I'll probably pick this up, unless reviews indicate it's a lazy effort. I enjoyed the first game a lot back then, the second not so much and then I lost sight of the series.

Re the earlier comment, the trailer looks more like a remake than a "low effort remaster". The original game has pre-rendered static backgrounds. There's a lot of camera perspective shifting here, looks like they remade everything in realtime 3D.

I'm actually not sure I like that. The original had some incredibly iconic "shots", that were beautifully framed and suggestive. It was the kind of game where you see something in the corner of the frame that makes you ache to explore there, and the sense of longing was important to the atmosphere. I hope this isn't the sort of "now you can go anywhere!" fan service that loses the magic.

RogueSix wrote on Mar 11, 2025, 22:12:

Again: The problem is not the requirement to install a chipset driver. The issue is keeping the compatibility database "inside" the chipset drivers up to date which you can not even influence because you 100% depend on AMD in that regard (just like you depend 100% on M$ to keep the Shitbox GameBar garbage up to date). *That* is the problem.

This might be less problematic if you never play any new games/releases anyway but if you like playing new games (maybe even lesser known indie games) or if you do really crazy shit like participating in a Steam NextFest then good luck.
There is going to be a 100% chance that neither the GameBar nor your AMD chipset drivers will correctly recognize most of the game demos during a NextFest as a game application, i.e. you will have to do a ton of manual tuning to get the most out of your NextFest demos.

Sure, some people enjoy playing the manual core allocation game but personally I'm weird and I would rather focus my gaming time on the actual demos.

I agree with you that approaches based on a database of known processes is icky. This is unfortunately super prevalent especially in the Windows ecosystem (Windows itself and every GPU driver have massive dbs for apps/games that apply various quirks, sometimes for backward compat, other times for perfomance tuning). Of course every engineer prefers a generic, self-tuning approach, because it makes systems easier to predict and reason about, and is more future-proof in the face of unknown workloads.

The stuff I quoted is about what AMD has in place (on Linux, since I know this better than Windows) for the generic, db-less approach - a HW-driven way to classify threads at runtime based on their behavior, and allow the OS kernel scheduler to make useful decisions where to run them. Along with P-state-related mechanisms to handle core preferences dynamically based on their non-heterogenous characteristics.

Hopefully this is enough to make the system behave well decently. If not, I'd advocate for the other approach I mentioned toward the end, where, when the Steam client (or something else) launches a game into a cgroup (a cgroup is a way to track groups of processes and e.g. set quotas and other properties on them) that entire group just gets pinned on the V-Caches or has scheduler hints set, at launch time (and if they launch child processes into the same group the preference is inherited). This is then basically for all games via the context they get launched in, and doesn't need anything db-based or running permanently.

If this also still isn't good enough, then it's time for an API that lets games itself announce a preference for whether they believe they can benefit from being distributed over more cores vs. keeping their threads together on performance cores, as an additional hint to either the OS scheduler or a launcher. This is the one part that could be db-augmented for older games that won't see updates, but then those probably aren't perf-critical enough to warrant the complexity.

Simon Says wrote on Mar 11, 2025, 20:40:
Not to mention I also had to install an Intel driver on every Intel computer I ever owned...

Intel chipset drivers they're called. Took a few minutes, done.

But I guess that's too much of a bother for RogueSix...

Yeah, this is a bit of a nothing burger overall. CPU packages that have a mix of different cores with different performance profiles on them are here to stay, and all mainstream OS ecosystems have to address the scheduling problems they bring with them. Of course this is very much the situation in e.g. smartphone SoCs.

On Linux, AMD has the Heterogeneous Core Driver in the kernel that exposes the core characteristics and thread statistics/classifications to the scheduler to make smarter decisions. I.e. it's wrong that only Intel has a HW "Thread Director", the AMD HW also has HW-originated stats and classification decisions it can make available to the operating system kernel.

Their P-state driver also has dynamic "Preferred Core" handling and there's a sysfs interface to express a preference for e.g. frequency vs. cache.

