bizarre Steam behavior on
| my Linux desktop where the game patching process pegs all cores
| to 100% and thrashes the disk so hard the system eventually stops
| allowing eg. launching new processes (though the system isn't
| frozen stiff like running out of RAM - switching Niri desktops is
| fine, but launching eg. htop hangs forever, and eventually
| browsers stop responding). After walking away for two hours and
| coming back to the system still in this state, I gave up and
| hard-rebooted with the power button.
|
| But if you survive the 12GB update process, I'm sure this is
| great news :) Maybe I'll finally have to make some time to play
| this game - bought it two years ago, but never ended up making
| time for it, despite having played Cyberpunk 2077 a time and a
| half, and most of Factorio: Space Age, since then.
| skavi wrote:
| A bit of a tangent, but I've seen these issues mentioned before
| and to me it's always felt like more the OS's fault than
| Steam's. Like shouldn't Steam be free to express full
| utilization of the available resources? And isn't it the OS's
| job to manage QoS?
|
| What am I missing here?
| colechristensen wrote:
| Systems tend to not have particularly strong guardrails
| against pathological access patterns which aren't trying to
| use 100% but a large multiple of that or are abusing some
| subsystem or another. The application is almost always also
| unresponsive.
|
| Putting up those guardrails temporarily hides big problems
| more often than it avoids needing to have them solved.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| BEAM handles this very gracefully. Shame preemptive
| scheduling isn't more common..
| kaztal wrote:
| Update was intense for me too. 12 gb with hotfixes, downloaded
| after kids had gone to bed. It took about 30 minutes to apply.
| That was about the allotted time for me.
| mattmanser wrote:
| I get that on windows when there's no enough space on my disk
| to install a whole other copy of the game being patched.
|
| So for BG3, if you don't have 150Gb free on your disk, steam
| will download it on a different disk and then transfer it over,
| thrashing you disk.
|
| It's bizarre, incredibly annoying, behaviour and I wish it
| would just ask so I'd know that was about to happen and just
| clean up some space. Or refuse the upgrade.
|
| But steam want to force upgrades on users before you can play
| anything, which for single player games is incredibly
| frustrating. I get why they do it, but it's another one of
| those things where you feel like you aren't in control of the
| thing you paid a lot of money for.
| OtomotO wrote:
| Can you no longer disable updates on a per game basis?
|
| You could do that in the past and I did occasionally for
| single player games because my internet connection wasn't the
| best and I did not want to waste the little time I could
| allocate for gaming.
| whs wrote:
| I had that with MHW and I nailed it down to shader (fossilize-
| replay - https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Fossilize).
|
| From my guess, Steam support Vulkan shader pre-compilation so
| that you don't have to wait in game (like the infamous 10 min
| Monster Hunter Wilds startup delay). They also seems to also be
| able to download the compilation cache from Steam if someone
| already have done the process on the same GPU + driver version.
| Since fewer Windows games use Vulkan this feature is often not
| used, but on Linux most games will run on Vulkan (esp. Proton
| games with dxvk) you may experience the process more often.
| pretzel5297 wrote:
| Background shader pre-compilation does not use all cores by
| default and the only way to change that is to manually edit a
| file. So unless you're consciously changing it, you won't
| have this problem. It'll only use all cores when you launch
| the game.
|
| I have been having the issue with the system hanging up when
| steam is doing big writes. I had assumed it was due to
| something wrong with my drive and was contemplating
| reformatting it.
| voodooEntity wrote:
| I have massive doubts about the "They also seems to also be
| able to download the compilation cache from Steam if someone
| already have done the process on the same GPU + driver
| version."
|
| This would imply that if I already calculated the shaders for
| the current game state than i could reuse them and not have
| to go through the whole compilation step (if no changes
| happen inbetween).
|
| Matter of fact, i have to recompile the shaders on every game
| start for every game, even if i restart the game just x times
| in a row.
|
| For context: using linux/debian and basically running
| everything on vulcan
| izacus wrote:
| What are your doubts exactly?
|
| Shader precompilation is a standard thing to do now -
| consoles mostly ship precompiled shaders for their GPU +
| driver combo, Steam Deck will also download precompiled
| shader for its Linux + AMD + driver version combo.
|
| The infrastructure for that Steam side is there and is in
| active use.
| whs wrote:
| It's documented here
| https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/35534?l=
|
| I don't think I ever found more documents on this feature.
| I assume it might need lots of users with matching result
| to ensure that bad actor can't upload malicious shader.
| p_l wrote:
| That depends on game actually passing exactly the same
| parameters to shader compiler and your GPU driver actually
| building and using the cache.
|
| What fossilize does is it generates data of all the
| parameters passed to shader compilation, and then can
| trigger "offline" compilation before you run the game.
| xd1936 wrote:
| No reason to doubt nor speculate. It's been a feature of
| Steam since 2017.
|
| https://www.techpowerup.com/239687/latest-steam-client-
| beta-...
| baq wrote:
| The linux kernel's handling of IO under memory pressure is
| abysmal. I have to tune dirty ratios and write back ages and
| swap and whatnot just to get the system to not hard lock when
| running multiple node microservices in stages which run fine,
| just slower, when starting them all at once on a MacBook.
|
| Disclaimer: I don't even like macOS.
| hackernudes wrote:
| I've had similar problems but no amount of tweaking vm and
| vfs cache settings helped. Swap or not, both 32gb and 128gb
| of ram. Manually reclaiming memory would un-lock the system
| (/sys/fs/cgroup/memory.reclaim).
|
| I wrote a user space memory reclaimer and have not got a
| lockup since. https://gist.github.com/EBADBEEF/f168458028f684
| a91148f4d3e79...
| baq wrote:
| I don't know how to give more visibility to this hack, but
| it deserves it. Bookmarking and deploying on my boxen.
| seviu wrote:
| I had to free 100GB so that it has enough disk space.
|
| I am amazed this game is even playable on the steam deck. Was
| trying to find an excuse to play it after cyberpunk. I guess
| this one it is...
| mhitza wrote:
| Are you using full disk encryption (LUKS) without enabling the
| Cloudflare contributed flags? Because that's the most common
| syndrome of high IO causing high CPU usage until lockup.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| If you survived the warzone of your desktop's update process,
| BG3 is absolutely worth diving into
| johnbellone wrote:
| That pausing issue is plaguing me with several other titles. I
| _think_ it tracks with background downloading of game updates,
| but haven't had enough hours to entirely confirm it. What I did
| notice is that after installing Decky there are background jobs
| from some of the plugins that run native Linux updates
| (flatpak) and snapshotting.
| energy123 wrote:
| Solasta COTM is a similar game with good steam deck support
| (native controls) and many community made campaigns for
| replayability.
| mbStavola wrote:
| I had tried to run BG3 on my Steam Deck a couple months back. It
| ran... okay. Lot's of hitches and I had to tune things way way
| way down, but somewhat playable.
|
| I'm very grateful that they took the time to build a native Steam
| Deck release for the game, not really something I had ever
| expected. Hopefully with this I can actually jump in and enjoy
| the game!
| october8140 wrote:
| I played the entire game on Steam Deck and had a great
| experience. 100+ hours
| whatevaa wrote:
| No offense, but some people requirements are really, really
| low. I played God of War on Steam Deck and it was not a good
| experience, it was at the bottom of 'okay', and only because
| at that moment I wasn't at home to play on better hardware.
|
| This is the reason why I don't believe when people say that
| it runs great without trying it myself.
| mbStavola wrote:
| > No offense, but some people requirements are really,
| really low.
|
| I think you kinda hit the nail on the head, but I believe
| there is an extra dimension to this: desire.
|
| For BG3, it looked fun and I had good memories of BG2 so I
| was _interested_ in playing it. After tuning the settings a
| bunch and not being able to get a consistent framerate /
| not have micro-freezing, I just said "oh well, I'll play it
| on some other platform in the future." I cared about BG3,
| but not _that_ much.
|
| This is in contrast to Elden Ring Nightreign, which _also_
| had issues. I was able to get it to a somewhat stable 30FPS
| and celebrated that success before dumping 100+ hours into
| the game. Why? Well, because I love FromSoft games! I
| really really really wanted to play the game and was
| willing to put up with a somewhat subpar experience in
| order to get it. BG3, among other games, is just not that
| exciting for me personally so my tolerance of technical
| hitches is very different.
|
| ... which brings us right back to this native release.
| Hopefully the improvements we see are enough to get me over
| that "hill" and actually enjoying the game. I have the
| update queued on my deck now so I can try it out after
| work.
