Hazzard

joined 1 year ago
[–] Hazzard@lemm.ee 2 points 3 days ago

Yeah, definitely hoping they consider bringing that to windows at some point, because it could be incredible. Obviously ultra-complicated, but it works unbelievably well on Series X. Being able to say, skip the loading of an emulator and hop directly back into the middle of a level in Demon Souls, jumping past all the logos and whatnot, would be amazing.

[–] Hazzard@lemm.ee 27 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

Man, I've been console for ages, but this January I bought a gaming PC and hooked it up as my dedicated console, and it's been amazing. If you like a bit of tinkering, PC can dominate as a console.

  • Playnite makes an amazing front end, stitching together everything my PC can do. Emulators, Steam, itch.io stuff, GoG and Epic and Xbox Game Pass, all seamlessly stitched together and 100% controller accessible.
  • Emulators are fantastic, my PC plays Switch, PS3, Wii, everything.
  • Real settings are a godsend, as is more powerful hardware. Actually play Elden Ring at a proper framerate. Play old games in true 4K/120.
  • Tinker like crazy. Mods, ReShade, actual in-game settings, GPU Driver settings, if it bugs you, you can do something about it. Currently messing with emulating Demon Souls with ReShade, some mods, and connecting to RPCN for online multiplayer, and it's a delight.
  • More powerful hardware too. Great to be able to push games past console, in whatever way you prefer. I'm already planning a GPU upgrade to be able to do more.
  • Heck, even sharing features. My GPU can save 5 minutes or more of instant replay clips, which I used to save all of my Elden Ring boss fights, just hitting a controller shortcut when I killed the boss. My PC shares those via FTP, so I can just grab those on my phone and upload them to YouTube. Faster than Xbox uploads, and actually my files, with no arbitrary storage cutoff like I hit on Xbox.

Basically the only thing I miss is Xbox's Quick Resume, or suspending a game on Switch. But a good PC fires up games fast, so it's really not a huge loss in the face of all the benefits.

[–] Hazzard@lemm.ee 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Honestly.... I kinda can. This is an extreme and unlikely scenario, but there's a few things that make me think it's not impossible.

A) Trump has publicly promised to back out of NATO.

B) Trump is generally very pro-Russia.

C) Trump has generally had poor relations with Canada.

If the US backed out of NATO, they'd have a lot of military power sitting idle, and NATO would be significantly weaker, as well as doubly occupied in Ukraine. Russia would certainly be interested in such a thing happening, given the strategic importance of Antarctica, and how much it would take eyes away from them. I also don't doubt for a second that Trump would love to exploit our natural resources, especially oil, and the military importance of the top of the world. Not to mention it'd be an excuse to continue creating expensive military contracts and posturing as tough.

This is of course, mostly fantasy, but Trump is nothing if not unpredictable.

[–] Hazzard@lemm.ee 1 points 1 week ago

My issue is more with the math of it. Since it requires holding your frames until you've got one in reserve (can't generate an in-between until you know what's next), it fundamentally makes the game less responsive.

That said, if you understand that, and like the visual smoothness of motion with more frames, then it's super cool tech. Not every game has to be treated like it's competitive Counter Strike, and I think it's really cool if you like it, but it frustrates me how poorly marketed and understood the actual technology and its compromises are.

[–] Hazzard@lemm.ee 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Eh, FSR3 upscaling and FSR3 frame generation are different things. I'm personally a fan of upscaling, it's great for a sharper picture on my large 4k TV without spending a fortune on a massive GPU (I use a living room gaming PC), but not at all a fan of frame generation, as it introduces more input lag for the illusion of more frames. Not a tradeoff I'm ever willing to make, especially when VRR already does an incredible job of creating the illusion (and a degree of reality) of good performance when my framerate drops.

[–] Hazzard@lemm.ee 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Sounds like a CEO who doesn't have a damn clue how code works. His description sounds like he thinks every line of code takes the same amount of time to execute, as if x = 1; takes as long as calling an encryption/decryption function.

"Adding" code to bypass your encryption is obviously going to make things run way faster.

[–] Hazzard@lemm.ee 3 points 1 month ago

100%. I literally bought Echoes of Wisdom on Switch day one, dumped it, and played it in Ryujinx, installing mods to increase settings.

I have the money, and am willing to part with it, but prefer a PC Quality experience. Heck, I'd even pay more for a PC version that didn't have shader stutter and had real PC options.

