old profile: https://lemmy.ml/u/dudewitbow
the only difference between this and the internal one is that its more sucepptible to piercing damage, but the contraption itself isnt any more inherently dangerous conpared to the battery in the tablet itself.
if youre worried about house fires at all one shouldnt even use lithium ion batteries period.
only casually read stuff on hardocp around the sandy/ivy bridge generation. but yes a good chunk of it died to video coverage of the content. its why for example Gamers Nexus has the reverse approach where the video content is their main priority (and audience) and they maintain their own website because thats what they wanted to do.
which is the condition on whether a user wants to make it cheap, else you have to go theough the trouble of sideloading the requied stuff to turn the device into a mixedvr/piracy headset by cutting off the meta related services.
else the “cheap” option would be to go use older windows mixed VR headsets, or cheaper chinese options(e.g Pico Vr headsets), both having their own cost of using it, very similar to what you sign into for users who buy a phone, or a console.
its a standalone device that functionally is like buying a phone with a Snapdragon 865(for older quest 2 models). relative to what you’re paying for. It’s actually not that expensive in the grand scheme of other gaming devices, as its on par/cheaper than basiaclly all other mainstream gaming devices, and on the low end in terms of smartphone pricing.
their investments is into a later for x64 to arm cpu translations, but still does not settle the problem that the gpus on arm based systems still have soo little development into games, which would then limit your options to amd, intel and nvidia based arm designs if you wanted an SOC with existing GPU support already in the environment. the moment you choose to have a tiled approach of mixing cpu and gpu from companies, you sort of instantly throw away the efficiency gains from switching to arm in the first place.
AMD and intel basically havent pushed out an atm based device yet, and Nvidia notoriously hates doing semi custom designs for clients.
personally i think youre far more likely to see the arm compatibility layer for basic pcvr games on a theoretical index 2 before a steam deck uses arm.
people overexagerate the power efficiency of arm because of controlled environments. for gaming handheld workloads x86 is more than enough.
Snapdragon on windows has already shown(ignoring games that outright dont work) then when under a gaming load, the efficiency gains arent there.
Another example that its not a magic bullet in terms of strictly hardware is the M1 in non OSX environments. If you look at the M1’s efficiency while using Asahi Linux (a distro of linux specifically tailored to apple m series cpus), it does not remotely get the same kind of battery life as it does in OSX. Its why for example, the steam decks battery lofe reletive to size is better than windows handhelds.the bottleneck wasnt the hardware but more the OS
what valve really wants is if they could get a handheld with only AMD C cores (that is power efficient cores with less cache but like 70% of the size of a full core) such that the power budget would go to the iGPU more than the CPU, as a majority of games are gpu limited in performance rather than CPU. AMD just has never made a C core only consumer part (only servers have gotten them).
its functionality put into the app. its a feature not a part of the control panel nor gfe and only the new app. it requires the app because its also not a binary function. it gives the user a sliding scale to adjust the debanding intensity of HDR, as its Nvidias own implementation of what is essentially auto HDR.
i mean there are features that the apps have to enhance the experience. especially this patch is the one that enables Nvidia RTX HDR for multi monitor setups (which gives a better HDR experiemce than Windows implementation of it).
if you only need a driver, sure you dont need the app, but just because you dont use all the features doesnt mean its completely bloatware/no real advantage. (and Im saying this from the POV that geforce experience was overly bloated).
the problem on the Nvidia front is that vram capacities are hitting the midrange gpus to the point that they may actually lose said features. in particular with the 4070 ti and slower, vram usage gets to the point where the user may not be able to use all features and half to selectively use them because each feature has their own vram cost attached to it.
outside of the 4060 ti 16gb you have to spend 800 to get the 4070 ti super to get 16gb vram
its not exactly for the positive reason you think. theyre trying to prevent the class action lawsuit going around the (UK?) right now and realized when a certain amount of people take the arbitration, it gets fairly costly, so they reverted on that clause.
regardless fuck arbitration, its like paying off judges but even more transparent about it.
its basically doing the right thing for the wrong reason (reverting arbitration cause not for thr consumer, but for their wallets)
its more or less that yes. they saw the money but not the time and effort to get users to use your platform.
and its not like impossible, as long as you can create games people will play and stay at itll work (e.g Riot), but they legit put such little effort in the launchers that it was creating a negative user experience, and never put in the money to make it better.
the advtage the steam system has is first the bought game/gifted game situation, as well as the more important factor, the recent opinion score, as at amy given momemt a game can get good because of a major change (e. g payday 2 reverting all the pay 2 win content the original publisher mandated) or gone to shit because of greed or a bad patch.