| tikotus wrote:
| I recently started it on Deck. At first I thought it was
| ok, perhaps a bit blurry and hard to read. Then I put it on
| the TV and oh my when those pixels came at me! I don't
| consider myself a hifi person, I really don't care much
| about such things. But that pixel mush was borderline
| unplayable! And I couldn't up the quality without making
| the game run unbearably slow. I don't understand why
| everyone is saying it works great or even fine on SD.
| Perhaps others don't really use an external screen for it?
| But now I can't get comfortable looking at it on the small
| screen either...
| KolibriFly wrote:
| Really didn't expect a native build either, especially post-
| launch. Huge props to Larian for going the extra mile
| pmarreck wrote:
| Huge props to the dev who burned his free time to do this,
| and to Larian for _then_ backing it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| This is how it is supposed to be, not by doing API translation.
|
| Kudos to Larian.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Let's keep in mind that this API translation is more performent
| then the original API though (as you can see from the ROG ally
| windows vs steamOS)
|
| outstanding work by larien however, I just felt strange reading
| your comment which somehow implied that the translation is the
| reason for bad performance, when it is actually _more
| performent_ then the original
| pjmlp wrote:
| Naturally, because it doesn't take into account that the OS
| does much less.
|
| Less see how those benchmarks compare, now that just like
| with netbooks, Microsoft is finally acknowledging they need
| to react.
|
| The translation is the reason SteamDeck will suffer the same
| fate as OS/2, and netbooks, building castles on other
| companies kingdoms.
|
| For that not to happen, the SteamDeck needs to be sold on its
| actual capabilities, not by pretending to be someone's else
| platform.
| bigyabai wrote:
| You suuuuure love to talk...
| https://flightless.yobson.xyz/benchmark/11
| drnick1 wrote:
| It's worth noting that the native Linux version of games is often
| buggy and a far worse experience than the Windows version running
| on Proton. Valve itself is infamous for this: the Left 4 Dead 2
| native game has multiple very annoying bugs that have been known
| for 15 years, and that Valve still hasn't fixed. Unfortunately,
| there is (another) bug that prevents the Windows version running
| on Proton from connecting to VAC-secure servers or I would have
| ditched the Linux version long ago.
|
| At this point game devs should just discontinue the native
| version if they aren't going to properly support it and just make
| sure the game runs flawlessly on Proton.
| arcfour wrote:
| I've had the opposite experience, getting great performance in
| TF2 for example and even Rust on Linux (but with Rust you
| couldn't connect to EAC secured servers, so, useless outside of
| testing stuff on a private server).
| izacus wrote:
| Is this the case for BG3?
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| This is specifically a Steam Deck version and _not_ a general
| Linux version, so it's likely not applicable in this case.
| Think of it more like a console native port.
| gpderetta wrote:
| I would be surprised if it was hard to run it on a generic
| Linux.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| Often the linux builds do work when they are released, but
| then an OS update changes some dynamic linked library which
| then breaks them.
| a_humean wrote:
| Except valve runs these games in well defined container
| runtimes to avoid these issues:
| https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-
| tools/-/b...
| pipes wrote:
| That is fascinating. So if I have a Linux version of say
| a game or emulator, and it seems unstable on steam deck,
| I could try running it in this container?
| 0dayz wrote:
| I believe steam deck already does this, if not yes you
| can.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Pinch me when a single flake.nix takes equal care of
| this.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| Somehow it's still an issue. Was a while ago now but
| somehow an update to dbus(?) broke Worms WMD and the
| publisher just never fixed it. The solution was to just
| run the Windows version in Proton which works fine.
| izacus wrote:
| So the answer is no?
| stavros wrote:
| It's a "yes, for a while".
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| Yes, BG3 crashed my Linux computer continuously so I could
| not even play it until I bought a ps5
| Kudos wrote:
| I think you might be confused, there wasn't a linux-native
| version until yesterday.
| WithinReason wrote:
| The SD version crashes the steam overlay. I didn't check
| further than the menu yet.
| Kudos wrote:
| If you want to play on Nvidia, probably yes.
| Levitating wrote:
| That's kind of the state of Linux in general. Binaries need to
| be build against the correct distribution and version. Even
| static binaries are a gamble.
| vanviegen wrote:
| Actual static binaries (so including libc) should run just
| fine anywhere, right? The Linux kernel has always had a very
| stable ABI.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Yes but that limits you to command line applications. GL
| and X11 (and I assume Wayland) are always linked
| dynamically. Granted, those don't suffer from glibc's "DLL
| version hell", but not sure what happens when you link the
| main executable statically against musl and then load DLLs
| which dynamically link glibc.
|
| Another option is to dynamically link against an old glibc
| version, the Zig toolchain makes that easy also for C/C++
| projects.
| electroly wrote:
| If you statically link musl, dlopen doesn't work at all.
| You can't load any shared library.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| glibc doesn't suffer from DLL version hell _as long as
| you are not doing anything stupid_ (like using private
| symbols). If you commit to using just the "C library"
| bits you can compile a binary linked against glibc on a
| distro from 1998 and it will work on modern distros just
| fine.
|
| There are many issues with libraries breaking backwards
| compatibility on Linux (like pretty much all GUI ones)
| but glibc, X11, OpenGL (and to some extent SDL - it used
| to not be like that, but in recent years they made
| "SDL1->SDL2" wrappers and there is or will be a
| "SDL2->SDL3" wrapper too) are fine. I'm not sure about
| Vulkan but i'd guess that is fine too.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Last I tried the problem was linking against glibc on a
| new Linux distro and then attempting to run that
| executable on an old Linux distro which doesn't have a
| recent-enough glibc installed (usually Debian with their
| software stack from the last century).
|
| There's probably an obscure linker trick to force an
| older glibc version number, but if that's the case it
| really should be the default since the C stdlib is
| supposed to be ABI backward compatible anyway.
| palata wrote:
| Well the "trick" is to build with the oldest glibc
| version you want to support. Nothing more.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| This isn't just a glibc thing but something you can find
| with any shared library on Linux. For example if you are
| using a rolling distro and make a build that links
| against Qt6, the produced binary may not work in another
| distro that has a slightly older Qt6.
|
| As palata mentioned the "trick" is to build using the
| oldest version you plan to target. You can use a Docker
| image with, say, Debian (which has official docker images
| going back to Squeeze released in 2011) to build the
| binary and release that.
|
| AFAIK there are some tools that allow you to fudge
| symbols, etc to allow you to use whatever you have on
| your system but these feel like brittle solutions and the
| easiest one is to just build on an older/stable release.
| It isn't like it takes more than a second to make a VM or
| docker image anyway :-P.
| gpderetta wrote:
| It can't be the default, otherwise using any new feature
| would fail.
| p_l wrote:
| glibc very much suffers from version hell, because:
|
| a) glibc will drop older versioned symbols over time
| making your binary not work at all
|
| b) glibc owns ld.so and is not afraid to make
| incompatible changes, which is why running Sid Meyer's
| Alpha Centauri linux port requires that you dig out not
| just libc, but the entire dynamic linking stack and know
| how to bypass default executable interpreter in ELF
| files.
| pmarreck wrote:
| ...aaaaand stuff like this is exactly why NixOS is the
| only sensible Linux distro
| vanviegen wrote:
| NixOS removes outdated packages from its repo pretty
| rapidly... :-/
| maxlin wrote:
| Not true even for all apps having just libc.
|
| I wanted to port my semi-minimal 3D ECS game engine ~(10k
| lines) to a minimal distro, so I decided on Alpine after
| figuring Arch is actually very bloated on comparison.
|
| I had to recompile even the single-executable command line
| prebuild system (premake5) for musl. Musl is a more minimal
| version of libc.
|
| Got it to work fine after that, building a few components
| from source and getting a few like sdl from the
| distribution's repos. (also had to of course install
| relevant driver bits to get opengl working as the distro is
| truly minimal)
| ernst_klim wrote:
| I'm not sure this is true tho.
|
| The games by Loki Software are still running great for me.
| It's a matter of skill and discipline. SDL, OpenGL and alike
| are very stable.
|
| The problems start when developers start to use lots of small
| third-party libraries and depend on particular versions of
| them, but IIRC on Windows it's also solved by simply shipping
| all the libs with the game.
| atemerev wrote:
| Discipline? In gamedev? The industry which famously modeled
| trains as hats and was proud of it?
