Nik282000
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For anything that HAS to work and only runs on Windows (eat a dick Siemens) I put it in a VM with no network connection. A physical machine that gets regular updates is too unstable to rely on.
When ever I’m teaching a new guy I try to get them on board with using VMs at at minimum for reliability and a VM under Linux if they are interested.
That sucks. About 5 years ago I put ideology one peg above entertainment and just avoid games that use Windows only anti-cheat, I don’t get to play the biggest releases but there are literally thousands of other games that work perfectly and are just as fun.
If I were you I would keep my Windows gaming machine as a single function device. Play games, get all the MS updates and 3rd party spyware, don’t let it touch anything you want to keep private or safe.
Like you said though, just buy a prebuilt and you’re already there
As long as Microsoft doesn’t push an update that fucks up your machine, or you don’t boot for a few weeks and have to wait 2 hours for an update…
Even the biggest Steam update takes a fraction of the time of a ‘routine’ Windows update. SteamOS/DeckOS is a huge quality of life upgrade over a desktop.
Ray tracing is a conceptually lazy and computationally expensive. Fire off as many rays as you can in every direction from every light source, when the ray hits something it gets lit up and fires off more rays of lower intensity and maybe a different colour.
Sure you can optimize things by having a maximum number of bounces or a maximum distance each ray can travel but all that does is decrease the quality of your lighting. An abstracted model can be optimized like crazy BUT it take a lot of man power (paid hours) and doesn’t directly translate to revenue for the publisher.
The only downside of raytracing is the performance cost.
The downside is the wallet cost. Spreading the development cost of making a better conventional lighting system over thousands of copies of a game is negligible, requiring ray tracing hardware is an extra 500-1000 bucks that could otherwise be spent on games.
Game engines don’t have to simulate sound pressure bouncing off surfaces to get good audio. They don’t have to simulate all the atoms in objects to get good physics. There’s no reason to have to simulate photons to get good lighting. This is a way to lower engine dev costs and push that cost onto the consumer.
Game engines don’t have to simulate sound pressure waves bouncing off surfaces to get good audio. They don’t have to simulate all the atoms in objects to get good physics. There’s no reason to have to simulate photons to get good lighting. This is a way to lower dev costs and increase spending on the consumer side, I would not be surprised if Nvidia was incentivizing publishers to use ray tracing.
I grabbed literally the cheapest HOTAS from Aliexpress a few years ago and it has been awesome.*
*It required tweaks. The stick centering spring was WAY too tough and had to be shortened. And the measured range of motion was only about 80% of the physical range of motion so there were deadzones at the end of each axis. Resistors can be added to each POT to stretch out the measured range.
In our efforts to combat cheating in Apex, we’ve identified Linux OS as being a path for a variety of impactful exploits and cheats. As a result, we’ve decided to block Linux OS access to the game.
Translation: Software development is hard and we would rather spend our time maximizing in-game transactions.
Market share. I know it’s a meme but seriously, push Linux on people who will benefit from it.
My girlfriend is totally non-technical but I set her up with an old laptop running Debian and after a few months she loved it. No ads, no popups selling cloud storage, no forced reboots, and it doesn’t crash. That’s one more browser hitting websites without Windows in it’s useragent string.
Virtual Box. It’s dead easy.