That said.... I don't expect it. Nintendo is very stuck in their ways, which has pros and cons. On the one hand, we're getting good traditional game design, no layoffs, and no micro transactions, which is wonderful. On the other, we're getting outdated hardware that's just powerful enough to support their game design ideas (although we're even seeing the cracks there now), and a diehard dedication to the old console exclusivity model.

[–] Hazzard@lemm.ee 2 points 1 month ago

Eh, not much nefarious you can do by pushing data around. Taking a lot of CPU/GPU usage? Certainly, you can do a lot of evil with distributed computing. But bandwidth?

Costs a lot to host all that data to push to people, and to handle streaming it to so many as well, all for them to just... throw it out? Users certainly don't keep enough storage to even store a constant 100Mb/s of sneaky evil data, let alone do any compute with it, because the game's CPU/GPU usage isn't particularly out of the ordinary.

So not much you could do here. Ockham's razor here just says... planes are fast, MSFS is a high fidelity game, they've gotta load a lot of high accuracy data very quickly and probably can't spare the CPU for terribly complicated decompression.

[–] Hazzard@lemm.ee 23 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Agreed, the way they can preserve the position of any object, anywhere, with thousands of objects and an obscenely large world, is exceedingly impressive.

What I don't get is why the hell any of that is a priority. It's a neat party trick, but surely 99.9% of the gameplay value of arranging items for fun could be achieved on the player ship alone.

Like... it's neat that I can pick up, interact with, and sell every single pen and fork on every table. But is it useful, with a carry weight system deincentivizing that? Fussing with my inventory to find what random crap I accidentally picked up that's taking up my weight? Is that remarkably better than having a few key obvious and useful pickups? Is it worth giving up 60FPS on console, and having dedicated loading screens for nearly every door and ladder around?

Again, it's cool that they have this massive procedurally generated world, that a player could spend thousands of hours in. But when that area is boring, does it really beat a handcrafted interesting world and narrative? What good is thousands of hours of content when players are bored and gone before 10 hours?

So like... from a tech perspective, I respect what Starfield is, and it's very impressive, but as a game it feels like a waste of a lot of very talented work, suffering from a lack of good direction at the top.

[–] Hazzard@lemm.ee 2 points 1 month ago

30% / 0% / 70%

[–] Hazzard@lemm.ee 53 points 1 month ago

Honestly, makes sense, the active voice version is just... more efficient and easier to parse quickly.

[–] Hazzard@lemm.ee 2 points 1 month ago

Eh, you're applying generalizations universally. These last couple weeks, I literally bought Zelda Echoes of Wisdom day one, even bought NSO vouchers so I can buy the next big game that comes out. Day one, I dumped the game from my own modded switch, and started playing it on Ryujinx rather than on my Switch.

I modded the game to change the resolution to always 1080p native, remove the double buffered vsync issue to smooth out the framerate and let VRR work, boosted LODs for better distant assets, and swapped the UI for Xbox controls. Ryujinx also let me play at 2x internal resolution, so I could run the game at native 4k.

My game looks sharper, runs smoother, and is a lot of fun to tinker with. I've had a blast checking gamebanana every day for new mods, or for Ryujinx patches. I love it, and I'm preferring that experience to Switch. I'm also getting fun stuff like discord rich presence, and being able to record with my GPU driver, stream my gameplay to discord, play with a controller I prefer to a Pro Controller, everything.

I'm also looking forward to tinkering with mods for unlimited echoes once I beat the game. I'm more than happy to pay for the game, but this is much more fun for me, and trades blows with the real hardware experience well enough that I'd much rather play here than on Switch.

2
Looking for First Build Advice (ca.pcpartpicker.com)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by Hazzard@lemm.ee to c/buildapc@lemmy.world
 

Never built a PC before, but I've got some tech awareness, LTT videos, Digital Foundry, that kind of thing. I've also helped friends build PCs, but I've never actually pulled the trigger and built my own PC, so I'm hoping to get some experienced eyes on this thing to help out! I based this build off PcPartPickers default "AMD build", and replaced many of the parts one by one.

Budget is about 1500$ CAD, and I'm hoping to use this thing as a living room gaming PC. I've also got a Series X, so I'm mostly looking to run emulators at high settings, mod some games, play some of the Sony exclusives that hit PC, some non-crossplay multiplayer, that kind of thing.

Looking to get something upgradable, that I can build onto in the future as well. Thus my paying a little more for AM5, for example.

Please let me know if I'm buying anything dumb, or making any missteps like not getting enough VRAM for modern system emulators or something. Incredibly nervous and excited about finally doing this! Thanks so much for any help you can give!

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