| MountainTheme12 wrote:
| And why is that a problem if it works? What if I told you
| that games also don't simulate each atom individually?
| atemerev wrote:
| Absolutely not a problem, in fact, I enjoy this. But
| asking game developers for "discipline" is akin to asking
| frontend developers for forward compatibility - simply
| not in their culture.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Meanwhile I love the "trains as hats" hack.
| atemerev wrote:
| I love it too, but what game developers never have, never
| will and probably even never should -- is discipline
| a2128 wrote:
| Steam takes care of the distribution and version mumbo jumbo
| for you with their runtime
|
| https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime
|
| https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-
| tools/-/b...
| asmor wrote:
| Not entirely, but it's a lot better than 1.0/Legacy.
|
| https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-
| tools/-/b...
|
| I hope they'll drop 32-bit support in the runtime with the
| next major version. More and more distributions are
| dropping it or are thinking about it. Any new game should
| really use 64.
| kokada wrote:
| Thanks, this is very interesting. So the old native runtime
| was basically a messy hacky using LD_LIBRARY_PATH and
| Ubuntu 12.04 libraries, and now they're using containers
| based on Debian 10 (Steam Runtime 2 'soldier') or Debian 11
| (Steam Runtime 3 'sniper').
|
| Edit: Valve actually have some very interesting documents
| about their compatibility environments:
|
| - https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-
| runtime/blob/master/d...
|
| - https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steamrt/-/blob/steam
| rt/...
|
| - https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steamrt/-/blob/steam
| rt/...
|
| - https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steamrt/-/blob/steam
| rt/...
| haunter wrote:
| Time to link the famous "Win32 Is The Only Stable ABI on Linux"
| https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/
|
| 500 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624
| slightwinder wrote:
| Oh, is that why steam still depends on trashy 32bit-libs?
| Last week, after updating my Debian, steam broke because of
| that s**, and now I have to think about using a separate
| windows-machine just for this, until steam removes the 32bit-
| dependencies (which seems to be planned for 2026).
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that's an entirely
| fair comparison?
|
| The syscall abi has been stable for decades, and any game
| that included glibc or compiled with musl keeps running just
| fine?
| p_l wrote:
| You need to include not just glibc, you also need to
| include ld.so sometimes, because older libs can become
| incompatible with current ld.so (Linux port of SMAC for
| example), and I fear what it might do sometimes when trying
| to link openGL or Vulkan driver that links to newer glibc.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| Unless a studio is fully committed to proper Linux support
| (like, Feral-level), they might as well just optimize for
| Proton and call it a day
| pmarreck wrote:
| One of the reasons Proton has been so successful as a dev
| target is because the Windows API is not changing anymore and
| is thus stable.
|
| The same, as I understand it, cannot be said about the Linux-
| native API. SteamOS may have stabilized it somewhat, but
| there's a reason why the readme on their site for this
| basically says "it may run on Linux proper, but we're not
| supporting it except on Steam Deck"
| spaceywilly wrote:
| I would tend to agree, I think dev time is better spent
| supporting Proton. I have even seen benchmarks where Proton on
| Linux outperforms Windows. As a Steam Deck owner, Proton is
| fantastic.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2024/08/21/linux...
| jonny_eh wrote:
| I started playing Silksong on my Steam Deck using the linux
| build. Only to discover that it maxed out at 720p (docked), and
| wouldn't bind right/left trigger for my controller. Enabling
| proton (to play the windows build) worked great. Controller
| worked flawlessly and the game ran smoothly at 1080p.
| rb666 wrote:
| If there was ever a game to play with KB+M, this is it. I don't
| get the need to stuff everything into a handheld. It's not Mario
| kart!
| darthcircuit wrote:
| I love my steam deck over my desktop pc anymore. Once I had
| kids, I never got to have my desk in a place that's safe from
| being climbed on, so I hooked it up to the tv. But then they
| started taking over the tv, and the only way I could game was
| on a handheld. I mostly play older stuff, so it's plenty
| powerful for what I do most of the time. I still have the
| desktop and and Xbox to offset anything else.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I agree with you. Steamdeck is amazing but people are often
| over-enthusiastic about what a handheld device can do.
|
| The most comfortable and consistent gaming experience is still
| a regular stationary PC. But if you really want to play Civ5 on
| a train then sure the Steamdeck is there for you. I just never
| felt the need to game something that bad.
| gambiting wrote:
| I just don't want to sit at my desk after a whole day of
| work, and I've got an RTX5090 PC for some stupid reason. I'd
| much rather play games on the sofa on my steam deck sitting
| next to my wife or play in bed.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > The most comfortable and consistent gaming experience is
| still a regular stationary PC.
|
| That would be playing console on an 80 inch screen from a
| couch.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| I just don't want to play anything with a kb and mouse anymore
| because it just feels like being at work when I'm sitting at a
| desk using the same setup I just spent all day on.
| KJBweb wrote:
| THIS.
|
| 1000x this.
|
| When I grab the deck it's downtime mode for me now,
| keyboard/mouse time is work or side-project mode.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Honestly, I prefer the Steam Deck over M+KB for BG3. I beat the
| game twice on Steam Deck before I sold mine, in fact - entirely
| in airports during layovers while traveling for work.
|
| My current obsession is Satisfactory.
| energy123 wrote:
| Those back muscles aren't going to rest themselves
| Podrod wrote:
| There's no "need" to, just some people's preference. Also you
| can play the game just fine on PlayStation or Xbox using a game
| pad too.
| gambiting wrote:
| I honestly went from being a hardcore PC only KB+M is king kind
| of guy to genuienly not playing games unless they can be played
| on a controller. After 8 hours of work at my desk I just want
| to slouch and play comfortably, and BG3s controller support is
| really well done.
| janfoeh wrote:
| Hey, some of us use these things exactly like that. I have an
| Asus ROG Ally, which runs steamOS and never leaves its dock,
| KB+M and monitor.
|
| I would have gotten a mini PC, but strangely enough the Ally
| was the cheapest steamOS-compatible option I could find.
| opan wrote:
| You've got two trackpads, gyro, 4 extra buttons on the back to
| bind, and Steam Input lets you make custom radial (or non-
| radial) menus with entries that can press any keyboard key or
| key combo for you (which you can bind to the trackpads). It's
| honestly nothing like using an Xbox controller if that's what
| you're imagining.
|
| Mario Kart is also a funny example as it's one of the few
| racing games that makes no use of analog triggers for
| acceleration, so you really wouldn't miss much playing it on a
| keyboard.
| thefz wrote:
| This is a gigantic effort from Larian, who among all things is
| still updating its software instead of resting on its own
| laurels.
|
| But the Deck is limited in hardware. It makes sense that it has
| some difficulties running gigantic games and is more aimed
| towards simpler games.
|
| In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware
| leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with
| minimum settings.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| The Steam deck is really not that limited. Every game could be
| made to run well on it if some time was spent actually making
| the low settings work well. Something often skipped on modern
| games which optimise only for people with a $1000 GPU chugging
| 400w.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| It's not like we have seen anything in gaming that wouldn't
| be possible on PS3/Xbox360 era hardware, certainly not in
| terms of complexity.
|
| Just remember that stuff like red dead redemption ran on
| those things with all of 512 MB of unified memory. It ran and
| looked better than borderlands 4 does on current consoles.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Deck can run witcher 3 and mh:world decently (maybe some
| hiccup and lower graphic setting). There should be not a
| big problem to make games run on steam deck (ignoring
| controller support since it's a separate matter).
| LoganDark wrote:
| Portal RTX might not be possible on that hardware without
| some severe compromises. But then again, RTX is pretty much
| Brute Force: The Renderer
| jon-wood wrote:
| Portal RTX isn't a new game, its Portal on supermax
| settings, so the original point on making sure low
| settings work still stands.
| teamonkey wrote:
| I think you're looking back with rose-tinted glasses.
|
| The 360/PS3 was a huge jump forward but very limited by
| today's standards. RDR was one of the better looking games
| of the generation but could not maintain a steady 30fps at
| 1080p/i (and I'm not sure it was even true 1080).
|
| The PC version came later, had higher resolution textures
| and other graphical improvements so it compares more
| favourably to modern games when you play it today. It still
| had problems running on all but the highest-end PCs of the
| time.
|
| Of course even low-end PCs can run it without breaking a
| sweat, because they've become much more powerful.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Most Xbox360 and PS3 games were 720p at 30fps. 720p was
| mostly fine because 1080p TVs were luxury items back
| then.