When I worked on SteamOS-related stuff for the Steam Deck, we came up with a new mechanism to launch apps into dynamically-allocated Linux cgroups for group scheduling and tracking, and then it was patched into Plasma/Gnome/Qt/GTK and the Steam client to use. I think overall it shouldn't even be necessary with good code in the scheduler and sane defaults, but if need be it also wouldn't be too hard to tie it all together and make Steam pin games to the V-cache cores when launching a game by default (I've been out of it for a while, perhaps someone already did this in the meantime).

Some additional detail for those who are technically curious, for how the thread classification works:

The AMD Heterogeneous core design and Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI) provide behavioral classification and a dynamically updated ranking table for the scheduler to use when choosing cores for tasks.

Threads are classified during runtime into enumerated classes. Currently, the driver supports 3 classes (0 through 2). These classes represent thread performance/power characteristics that may benefit from special scheduling behaviors. The real-time thread classification is consumed by the operating system and is used to inform the scheduler of where the thread should be placed for optimal performance or energy efficiency.

The thread classification helps to select CPU from a ranking table that describes an efficiency and performance ranking for each classification from two dimensions.

The ranking data provided by the ranking table are numbers ranging from 0 to 255, where a higher performance value indicates higher performance capability and a higher efficiency value indicates greater efficiency. All the CPU cores are ranked into different class IDs. Within each class ranking, the cores may have different ranking values. Therefore, picking from each classification ID will later allow the scheduler to select the best core while threads are classified into the specified workload class."

(Source)

This along with a 9070XT (already on the way) is what I'm putting into my new build, which is going to see a mix of software dev (the extra cores are nice for long C++/Rust builds) and of course gaming, both mostly on Linux. It's my first new rig in a long time, pretty excited.

With 27" (my preferred size for a few reasons) 4K OLED launching a month ago as well to replay my midrange IPS stuck at 60Hz, it's truly like everything is lining up this quarter to pull the trigger.

I haven't played this drop yet, but in the aftermath of the old thing they said they intentionally leaned far out the window to gauge reactions, heard loud and clear that people want the remake to stay very close to the original, and did that in the real thing. So I guess this is a test to check whether they did.

Braden wrote on Feb 24, 2025, 13:29:
Is this just a newer version of the "Playable Teaser" they released at the end of 2019?

No. The "Playable Teaser" was a little vertical slice put together with a small core team to pitch the project. After that they set up the studio properly and went into pre-production.

This demo was originally made for press showings at conferences a few months back. It's content not as-is in the game, but a sort of prologue with a different character. After many requests they decided to release it to the fans as well. I guess you could call it a Playable Teaser, but it's using production assets and gameplay systems etc. and isn't just a one-off prototype like the old one.

The game itself is fairly deep in full production now, and reportedly going pretty well.

RogueSix wrote on Feb 18, 2025, 19:11:

?

Like which one(s)?

Because of your comment, I just randomly looked up the PC Games review and, literally on the page I linked to, they are saying to NOT expect a Gothic experience (in terms of a lively game world) from Avowed . If anyone here doesn't believe it, feel free to put it through Google Translate. I'm not shittin' ya.

Heh, the GameStar people in their videos compared it to Gothic a lot, mainly because of the world density and the rewarding exploration loop. As in, you set out to do X and on the way you come across 10 other cool things. At the same time they recommended playing it with quest markers off to make it more like that.

We'll see, I think I'll give it a try in a few weeks. I don't expect it to live up to Gothic (also one of my all time favs), partially because I understand in Avowed the NPCs are just static in the game world and have no routines, etc.

Then again, I'm actually doing my first-ever playthrough of Gothic 3 currently because my gaming PC is out of commission, this is about what my aging laptop can power, and I missed the time window to play it back then while waiting for it to get patched to completion. I'm quite enjoying it overall, but doesn't really live up to 1/2. I suspect Avowed may be a similar "Gothic Lite".

This one got lots of love in the German media for reminding reviewers of the Gothic games ... color me intrigued.

