MudMan

OK, let me fix that for you permanently.

This is Retroachievements.org.

Not only does it do what it says on the tin, but it’s, for my money, the best discoverability tool out there for old games. The most obvious way to use it for that is to check the new games they’ve added achievements to, but they also have book club-style events (they’re revisiting F1 games this month to go with the movie currently in theatres), challenges, seasonal achievements, leaderboards and all sorts of the types of metagaming stats tools you’ve seen in modern platforms to point you in the rigth direction.

You can start by selecting “all games” and sorting them all by players to see what’s popular. Or, hell, reverse sort by players and see what weird crap is in there. Once you start down that rabbit hole you’re more likely to have too much in your retro backlog than you are to ask this question again.

And nothing has replaced it.

That’s what I was saying, it’s all shaky right now. Wilds runs about as well on both, but it’s noticeably less stuttery for me under Linux. Other stuff, particularly when leaning hard into Nvidia features, is either performing poorly or has features disabled on Linux. Plus the compatibility issues.

There is just no one-size-fits-all solution on PCs thede days, even before you start considering the weirdness of running the same games in ridiculous 1000W powerhouses and 15W handhelds at the same time.

PC gaming has become a LOT less plug-and-play this last decade, and I don’t know that it’ll go back to where it was any time soon.

Either different SKUs per territory or one of the sites is straight up wrong. FWIW, cross checking with Amazon shows the Z2 versions of the Go S having 16 GB and the Z1 Extreme versions with 32 GB for my territory.

All else aside, man, is the world of PC handhelds the wild west right now. Everything is on effectively the same two or three pieces of hardware, but somehow nothing is consistent.

That depends. In this case, where the Lenovo drivers are clearly outdated and kinda broken, definitely they’re the bottleneck for at least some games. That much they’ve shown, by installing newer drivers and showing a massive performance upgrade.

Although I’d caveat that by saying that their flashier results with big updates across OSs and driver variants are running at outright unplayable settings. They are benchmarking on settings resulting on framerates in the teens. When they say they saw 12% performance increases on the newer drivers they mean going from 14 to 16 fps in some cases.

Benchmarking properly is hard, I guess is my point.

I mean… you can turn it off. I wouldn’t, but you can.

I just haven’t heard it referred to as “antivirus programs” in ages, it sounds so 20th century to me. Say what you will about MS’s monopolistic tendencies, but at least they killed the parasitic “antivirus” industry with that one.

As of right now, both models of the Go S listed on Lenovo’s website have 32 GB of RAM (screenshotted below, if the weird screenshot functionality here works). So no, you’re wrong here. The version with 16 GB is the Go 1. If there is a 16 gig SKU of the Go S, which there may be, they currently don’t have it listed.

Memory size requirements depend on what you’re trying to run. Easier to run stuff will run on everything, but from hands-on experience I assure you a bunch of newer games struggle with the default allocation of 4 gigs of VRAM and can use the extra RAM. You can still give 8 gigs to the GPU with 16 but then you’re a lot more likely to start struggling with system RAM. If these AMD APUs worked like an Apple chip and could dynamically allocate RAM that wouldn’t be such a pain, but at the moment you need a reboot to change this even on current-gen hardware, so it’s easier to have a larger pool and give the GPU a little too much.

The amount of CUs and the VRAM aren’t necessarily related. Even with larger RAM allocations and weaker GPUs you can find yourself in the wrong setup, which is annoying. And it’s not just amount of RAM, these shared architectures can struggle with bandwidth as well, so speed can matter (although it’s more giving you more or smoother FPS and the less the fall-off-a-cliff unplayable mess you get if the game is entirely out of RAM budget). That’s also why I suspect being lighter on memory and perhaps having a better default setup may be a part of why SteamOS performance is disproportionally better on heavier scenarios compared to what you see on desktop PCs. I can’t be sure, though.

This comes from me messing around with a literal handful of PC handhelds on Windows, SteamOS and Bazzite. I’m not guessing, I’m telling you what happened during hands-on testing.

Heroic is very straightforward, as long as what you want is access to your GoG, Epic, Amazon and Battle.Net libraries. Lutris is meant as a more general purpose launcher, so they’re aiming at slightly different use cases that overlap.

Heroic won’t solve your Lutris ISO problem, but if you want to play some non-Steam ways it works great, is easy to use and is very Steam-like.

The Legion Go 1 yeah, this was on the Legion Go S, which has 32, apparently.

I’d say if you’re buying a handheld these days you should aim at 32 and look into having at least 8 available for the GPU.

Hah. Sure, but you can’t do much about those, so no tinkering.

Antivirus programs? When was the last time you tried Windows, the mid-00s?

Anyway, it’s not random print services causing CPU overhead, that’s old timey stuff. In this case it’s being RAM heavy in a RAM-limited scenario and, from their testing, Lenovo being really terrible at keeping their AMD Windows drivers updated. As part of the test they manually switched to an ASUS version of newer AMD drivers and saw significant boosts in some games.

Modern graphics drivers are a mess of per-game features and optimizations. Different manufacturers keeping things at different levels of currency is a nontrivial issue and why some of this benchmarking is hard and throwing five random games at the problem doesn’t fully answer the question.