|
| The performance problems in modern games are often not
| caused by fillrate-vs-resolution bottlenecks though, but
| by poor engine architecture decisions (triggering shader
| recompilations in the hot path).
| teamonkey wrote:
| Shader recompilation causes stuttering not general
| performance problems. Shader complexity will though,
| which is a function of render quality.
|
| But I'm confused about why you think fill rate isn't an
| issue? If you are now upgrading from 1080p to 4K your GPU
| needs at the very least 4x the pixel pushing power and
| even then that's only to maintain the same detail; you
| bought a 4K screen for _more_ detail.
| everdrive wrote:
| > If you are now upgrading from 1080p to 4K
|
| Presumably people do this because they hate money; as you
| say, it's much harder to make the pixels just slightly
| more crisp and you'll pay dearly for the privilege.
| teamonkey wrote:
| I think people do it because they want the best quality
| but they underestimate how much compute power is needed
| to drive it properly.
| foldor wrote:
| I might be misremembering, but I seem to remember most
| games of that era were 540p scaled to 1080p. 720p would
| have been an upgrade. But your point still stands.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Remarkably RDR1 was only released for PCs late last year,
| ~14 years after the original release.
|
| Maybe that is even related to it's good performance on
| consoles back then: Rockstar invested a lot of
| development time and sacrificed portability for
| performance. Basically the opposite of what modern games
| achieve with unreal 5.
| dahauns wrote:
| Yeah, sure...I'd like to see something like MSFS2024 or
| BeamNG.drive running on a PS3.
| izacus wrote:
| Cyberpunk 2077 proved that one wrong very easily :D
| TheCapeGreek wrote:
| I tried CP2077's Deck mode but it really seemed like a
| tech demo level of "you _could_ do this if you really
| wanted to " more than it actually being playable.
|
| The game felt like it had significant input lag, and at
| 720p with upscaling text becomes very hard to read. The
| game's visual style of "glitch" effects also translates
| badly with upscaling and I really had a tough time
| actually understanding what I'm looking at on the screen.
|
| Perhaps the situation is better on OLED.
| izacus wrote:
| Yeah, and famously CP2077 isn't really playable on PS4
| and Xbox One era hardware. Even HDD equipped machines
| need to downgrade the streaming.
|
| The game on new machines is quite impressive, quite
| unlike anything else made.
| goosedragons wrote:
| I thought it was playable on the LCD Deck. I did turn
| things down below what the Steam Deck preset was at. It
| certainly wasn't the smoothest 100% of the time but it
| was better than Fallout New Vegas on a PS3 IMO. It still
| holds up pretty well against the Switch 2 version in
| handheld mode.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvGQik3m6ag
| piltdownman wrote:
| The problem is how horribly unoptimised Unreal Engine 5
| itself is - with that sort of foundation there's not a lot
| you can do. It's a GTX-1050 equivalent GPU, there's only so
| much that can be expected of it.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| UE has always been a damn huge toolbox. Yes, sure, you can
| just cobble together all sort of libraries and get a
| visually _very_ appealing game or, if you want,
| photorealistic rendering decent enough to back these giant
| virtual studios for triple-A blockbuster movies, but you
| will need the hardware to match if you want performance.
|
| If you want performance on everyday hardware, there is no
| way (and I'd say this holds true for _any_ engine, not just
| UE5!) that you dig down into the engine an the libraries
| and invest the money in testing to tune the performance
| appropriately.
| teamonkey wrote:
| To make the point, if you turn the next-gen Nanite and
| Lumen features off, UE5 will typically be faster (more
| optimised!) than UE4.
|
| And don't get me wrong, those features are great, but
| they're not intended for low-end hardware or where fps is
| a priority.
| izacus wrote:
| When EVERY game stutters and has the same kind of issues,
| then you can't put a blame on individual developers.
|
| This isn't a case of "these developers are lazy", UE5
| issues are the case of "every single UE5 released game
| has shader stutter issues on PC". That's an issue with
| engine architecture and its APIs, not an individual
| thing.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > This isn't a case of "these developers are lazy", UE5
| issues are the case of "every single UE5 released game
| has shader stutter issues on PC". That's an issue with
| engine architecture and its APIs, not an individual
| thing.
|
| Just because an engine offers you a way to shoot yourself
| in the foot with a sawn off shotgun, you can't blame the
| engine maker when you do shoot yourself in the foot with
| a sawn off shotgun and end up with a bleeding ugly stump.
|
| The thing is, of course game studios will go for "we want
| to use ALLLLLL the newest features, we want to show off
| with Nanite and god knows what else". Who wouldn't? But
| game studios aren't willing to put in the effort
| surrounding such an implementation to properly tune it.
|
| And it's not just tuning engine components for what it's
| worth - often enough the culprit ends up being
| ridiculously oversized textures, there's _nothing else_
| that could cause dozens of gigabytes worth of patches
| [1], and it 's not a new complaint either [2].
|
| [1] https://www.neogaf.com/threads/days-gone-whats-up-
| with-the-r...
|
| [2] https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/are-game-patch-
| sizes-becom...
| unionpivo wrote:
| It's not that I think that UE5 is good for low end
| hardware, it's not.
|
| One of the reasons that a lot of studios struggle with
| bad performance on UE5, is because a lot of studios,
| fired their most experienced devs and hired bunch of
| cheaper new programmers, because they bought into the
| whole make game with blueprints idea. I have several
| friends (I know just one datapoint ), that were in games
| industry from 6 to 12 years that got fired, just for the
| studio to replace them with cheaper more inexperienced
| devs.
|
| Baicly UE5 overpromised how easy it was. You still get
| some great working games that use UE5, but this are from
| studios that have experienced devs.
| teamonkey wrote:
| It's not _terrible_ at low-end hardware. Fortnite has
| been able to run on phones for a long time now. It's not
| as lightweight as Unity or Godot by any means and they
| still remain the optimal choice for low-end platforms.
|
| What you can't do is hit compile out of the box and
| expect it to work well on those low-end platforms,
| because it will try to use all the high-end features if
| it thinks it's allowed to.
|
| I don't think it exactly overpromises how easy it is, but
| unlike a lot of software it has a learning curve that
| seems gentle at first and then exponentially increases.
| It's high-end AAA-grade development software aimed at
| professionals, it expects you to know what you're doing.
| bob1029 wrote:
| UE is easier to ruin a project with but it's not inherently
| cursed.
|
| The real reason many of these games run like shit is over
| reliance on real time lighting systems. RT lights are easy.
| It's easy to throw a bunch of artists into a box and hope
| for the best. A complete idiot can make a scene mostly look
| good without much thinking. Baked lights require a lot of
| anticipation and planning. It impacts iteration time, etc.
| The tradeoff being that this is orders of magnitude more
| performant than RT lights. Imagine watching Toy Story after
| the offline render vs attempting to do it live. This is
| literally the same scaling problem.
|
| https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-
| engine/...
| Perz1val wrote:
| It has limited performance, but it is also very limited by
| the display resolution, so it kind of cancels out
| KronisLV wrote:
| Or in the case of Borderlands 4 and a plethora of other
| Unreal Engine 5 titles: they're optimized for nothing and
| there aren't even options to turn off most of the expensive
| graphical effects, despite the engine being able to scale
| down to mobile devices.
| izacus wrote:
| Yeah, UE5 games don't even run well on 5090s these days -_-
| KronisLV wrote:
| For anyone doubting this, here's some receipts:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoSoElmw--M
|
| This is absolutely unacceptable and if this happens with
| nearly every big release, then that also speaks badly of
| the engine itself. Similarly to how languages like C++
| are very powerful and can be used to great effect... and
| people almost inevitably still write code that has memory
| safety issues. That comparison should make a few ears
| perk up, my point is that fewer developers should use
| Unreal Engine 5 if they can't use it well (same as with
| the languages).
|
| Frankly, I place more trust in studios that have their
| own engines or use literally anything other than UE5,
| like what happened to KDC:2, a modern game that looks
| good and runs great across a wide variety of hardware. Or
| how they fixed Cyberpunk 2077, it took a while to get
| there but now both the visuals and performance are quite
| good across the board.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I can't imagine how shit space marine 2 would run if it
| was built on ue5.
| energy123 wrote:
| That's true for GPU bound games but with CPU bound games like
| BG3 in Act 3 there's no easy toggle on the user side, and
| often no easy toggle on the dev side either, because the
| nature of the game necessitates CPU intensive work.