Probably my 2nd favorite game of all time after the original Deus Ex. I hope this turns out good enough that I can get all my younger friends to pick it up

The big news with this one was that no one expected them to actually include TR6, which of course was the original "next-gen" game for the franchise, the first not done on the original engine. It was a disaster at launch, especially the PC version - the controls were so sluggish and bad it was nigh-unplayable, the levels were simplified and more linear partly as a result, it had a weird unnecessary RPG light system, a stealth system that was similarly superfluous since the combat was massively toned down to be at all playable with the terrible controls (i.e. just killing enemies off was generally less frustrating than using stealth, making entire stealth-focused levels kind of pointless), and so on and so forth.

It was so undercooked, it probably needed at least two years more dev time for them to (a) fundamentally change the course they were on and (b) fix the bugs. Instead it was rushed out to come out alongside the second feature film, and flopped so badly the series was taken away from CORE Design and given to Crystal Dynamics to reboot.

Ultimately the games' design flaws are too deeply rooted to be entirely fixable, but the game has some proponents for its vibe and atmosphere. It'll be really interesting to see just how much they were able to do. If at least the controls are OK now for a lot of fans it will be like getting a new TR game they were never able to finish before, and I guess its strangeness gives it an odd meta-game-archeology fascination. That they even tried deserves to be commended for ambition I think, I'm sure it represents most of the work on this since for TR4/5 they basically already had the tech and pipeline from the earlier Remaster trilogy in hand.

Other than that, TR4 is widely considered to be perhaps the best game in the series after TR1 and alone makes this a solid buy for most fans. TR5 was kind of an anthology level cash grab and is very take it or leave it, although some of the levels are good.

RogueSix wrote on Feb 11, 2025, 20:37:

Thanks for the explanations and sorry about my faux-pas (duh). English isn't my 1st language and I thought that "current" is the word for (German) "Spannung" but "Spannung" is actually "voltage".

I'm aware of the P = U * I formula which is Power = Voltage * Current/Amperage. I mistakenly assumed previously that the English word for 'U' is current when it is actually really simple as the correct English term is "voltage" and the unit is "Volt". Mea culpa .

As a fellow German speaker I get it

RogueSix wrote on Feb 11, 2025, 16:46:
I'm no electrical engineer either but current = Volt. As the name 12VHPWR implies, this connector is made for 12V which isn't really "lots of current".

I'm really sorry, and I promise this isn't nitpicking either, but this is completely wrong. Voltage and current are not the same, and 12V is not a figure of current.

In fact, this problem would also be eliminated by moving to 24V or 48V, which have much lower resistive loss and wouldn't heat up to this degree.

The issue here is really simple. This is a 600W+ card that's pushing close to the spec envelope to the connector, and as a result has a very low safety margin. The electrics on the card aren't designed to mitigate the situation. As a result the probabilty of things going wrong is reasonably high. I'd say the bottom line is somewhere on the spectrum between poor design and negligence. Given it's a consumer product and should not require training, I think it needs addressing indeed.

The best way to address it would be backing down from this high power draw and having more efficient GPUs. The alternative would be switching to a higher-voltage bus to increase the margins, if ATX truly wants to support 600-800w expansion boards.

(If you're curious, this is also how USB-Cs newer PD modes like the 240w one get away with such a small conductor: It's 48V.)

I briefly thought it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Barker%27s_Undying and got excited.

IMHO it's the marketing. Maybe I have my head in the sand, but I didn't see them push this game much, and all the screenshots and videos on display were vaguely the same purple-dark mess with nothing memorable leaping out. They put no effort into explaining the setting or lore to those new to the series, didn't talk up any notable characters or locations, etc. All I got was "here's a gameplay vignette of a combat situation, have fun looking at me click menus for half of it".

Larian lucked into much of this with the bear sex going viral and what not, but you certainly don't get 15 mio. if you present nothing at all for the zeitgeist to grab onto. From that POV, 1.5 them only reaching the franchise' built-in audience.

From most of the serious reviews I've seen, it's a fine game with various aspects ranging from decent to very strong - that I never got to see. If I was on the dev team I'd be pretty bummed about how EA handled this comeback. I don't think a second BG3 was in the cards, but 3 mio. easily.