I haven’t tried, sorry. I use Heroic rather than Lutris for my non-Steam digital libraries and I haven’t messed around with older physical releases too much, so I don’t know what Lutris is expecting. Maybe someone else here can help?

I hate that it makes sense for this to exist for so many reasons.

It is in some ways. I can tell you I tried to run Prototype 2 on a handheld today and it didn’t run natively on Windows 11 because it’s old but putting it into a Proton session and keeping it contained did wonders for it and the Deck ran it maxed out at 90fps (you forget it can do that if you insist on playing modern games on it, but man, does it look nice on the OLED).

So hey, it certainly Windows 8s better than Windows 11. There is that.

But it’s not magic, so I’d still like to figure out what we’re seeing in these examples.

Just to be clear, this is testing the same handheld on both Steam and Windows and is in line with previous findings on a small set of AAA games.

Best guess, as someone who runs both Linux and Windows on both handhelds and desktop gaming PCs, the issue here is probably memory and driver optimizations around them. Windows is just heavier than SteamOS and, while the 32 GB in the Legion Go should be enough for at least some of these tested games, they are shared between CPU and GPU. I don’t have a Go S, but I’ve seen significant performance improvements on Windows handhelds by manually assignign more VRAM in heavy games like these.

Shame, I’ve been waiting for more thorough testing (more games, desktop hardware references and a deeper look at memory management in Windows, but this is pretty superficial still.

EDIT: For what it’s worth, and I DON’T have the time or the setup to do a full set of benchmarks, but running South of Midnight on both Linux and Windows, same settings, same PC, just dual booting I got almost 2x the fps on Windows. That’s suspicious the other way, I’d expect the difference to be less dramatic, so there may be some resolution stuff going on here. Or perhaps the DLAA I’m running on both runs slower on the Nvidia Linux drivers? I’ll give one more game a try with no DLSS before I call it an experiment.

EDIT 2: Damn, this is why benchmarking modern games sucks. I tried Marvel’s Midnight Suns (just because it was there on both) and… well, the performance is the same on both, but Windows is clearly bugged and stutters for like a second every couple of seconds, consistently. So it’s really nice on Linux but entirely unplayable on Windows (on this machine, at least).

If I’m learning anything from this is that despite modern advances PC gaming is still a tinkerer’s game and that I really wish Linux/Windows drive sharing was less flaky because it’s increasingly obvious that dual booting is a great tool for gaming, given how temperamental modern big games are.

It is entirely possible that the entire construct of copyright just isn’t fit to regulate this and the “right to train” or to avoid training needs to be formulated separately.

The maximalist, knee-jerk assumption that all AI training is copying is feeding into the interests of, ironically, a bunch of AI companies. That doesn’t mean that actual authors and artists don’t have an interest in regulating this space.

The big takeaway, in my book, is copyright is finally broken beyond all usability. Let’s scrap it and start over with the media landscape we actually have, not the eighteenth century version of it.

Less bad, maybe?

Either way it’s definitely a good example of why you should write good emails to your customers that explain things properly.

If this is what they’re saying I’m assuming they didn’t want to be too clear about what info they’re storing if you don’t opt out and ended up making an email that sounds like a threat.

Either way I won’t be using Gemini as an assistant any time soon. Or any other voice assistant, for that matter.

Right. They have an opt-out for Gemini storing your in-app activity, which I believe is a requirement to get the assistant to be able to do things in the app. This seems to say you may be able to interact with some messaging apps even if you opt out (presumably they would have a rebuilt way to interact with those that doesn’t store any of your data?).

So there’s an opt-out.

The article seems concerned that the email announcing this doesn’t include a specific path to the opt-out right in the email (which is a weird concern, considering the email provides two links to… presumably that information)?

I’m not sure what this means, either, but it seems the “whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off” line is saying that you can still have Gemini send texts for you even if you disable Google storing your apps usage server-side? I don’t use Gemini as an assistant, so I’m not sure, but looking at the Gemini settings menu on my Android phone that’s what it seems to map to.

Yeeeah, for a fresh Bazzite install I’d agree that “swap Lutris for Heroic” is solid advice.

In Bazzite flatpak is the way so much that you will open Discover and only see flatpak, so if this was really, really beginner tips I’d suggest not learning what any of that means for as long as possible and just relying on Discover for your apps until you hit a roadbump. This guy seems well informed enough that is not a problem, but hey.

I’m also mildly annoyed that ujust is important enough to still need that terminal splash screen but not enough to be baked into the config tools by default in GUI. So weird.

That’s either another thing you should try not to learn about if everything works fine out of the box or something you really should look into if it doesn’t, and that’s not great.

Same as others here, the concern for me was noise back when I was on an intel platform that wanted to dump 220W into the CPU. Noctua or not, you can’t run that silently even with an AIO. I ended up lowering the power limits on that just to keep noise down.

The radiator gives you more room to run more fans slower and make less noise for the same temps, which is nice.

I moved from that to a 7800X3D and that capped out at 75W, so you could cool it by blowing on it from across the room. Newer AMD CPUs are a bit more power hungry again, but it’s still nowhere near the little square of a supernova Intel used to ship. I do still use an AIO… mostly because despite some of the other comments here, I actually have a couple of old ones in working order and haven’t felt the need to change things around.