| LaGrange wrote:
| Yeah. I just ran Goblin Cleanup, Mars First Logistics and
| Peak on a Framework 12 - that's an intel integrated gpu. They
| all ran fine. Just a solid reminder that you can actually
| make a fun and good looking game without asking the player to
| spend hundreds to thousands of euros on future land waste.
| WithinReason wrote:
| BG3 runs well on the steam deck, you can even run it in 1080 at
| 30 FPS which is sufficient for this type of game.
| adammarples wrote:
| From what I've heard it really struggles when you get to
| Baldur's Gate itself. Which I haven't got to yet :)
| nicce wrote:
| I would imagine this update tranfers to general Linux well? Not
| a small thing.
| jansommer wrote:
| Already runs smooth on Linux (Wine)
| Podrod wrote:
| Or just Proton
| nicce wrote:
| Yes, but native is always native.
| gambiting wrote:
| Native doesn't automatically mean better - quite a few
| examples of games running better on proton than with
| native executables(and yes then we can start arguing that
| it just means the native port is done poorly, but I'm
| just saying don't assume native will always run better).
| keyringlight wrote:
| It seems like a similar argument around the popularity of
| third party engines, whether studios should use Unreal,
| or whether they have the expertise/resources to change to
| and use another engine, or make their own bespoke engine,
| and if that will produce better results.
| nicce wrote:
| I think that is not fair comparison. Proton adds
| additional layer which can be completely removed and
| affects the runtime performance. Switching different game
| engine changes the layer implementation, instead of
| removing.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| When Proton started to get good, there were multiple
| stories of small game studios just dropping their bespoke
| Linux builds because the Windows->Proton version ran much
| much faster and required zero effort from them.
| distances wrote:
| Proton version often works much better than a native
| port. So I now always just force that on even if there's
| a native version.
| nicce wrote:
| Proton version will always work better if someone does
| not show an example and encourage the usage of native
| support. With Proton you are guaranteed to never reach
| the optimal potential, or get full advantages of the
| Linux/Wayland ecosystem. While with native versions you
| have at least the chance to get in there.
|
| It is like judging someone for taking an advantage of the
| new CPU instructions that accelerate processing because
| general instructions are already good enough.
| svl wrote:
| Sadly they explicitly don't support that. :(
|
| > Now that there is a Steam Deck Native build, is Baldur's
| Gate 3 supported on Linux?
|
| > Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The
| Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck.
| rnhmjoj wrote:
| Well, most game companies will only tell you the game only
| works on something very specific, say Ubuntu 24.04, and
| everything else is untested/unsupported. That doesn't
| exclude the game will work perfectly fine on other distros,
| which is usually the case.
| onli wrote:
| I'd expect it to work anyway. Under Steam at least. There
| is nothing special about the Steam Deck/SteamOS that's not
| available on other distros when running Steam, afaik.
| dkersten wrote:
| Of course they don't, it would be crazy to say they would
| support all the different possible distros and
| configurations that people might run, when the majority of
| users are in steam deck. But that doesn't mean it won't
| run, just that if you have issues, they don't promise to
| fix them. Seems reasonable to me.
|
| BG3 already ran well enough on Linux, so I imagine this
| will only make it run better, official support or not.
| kcb wrote:
| I don't think they have to do that for a Steam Linux
| release. Steam has Linux native runtimes to provide games
| with a consistent environment across distros.
| https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-
| runtime/blob/master/R...
| dkersten wrote:
| Ah, that's true. Steam Linux is a smaller target than
| Linux in general. You're right.
| morsch wrote:
| That'd be nice, though at the moment I hope that if the
| update instead _breaks_ something on Linux -- a distinct
| possibility --, I can go back to the Proton version which has
| been working pretty much perfectly.
| keyringlight wrote:
| Something I wonder is if this new version is a linux build
| specifically targeting the deck hardware+OS setup, have
| Larian now committed themselves to following whatever Valve
| does in future for changes to that setup. In any case,
| they've got a fallback which is the windows version on
| proton, but it's inverting how Valve has trained many to
| behave which is to make just a windows version and delegate
| linux support to them.
|
| There's also been persistent speculation about whether
| Valve would take on the burden of releasing SteamOS as a
| general distribution anyone can install on their own
| hardware (which I think is unlikely), which could in turn
| affect how Larian has to treat this port even if that is
| just communicating what it is and isn't.
| realprimoh wrote:
| Agree this is great from Larian. Though BG3 does run fine on
| Steam Deck as it is, especially for such a large game.
| sReinwald wrote:
| > This is a gigantic effort from Larian, who among all things
| is still updating its software instead of resting on its own
| laurels.
|
| What makes this story even better is how it actually came about
| - this wasn't initially a top-down corporate initiative, but
| rather a passion project from a single engineer who worked on
| it after hours. The fact that Larian immediately recognized the
| value and threw their full support behind it says everything
| about their culture.
|
| Swen Vincke shared the backstory:
|
| > The story of how this came to be really is one of true
| passion. The Steam Deck native build was initiated by a single
| engineer who really wanted a smoother version of the game on
| Steam Deck and so he started working on it after hours. When we
| tried it out, we were all surprised by how good it felt and so
| it didn't take much to convince us to put our shoulders behind
| it and get it released. It's this type of pure passion for
| their craft that makes me fall in love with my developers over
| and over again. Considering myself very lucky to have people
| like him on my team. Try it out!
|
| https://x.com/LarAtLarian/status/1970526548592623969
|
| That combination of individual passion and company willingness
| to back good ideas is what makes Larian special.
| andruby wrote:
| Do they name the engineer somewhere in the public messages?
| Super glad the company recognized the value and supported the
| release!
| sReinwald wrote:
| Not that I'm aware of. I thought that was weird at first as
| well, but I assume it might be in a way to protect the
| engineer.
|
| Unfortunately, singling out any individual developer, even
| for praise, can attract unwanted negative attention online.
| By acknowledging the passion and the work without naming
| the person, Swen gives them full credit internally while
| shielding them from becoming a public target.
|
| This doesn't even necessarily have to be intentional
| harassment, but if this engineer is now the "SteamDeck guy"
| at Larian, their social media might get flooded by people
| who mistake their personal social media accounts for a
| support ticket.
|
| I'm sure the engineer has the option to self-identify if
| they wish, but this approach feels like a sign of good and
| thoughtful leadership.
| dbspin wrote:
| This is an interesting perspective... I'd be at a loss to
| think of an example of an engineer who's been publicly
| pilloried (having been highly regarded for great work)
| for the failings of their company. Perhaps you could cite
| and example?
|
| Seems enormously more likely to be the all to familiar
| story in the games industry of not providing credit to
| individual devs. Something that goes back to the earliest
| days of Atari.
| shakow wrote:
| > I'd be at a loss to think of an example of an engineer
| who's been publicly pilloried (having been highly
| regarded for great work) for the failings of their
| company. Perhaps you could cite and example?
|
| Because these guys and gals are not famous enough to
| warrant large coverage, and because the phenomenon is
| unfortunately so widespread that noone is going to cover
| every case.
|
| https://endofaspecies.com/oped/the-harassment-of-game-
| develo...
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2621gzvkdo
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/zoe13c/passiona
| te_...
|
| https://www.gameshub.com/news/news/video-games-
| developers-gd...
|
| https://www.xfire.com/authorities-investigating-death-
| threat...
|
| https://f1000research.com/articles/11-1518
| dbspin wrote:
| Thanks, really appreciate the concrete examples. They're
| not quite what I was referring to (developer praised by
| company / media - then attacked for issues with the
| company beyond their purview), but they do point to a
| (largely invisible from outside the industry / twitter
| bubble) truly worrying and frightening level of animosity
| and aggression pointed towards devs that I wasn't
| sufficiently aware of.
| scott_w wrote:
| > They're not quite what I was referring to
|
| I don't think you need a case quite this specific because
| of the following:
|
| > then attacked for issues with the company beyond their
| purview
|
| Ultimately, whether an employee is praised or not is
| completely irrelevant to the nutjobs taking their anger
| out on them because of something their employer did.
| sReinwald wrote:
| I'm not necessarily saying they'd get pilloried. I'm
| saying that having your personal digital space colonized
| by people who think you're customer support is insanely
| disruptive. Think replies full of "I only get 8 fps in
| Act 3, pls fix" when you just wanted to post a photo of
| your vacation.
|
| I can't think of specific names anymore since it's been a
| while since I have played it, but a lot of the developers
| for World of Warcraft used to be and likely still are
| active on Twitter. For a lot of them, the community knew
| fairly well which features of the game or which class
| they were responsible for. When I used to look at the
| replies to some of their Tweets (even ones completely
| unrelated to WoW), they were often full of complaints
| about their area of perceived responsibility.