Teemeister wrote on Jan 21, 2025, 03:08:

I couldn’t agree more. It’s beyond me why people get hyped up about a song that has been remixed for the sixth time now. At the end of the day it’s nothing but rinse/repeat with slightly changed game mechanics and up to date graphics. But for some reason the name ‘Civilization’ appears to work great as cash cow to be milked forever. I’ve stopped playing this game when it was v2 and moved on to something new….

To be fair, it's not like they're doing an EA FIFA for them - 8 years between Civ 6 and Civ 7 isn't too crazy a cadence. I absolutely respect playing back-catalog and not getting one of the new ones necessarily, but I also can't say I lose sleep over these extremely intermittent purchases on this series.

All the snark aside, now that some time has passed, what's everyone's take on Veilguard from those who have played it? I've heard so many diverging opinions it's a little bit difficult to see where the dust has settled.

Razumen wrote on Jan 14, 2025, 23:45:
(Current year) is always supposedly the year Linux will somehow overtake Windows. I'm all for SteamOS, but that dream has always been delulu.

The amusing thing is, in every other respect it already has. The average consumer household easily owns 10+ Linux devices (Android phones, routers, smart TVs, cars, smart thermostats, AI speakers, ...) and spends most of their day interacting with services running on Linux servers. FAANG would likely not exist as-is if it hadn't been possible to set them up on the back of Linux-based commodity servers - Google and Facebook were running on Linux from Day 1. Microsoft now barely makes any money with Windows itself, but a whole lot with Azure, which runs more Linux than Windows by far, etc. Their appeal to keep developers on Windows was to add a Linux subsystem to it (WSL). It's easy to say that Linux is the single most successful and valuable piece of software in history.

So the massive irony is that the space that people thought might fall first/early, the consumer desktop PC, is almost the last one to go and proved by far hardest to make real inroads in.

Kxmode wrote on Jan 11, 2025, 15:35:
The issue with Chris Roberts is that his vision for Star Citizen has always lacked focus. It's hard to trust someone who can't commit to a clear plan or claims they need specific resources to achieve their vision, only to pivot to something completely different once they get those resources. What makes it even worse is when he shifts the blame onto the people financially backing the project—many of whom aren't professional investors and can be easily swayed by flashy, over-the-top videos and lofty promises.

Yes, this is the take I agree with.

I don't mind the scope creep necessarily, I don't mind making mistakes and a meandering development cycle, I don't mind the high budget, I don't even mind the funding approach.

But what I do mind is that the world building seems cookie-cutter and bland and generic, the gameplay doesn't really have any signature ideas, the writing in the handful of cutscenes they keep showing feels somewhat dated and goofy, etc. It just doesn't feel like there's any particular artistic or narrative vision. All of that feels stuck in the "we'll make you a 90s space game" original proposal tier, and didn't scale with the rest.

The closest thing the game has to an identity is that strong lean towards being integrated sim-heavy and systems-driven, I guess similar to what set Ultima Online apart in a way. I do like that, I still think it's interesting to watch from afar at this time. But I wish I was more excited about their universe.

Sepharo wrote on Dec 11, 2024, 00:53:

Sho wrote on Dec 11, 2024, 00:40:
Turns out this was too late in the game, when it's no longer possible to deviate from the path or trigger the expansion.

According to the internet this is impossible. I don't see anyone complaining about it either.
I started looking for a mod for you... should have started the other way around

Nah, it's possible sadly in the Panam ending. My last save is out in the desert before you do the final run, and you can't do any other quest activity or use the fast travel system, etc.

I'm still so incredibly frustrated how things went w/ killing Phantom Liberty for me ...

I finished my Cyberpunk playthrough, and then habitually cleaned up my savegames, keeping only the very last one, very close to the end of the game. Turns out this was too late in the game, when it's no longer possible to deviate from the path or trigger the expansion.

So I can't play Phantom Lib with my original playhrough character sadly. I have to either start from the very beginning, or in any case start a new game and use the option to skip ahead to the expansion.

As a gamer with slight role-playing tendencies that just kills me - I want to play it with my character. Sigh.

I still have it on the todo to figure out if the savegame format has been sufficiently reverse-engineered (or whether I can help with that) to create a new savegame just before the point of no return and then splice over all my character etc. stats ...

Edit: https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/718 looks promising