the problem users have is finding a curator that has a similar taste in games that they do. If I was a fan of JRPGs, im not going to care about the opinion on some person who doesnt really play jrpgs. at the same time, if you like some niche genre, to the general public, that niche is always less popular, so itll get worse ratings thanit should compared to people who enjoy said niche.
the problem is the covid supply chain ended a while ago and console sales havent drastically picked up since then. the PS5 has been orderable direct from sony for quite a long while now, and shortly after in stores. physical game sales (something console users champion, has gone way down (according to sony, only 30% of the sales are physical now)
the PS5 pro uses 60 CU rdna 4, so if you want to match that, buy the supposedly rumored 8800XT that amd is trying to pump more of as they forgoe top end end generation supposedly (basically similar to the RX 480 and RX 5700xt generations)
keep in mind, console and pc sales and cost differ because of where they focus on making money. Sony for example makes money off accessory sales (the ps5 pro is disk driveless and no vertical stand) ontop of never adressing the rampant stick drift problem the dualsense has, ontop of paid online, none of which is any signicant factor on PC, which generally speaking is more front loaded cost heavy but overtime has lower cost in games, services and such.
im not saying consoles have 0 appeal and wont have buyers, its just that their market is in real time, decreasing while on pc has increased, especially post covid. with the advent of streaming, more and more people are shifting over to PC because of it. im not saying consoles are dead as in 0 sales, but the market is forever going to decrease for it, as more people get into pc, and those countries that cant afford to already got into mobile gaming (mobile gaming accounts for more than 50% of the profits of game sales)
the difference is at least you can see it in more real time numbers. Xbox is clearly a dying brand, which leaves Sonys home console sales for now (~60M) and the switch as a handheld device. Devs are already starting to port everything on PC, and 1st party game development rate has gone down a lot. 3rd party devs are also starting to abandon console exclusively/timed exclusively over time (capcom making the next monster hunter simul release on pc instead of a year and a half cadence, square enix backtracking on making final fantasy a timed exclusive due to not enough sales)
Japan is completely flipping its old image of PC being the device for porn addicts of years past and starting to heavily buy into pc too, which is why Valve went to attend Tokyo gameshow to pitch the steamdeck for japanese handheld players(which remain the majority of console purchases in japan)
state of play is sony’s counterpart to “Nintendo Direct”. With the death of E3, all major companies have their own showcase of shows digitally, while some of them will just announce it in the general show (Geoff’s Summer Game fest, the “generic e3 show”)
basically Sony if showing off their own games, has 2 shows:
State of Play is sonys version of, includes 3rd party companies producing content on playstation
Sony also has a different showcase called “Playstation Showcase” thats directed specifically to 1st party stuff
just for completion sake, Microsoft’s game info show is called “Xbox Game Showcase”
basically specifically for AAA titles, development cost for them are soo astronomically high that the console platform isnt enough to support them alone (imo) both Sony and Microsoft basically have to decide to either scale back complexity of games (like what Nintendo would do) or release it to more platforms because 1 device platform is no longer enough for some titles.
Sony decides to port to PC, (and so does 3rd party companies like Square Enix and capcom who realize the need), while Microsoft is taking the subscription route which bolters both their cloud infrastructure numbers, and provides a subscriber count which investors like because subscriptions are content quarterly flow of money rather than peaks and drops based on game release.
basically how i see it is it only makes better sense from a consumer standpoint if the decreased developer cost is ALSO decreasing the upfront user cost to buying the game, as the worst policy that Valve has on steam is that the games base price has to be the same on all storefronts.
however in reality, most developers do not pass some of that savings to consumers and just take the cut for themselves. So devs are basically playing againt future benefits on growing a larger consumer base on a different platform for more upfront profit.
basically most of the investment money that epic throws is thrown at development and developers, and basically outside of free games, none of it is thrown back into making the platform better for consumers. Developers can complain however much they want that steam has a “consumer monopoly” (while ignoring the fact that other companies like Riot, and mobile game companies with PC clients like Mihoyo does fine without steam). this will continue to happen until epic reinvests some of that money into their client, or devs actually use the benefits of taking a lower cut and biting the bullet and regularly passing some of it off to consumers.
regardless of the situation, developers are stopping developers ultimately if they want to break the “consumer monopoly”
i mean thats why you have AA games take the risk first. thr problem is most video games have flushed out most of their smaller dev teams in favor of mainly big AAA budget titles. Thats whats mostly plagued sony for example in the past 2 years, where the only major release was like Spiderman 2, while companies need more teams like Team Asobi releasing smaller shit.
nintendo does it by having cadences and smaller teams working on smaller stuff (e.g Kirby, Mario spinoffs/sports). which bigger players like sony and Microsoft do not do enough