|
| I fully understand every engineer who just wants to put
| their head down and work on their stuff they're
| passionate about without having to also be public-facing.
| Even in a small company like mine, some of our devs
| constantly complain that some customers know that they
| are responsible for certain features of our product and
| email them directly rather than going through the proper
| support channels.
|
| Your point about the games industry often struggling with
| providing proper credit to devs is well taken - it's
| absolutely an issue. But in this case, Vincke did
| actually do that, in a way. He could've just kept quiet
| and let the playerbase think it was a company effort, but
| instead he publicly highlighted and recognized the
| passion and work of one of their engineers (even though
| anonymously). That engineer can look at the countless
| positive replies to that post and get the nice fuzzy
| feeling without getting dragged into the spotlight.
| dbspin wrote:
| I take your point about being inadvertently made a point
| of contact for customer support / complaints about
| technical issues with the game.
|
| Disagree however about the value credit - personal credit
| has concrete value (career wise, status wise etc), warm
| and fuzzy feelings less so. Right now we can only guess
| whether the dev had a say in the matter.
| sReinwald wrote:
| You're absolutely right that named credit has tangible
| career benefits that go well beyond feelings. But I think
| Vincke threaded that needle well with the anonymous
| public credit - it creates a documented public record of
| innovative work at the company level while preserving the
| engineer's privacy.
|
| The engineer can still leverage this (LinkedIn, internal
| promotions, industry networking) without being forced
| into a public-facing role they might not want. When
| they're interviewing or networking, they can point to
| Vincke's public acknowledgment and say "that was my
| project" in contexts where it's professionally relevant,
| without having their personal social media permanently
| associated with it.
|
| Considering Vincke was impressed enough to publicly
| acknowledge this individual's passion and initiative,
| there's no doubt in my mind that this engineer could get
| named credit or something that would acknowledge their
| role in the project if they wanted it.
|
| But to go a bit meta: I think it's strange that we are
| discussing this in the context of a CEO publicly
| acknowledging one of their engineers (even if
| anonymously). Vincke is, at least in the context of the
| broader industry, going above and beyond. I doubt you'd
| see Ubisoft, EA, or Blizzard publicly acknowledging a
| single engineer's after-hours passion project in this
| way.
|
| Feels a bit like misdirected energy, I guess? Why are we
| debating about the nuances of named vs anonymous credit
| and recognition when industry leaders don't give any?
|
| It's like calling someone out for only tipping 10% while
| ignoring the guy in the top hat who's tipping 0. If you
| want gaming companies to get better about giving credit
| and recognition, you should support the companies that
| are at least moving in the right direction. I know it's
| easy to be cynical, but don't let perfect be the enemy of
| good.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| It would make them at least Internet famous, and most
| people do not know how or are not ready to handle being
| famous.
| lwkl wrote:
| They probably would have to get the permission of the
| engineer to name them publicly. With how the gaming
| community behaves on social media I wouldn't be surprised
| if the engineer doesn't want that. Because that could mean
| death threats for you and your family the next time a
| subset of the community gets upset with your employer.
| Paratoner wrote:
| Not sure why this is getting downvoted, you are
| absolutely correct. The unhinged weirdos are still a
| minority, but less and less ashamed of their own behavior
| online. No doubt that dev is better off remaining unnamed
| in this instance.
| mort96 wrote:
| Reminder that all of mid/late 2010s online politics was
| colored by one reviewer giving a favourable game review
| to a game that some people disliked.
| bregma wrote:
| > all of mid/late 2010s online politics was colored by
| one reviewer giving a favourable game review to a game
| that some people disliked
|
| That's kind of a twisted interpretation of events. It was
| coloured by one incel who though he owned the developer
| of a game and a whole lot of incels who sympathized
| because they too were owed a vagina by the ones who
| controlled them. Now it's spread to broader issues and
| higher levels of politics and is still going.
| mort96 wrote:
| I remember the start of GamerGate well, it was all people
| screaming about "ethics in games journalism". But you're
| obviously right that that it wasn't _really_ about ethics
| in games journalism, your description is probably a
| better reflection of the actual psychology of the people
| involved.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| And then there are people, gamers, who were actually just
| dismayed with the conflicts of interest that ran rampant
| in the orthodox "games journalism" space and didn't give
| two shits about the personal drama side of the story,
| although that's mostly solved by finding your favorite
| youtube reviewer. And those who were genuinely focused on
| improving discovery of good indie games were subjected to
| some pretty horrible commentary that completely missed
| the point. Now there are smaller dedicated publications
| or channels that actually do regularly (weekly/monthly)
| review a decent volume of new promising indie games to
| help discover standouts, but that turned out to be a
| niche that the existing publications didn't want to keep
| up with, and a niche that suddenly many people denied
| even existed, for some reason? People who can't
| contemplate that there are amazing passion projects out
| there to be discovered, I suppose because those people
| can't imagine actually working hard on something people
| would enjoy, because they would rather spend their time
| raining on others' parades instead.
|
| But it was too close of a tangent towards criticism of
| establishment journalism in general, so of course
| establishment journalism countered back with the only
| weapon it has, and suddenly the vast majority of people
| forgot any of it had to do with reviewing and promoting
| good indie video games.
|
| People who make indie games are not losers. People who
| want good games to be promoted are not losers. It is an
| art. It's not for everyone. People who just want to play
| the latest AAA sequel can stick to those. But if you've
| ever tried a niche indie game and been more impressed
| than you expected, you know it's art, and you'd want
| other people discovering and promoting the good ones, and
| talking about what makes them special.
| mort96 wrote:
| I am not going to re-litigate GamerGate here. There were
| people who were genuinely concerned about ethics in games
| journalism, sure. But it did not become the defining
| event in the online-political sphere of the mid/late '10s
| simply due to genuine concerns about ethics in games
| journalism.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Correct, because a large portion of the public has no
| idea what indie games are, or how the software industry
| works, but they know that angry nerds are funny.
| mort96 wrote:
| That's not how it went down. Sorry. It wasn't "the big
| bad left laughing at some video game nerds whose feelings
| were hurt".
| astrange wrote:
| What I remember is that there were a subset of people I
| was acquainted with online who when this started all
| /immediately/ started posting things exactly like the
| comment this is a reply to; "these people just don't
| respect women, you all need to sit down and listen to
| women and center women" kinds of things. They were all
| men; mostly straight men although some were bi, and all
| generally thought to be fine although known for being a
| little performative and mildly, as they say, horny on
| main a little too often.
|
| Every single one of them later turned out to be a sexual
| predator. This is now known as the "softboi" or "male
| feminist". This kind of person is still out there and is
| dangerous as ever, so it's important to keep an eye out.
|
| (None of these people were in tech; instead all my tech
| coworkers who were men and lived in SF also heard "we
| need to respect women", but being kind of autistic
| engineers took it too literally and didn't seem to know
| any women, so they seemed to think the right thing to do
| was go out and find a woman and literally just start
| respecting them. This didn't work out for them and they
| mostly ended up getting scammed by scammers who happened
| to be women.)
| dom96 wrote:
| They may be a minority but they are more empowered than
| ever. Both by the new owner of Twitter and the current
| politics in the US.
|
| It's a shame that large companies like
| EA/Bethesda/Valve/etc don't do more to fight against it,
| instead of cowering and leaving indie devs that are
| barely surviving to fend this off.
| pilchard123 wrote:
| Or even "it has a trivial bug/doesn't run as well as i
| think it should/insulted my home decor, you die now"
| poulpy123 wrote:
| > In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old
| hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes
| above 720p with minimum settings.
|
| Because they bought the game. After decades of PC gaming, it's
| totally absurd there is no system that tell you how bad or how
| well a game is going to play on your system. And if it's too
| difficult to make, how can we expect regular people to know
| themselves ?
| GreenWatermelon wrote:
| Steam literally has a section called Hardware Requirements
| under every game.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Yes, they are entirely arbitrary. Worst cases (e.g. Cities
| Skylines 2) outright false
| Jolter wrote:
| As soon as what you have in your machine doesn't literally
| match the stated system requirements, you're on your own.
| It's up to the user to research and understand which CPU or
| GPU is "better" or "worse" than the required one. These
| things are nontrivial when comparing between generations
| and across tiers, not to mention across different vendors.
|
| A knowledgeable user might be able to predict their
| performance reasonably well, based on publicly available
| benchmark databases, but you still can't really get a good
| estimate FPS unless you find someone with exactly your
| hardware setup who benchmarked the game (and is willing to
| share).
| bavell wrote:
| Most minimum/recommended game specs reference mainstream
| gaming CPU/GPUs, and most gamers know the strength of
| their own hardware relative to mainstream components.
|
| If you're a very casual/young/inexperienced gamer then
| sure, you might have trouble comparing your own system
| with the min specs.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| Which is so bad it barely means anything for lower-end PCs.
| I played and enjoyed plenty of hours on Elden Ring while
| rocking hardware well below the minimum requirements
| falcor84 wrote:
| Steam makes it easy to get a full refund for a game you don't
| like for any reason. So there's no risk in trying an install
| of a game that might not work well on your below-specs
| device, but then you shouldn't give it a negative review.
| mhitza wrote:
| Unless most of the problems come later on, after the 2
| hours game time.
|
| I've heard about multiple games that where steamdeck
| verified but the performance choppy. If it can't hold a
| steady 30fps, a game shouldn't be steamdeck verified in my
| opinion.
| keyringlight wrote:
| I think one factor to this is that PC gamers are hostile to
| telemetry, and couldn't give a damn if the reasoning for it
| is advertising, real world feedback on game design which
| would feedback for future patches or the next game, or a
| mutual benefit of "hardware like (this) generally performs
| like (this) at low/med/high quality preset".
|
| The only thing I've seen which is close is Star Citizen's
| telemetry: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/en/telemetry
| samtheprogram wrote:
| > I think one factor to this is that PC gamers are hostile
| to telemetry
|
| Is there any data to support this? IME most PC gamers I
| know don't give a shit about telemetry. They are stock
| Windows and Android users, love Google products, etc.
|
| They only care whatsoever when it comes to adblocking,
| because they don't want to watch ads.
|
| (I'm also in the US)
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| Most games publish minimum and recommend specs.
|
| Steam could probably build in a system to guess the
| performance if there was some benchmarking data, but game
| performance can change dramatically after release between
| updates to drives or the game itself.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| There are too many dimensions to address unfortunately, cpu,
| gpu, memory, gpu memory, hell even disk speed for some games.
| nomel wrote:
| It could be survey based. Heck, it could be _coupon_ based.
| Something like:
|
| 1. Enroll is the discount program by running steam hardware
| survey. Steam holds onto your system specs.
|
| 2. Steam offers discounts for games that have insufficient
| benchmarks for your rough system.
|
| 3. For these games, steam collects performance data (5
| minutes of benchmark either during the game, first run, or
| maybe when the PC is idle (screensaver mode).
|
| There's all sorts of way they could do it. I'm guessing a
| large portion of people would be fine with a "Folding at
| home" style system, that just runs benchmarks for
| screensavers (with some coupons or whatever granted).
| Arch-TK wrote:
| The steam deck happily provides an enjoyable experience running
| Cyberpunk 2077.
|
| It's limited, but the limitations in a large part cancel out.
| It's still very capable.
| nottorp wrote:
| > when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings
|
| It's because most of those games don't have the graphics to
| justify choking.
|
| On lower end hardware it's extremely easy to notice who
| actually programmed the game and who just used the Unity
| defaults.
| bsza wrote:
| > I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving
| bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with
| minimum settings.
|
| Depends on what the game can be reasonably expected to run on.
| Most games don't even approximate what would be technically
| possible on today's hardware and waste your electricity on lazy
| coding instead. "15 years old hardware" is what was cutting
| edge when Crysis 2 and Skyrim came out, so that's not a good
| excuse in the majority of cases.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| The part of BG3 that was not in early access runs like shit
| even on the most powerful pc's
| KolibriFly wrote:
| As for the Deck... it's not a powerhouse, but it's still
| impressive how much it can run with decent tweaks. BG3 on a
| handheld at all feels like sci-fi to my teenage self
| array_key_first wrote:
| > In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old
| hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes
| above 720p with minimum settings.
|
| IMO it's because a lot of these newer games just don't _need_
| that much horsepower. BG3 is not one of them, but looking at
| the broader industry.
|
| A lot of times were seeing maaaaaybe a 5% bump in fidelity or
| graphics quality in exchange for 400% less performance.
|
| Like ray tracing. Does Ray tracing look good? Yes. But not that
| good. Its not the PS1 to the PS2. I've seen baked lighting
| indistinguishable from Ray tracing in 99% of scenes.
|
| Its just not a good trade off with modern games usually. Unless
| they really optimize them.
|
| The only people still optimizing games is Nintendo from what
| I've seen.
| suncore wrote:
| There is an interesting discussion about the need for ray
| tracing in one of the later Digital Foundry videos. The
| argument goes that sometimes baked lighting is impractical
| due to the size of the maps and how much dynamic lighting you
| need. The latest Doom game is one such game where light maps
| would be 100s of GBs. But I guess most other games are fine
| with baked lighting.
| array_key_first wrote:
| There's also much cheaper methods of dynamic lighting that
| aren't real time ray tracing. You can approximate, you can
| cheat, and it will look almost as good.
| jmuguy wrote:
| The only thing that seems to unite gamers is whining about
| basically every aspect of gaming, hardware requirements
| included.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old
| hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes
| above 720p with minimum settings.
|
| I game on 1080P and never have issues with any games I play,
| though I am on a 3080. It's definitely people trying to max out
| every setting for their 4K monitor that they overpaid for. I
| might be giving 2K monitors a try soon on the other hand.
| foresto wrote:
| > I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving
| bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with
| minimum settings.
|
| 15 years old? Have you seen many examples of this (I have not)
| or are you exaggerating to make a point?
|
| Regardless, some very popular gaming hardware from 10-12 years
| ago is still in use and still very capable in modern games, so
| long as they allow tuning the graphics down. People running an
| i5 3570K and RX 480 at 1080p don't generally expect to get the
| imagery or frame rates of a modern gaming rig, but they are
| reasonable to expect roughly 60 fps with (for example) low
| textures and shadow detail, no reflections, static lighting,
| etc. Perhaps this is what you meant by "minimum settings", but:
|
| While low-spec options like this have been the norm in 3D PC
| games practically forever, several very popular games released
| in the past 5 years have adopted anemic options menus that have
| negligible impact on performance at the low end. To someone
| with much experience tuning for older hardware, this is a
| striking and disappointing change. Especially now that gaming
| hardware upgrades are far more expensive than they were, and
| more people are struggling just to pay their living expenses.
|
| The change is almost certainly unnecessary. It smells like the
| developers just aren't putting any effort into it anymore.
|
| And it's not merely disappointing; it's also wasteful, both by
| pushing older hardware into the landfill and by denying
| opportunities to reduce power consumption.
| DeepYogurt wrote:
| You love to see it
| maxlin wrote:
| After all that effort, I'd be legit pissed at the website
| maintainer for screwing up the image scaling in the blog post,
| making this release look like some bootleg readme ...
|
| The images themselves are fine, just the post's formatting
| squishes them.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Now that there is a Steam Deck Native build, is Baldur's Gate 3
| supported on Linux? > Larian does not provide support for the
| Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on
| Steam Deck.
|
| "does not support" is not the same as "no", right? In theory it
| should be possible to run this build on other arm-based linux?
| Thev00d00 wrote:
| Steam deck is x86_64. It would probably run but they won't
| accept bug reports.
| omnimus wrote:
| It will most likely run fine. Steamdeck has AMD x86 APU. I
| guess gpu might be a problem. They simply dont want to provide
| official support for the variety of linux.
| easwee wrote:
| I finished the game on Ubuntu when it came out, so it should
| work fine since ever. You can check out
| https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940 for more info.
| jon-wood wrote:
| The whole point of this post is that there's a native version
| that doesn't use Proton now, so checking ProtonDB isn't going
| to tell anyone anything beyond the previous version being
| fine.
| haunter wrote:
| You can download the native version on any Linux distro
| https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nokcej/laria...
| marhee wrote:
| Anyone knows what does "native" means here precisely? Steam Deck
| has a x86-64 instruction set AFAIK, so it's just same as a the
| Windows version? Or has it to do with the GPU / OS? Or does it
| just mean "properly configured"?
| Thev00d00 wrote:
| Native as in it's a Linux binary, no wine/proton involved
| teamonkey wrote:
| It means compiled for Linux/SteamOS instead of being compiled
| for Windows and using a compatibility layer to play.
| nottorp wrote:
| What does native mean?
|
| Is this a linux binary? Using wine directly linked under the
| hood?
|
| Or did they actually build a native application with no
| translation layers, no matter how they're added?
| haunter wrote:
| >Is this a linux binary?
|
| Yes
|
| https://steamdb.info/depot/2330359/
|
| You can download the native version on any Linux distro
| https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nokcej/laria...
| nottorp wrote:
| Well I could, but I already finished the game using the Mac
| version :)
|
| Thanks to Larian for doing cross platform.
| krzat wrote:
| This is random, but I wonder if it would be possible to render
| BG3 with isometric camera, and then, on the fly, convert most of
| 3d objects into sprites.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| > Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The
| Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck.
|
| I though the steam deck would be the reason why developper start
| building their game for linux, but it seems like it's a bigger
| issue than just making a "linux file". Once they have rewritten
| the code for the steam deck, what would prevent them to compile
| the game for Debian and other linux distributions ?
|
| I really have no idea how much more work it is but assumed it
| would be straight forward.
| shortercode wrote:
| I would assume the issue is all the variation in different
| distros. Plus the driver/hardware combinations. While some
| setups would just work they don't see it as worth spending the
| time doing the validation/patching required. The steam deck is
| 1 device to test, with a single software stack. Much easier to
| target, and with a known customer base. Which brings up the
| other issue that they would be unlikely to make their money
| back on a general Linux release. Companies have cited this as a
| reason for not doing macOS releases in the past and based on
| the last steam survey Linux usage is in a similar ballpark
| (2.6% vs 1.8% for Mac ).
|
| Despite all this I think it's still a move in the right
| direction.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Valve released a runtime specifically to combat the variation
| problem. This allows developers to target a specific runtime
| and Valve will make the software stack work with as many
| distros as possible.
|
| On the other hand, that stack can only contain so much, and a
| lot of Linux bugs involve sound subsystems, GPUs, and
| compositors/X11/window manager configuration issues. You
| can't quite target the Linux runtime and assume everything
| will just work, but at least you don't need to target
| specific versions of glibc and libxml2 anymore.
| rtpg wrote:
| > Once they have rewritten the code for the steam deck, what
| would prevent them to compile the game for Debian and other
| linux distributions ?
|
| You can install Steam on Debian.
|
| I think the value here is that with Steam being the "approved
| launcher" you offload a lot of "distro weirdness" over to
| Valve. The value of a standalone build seems fairly low for
| most game devs.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| You can run the game on Linux just fine, Larian just won't help
| you if it breaks or bugs out. SteamOS is just a well-customised
| Arch fork, after all.
|
| Announcing official Linux support would also require testing on
| Intel and Nvidia GPUs, as well as other types of AMD GPUs,
| which would probably take much more time and effort than
| testing for a device with effectively two hardware revisions
| you need to test for. I don't think they want the support
| burden, and I don't disagree with them having had to debug
| obscure Linux GPU issues myself.
| drclegg wrote:
| They're just talking about official support (i.e. support
| tickets). It'll probably still run elsewhere, they're just not
| promising to help you with bugs on other hardware &
| configurations. Entirely reasonable IMO.
| Temporary_31337 wrote:
| Wow, I bought Baldur's Gate 3 out of nostalgia before a very long
| (20hours + ) flight and played some good long hours on the plane.
| Unfortunately the Proton version meant the game was unplayable on
| the Deck later in the game. I'm so happy I can finish it now.
| Coincidentally I also realised I can play it on my Mac too...
| sylware wrote:
| Proton titles on steam are illegal in tons of countries: there is
| no official support and real money is involved. Some say there is
| some special refunding policy with proton titles: well I have not
| seen any "legally binding" document about a game patch or a
| proton patch killing your game for good on elf/linux, and that
| anytime during the life cycle of the game. Only whining when that
| happens, no official support to turn to.
|
| Basically PROTON = ZERO BUCKS is the only sane way. I am playing
| proton titles: gacha games which are kind of free-to-play
| friendly, well... those without 'anti-non-steamdeck-elf/linux'
| software like ACE(cf WuWa). They have the windows whales to
| finance them already, and we are only penguins which dislike to
| be scammed.
|
| But now elf/linux people will be able to buy this game with the
| legally required official support.
|
| This game is really not my thing, but I'll go back to banging my
| head against the wall and throwing my keyboard thru the window,
| aka I am going back to play silk song natively on elf/linux
| available since day one of its release (well, this is a unity
| game, then ez).
| donohoe wrote:
| Can someone phonetically spell out "Baldur" for me?
|
| I've seen the term across my life but I have never heard it
| spoken. I think how I imagine it and how it's said are different
| - like I discovered from reading LOTR books and then watching the
| movies...
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Look for baldur's gate reviews on youtube?
| opan wrote:
| AFAIK it's just ball-der. I've seen it win awards at The Game
| Awards and such, plus heard it discussed IRL, everyone seems to
| say it that way. If that's not the correct pronunciation, it's
| at least the popular one.
| haunter wrote:
| Native vs Proton benchmark
|
| https://flightless.yobson.xyz/benchmark/10
|
| https://flightless.yobson.xyz/benchmark/11
|
| Roughly ~10% better FPS in Act 3 but the first benchmark average
| is pretty much the same.
|
| You can download the native version on any Linux distro
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nokcej/laria...
| 3ll10t wrote:
| Those are huge frametime spikes for the native during benchmark
| #10. Maybe shader comp?
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Just goes to show how impressive Proton really is. It has
| overhead, but it's tiny in most use cases.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| Nice to see Larian putting in the effort for a native Steam Deck
| build, especially considering how resource-heavy BG3 can get
| bloqs wrote:
| can someone explain why this is a big deal to me compared to any
| game being released on multiple platforms? Surely making games
| for the switch/ps5/etc is hard too?
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| Can I get the native linux build on gog?
| sombragris wrote:
| > In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old
| hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above
| 720p with minimum settings.
|
| I won't leave a bad review or whine on BG3, and my (otherwise
| very capable laptop) is just 6 years old with an Intel UHD 620
| integrated GPU, and BG3 barely reaches the 10fps level on
| 1024x768 with lowest settings on everywhere. So it's not even
| 720p, and BG3 chokes a lot in this somewhat recent hardware.
|
| I see BG3's graphics and while they are beautiful, they're
| nothing out of the ordinary in comparison to other games. That
| is, there are good games that could run very well in my laptop
| and which look good.
|
| In sum, I see BG3 as being needlessly demanding, and pushes out a
| large sector of machines and potential buyers. I'd love to have
| an RTX-class GPU (and have the cash to afford it), but all I have
| it's a laptop whose GPU cannot be upgraded, and that is perfectly
| capable in all other areas.
|
| Every time when I point out this limit in games, which I see as
| silly, I get flamed to death. People in the gaming communities
| are seemingly unable to understand why making extremely high
| minimum requirements is not a good sales strategy.
|
| Games can look good with integrated GPUs. See the Wolfenstein
| games (id engine). Even more recent games like Generation Zero
| (Apex open world engine) can be run decently at lowest settings
| on my hardware. MGS5:PhantomPain also runs and looks very good.
| But no luck with BG3.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| To be fair, there is world between "extremely high minimum
| requirements" and a 6 years old laptop, considering laptop of
| even the current year are never considered super high end rigs.
| sombragris wrote:
| If you had s/minimum/recommended I would agree. But no, we
| are talking about _minimum_ requirements. I submit that a
| game should be playable even on 10-year old hardware. Of
| course, the devs can blow the ceiling in their highest
| settings. Do they need three RTX-7000 series in parallell
| cooled with liquid nitrogen and eating 3000W of electricity
| in order to run at the highest /ultra settings? Yeah, be my
| guest, more power to them. But we are, I insist, talking
| about _minimum_ requirements. These should be as broad as
| possible in order to keep the entry barrier low.
|
| In a game which doesn't even look especially good, I see the
| very demanding hardware requirements as just a contribution
| to planned/artificial obsolescence.
|
| (and yeah, I got downvoted as expected. This is getting
| old...)
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I hope to see more games go steamdeck native in the future. While
| the proton layer is great it would be a nice way to start choking
| windows out of the games industry. I hate that I have a PC that
| really does nothing by play games.
| freehorse wrote:
| Baldur's gate 3 was one of the first (if not the first) big game
| to run natively on apple silicon. I am glad Larian takes this
| kind of stuff seriously instead of doing the bare minimum, in an
| industry that often even the bare minimum is not to be taken for
| granted.
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