sp3ctr4l

Oh ho ho, no.

The Steam Deck doesn't use Windows, it is much more functional and stable, hahahah.

I am laughing about this because I was working at MSFT when Win8 was being developed/released and their whole tablet push was going on.

Dear god no, the steam deck is way, way less clumsy and broken to use than a Windows Surface was, oh god.

Ironically, I've vaguely followed the same path as GabeN: Used to work for MSFT, now I "secretly," utterly despise them.

... Yes, I agree, the Win8 UI paradigm and the Surface were indeed massive mistakes.

I vocalized this, at the time, when I was a MSFT contractor, and that is a big reason why I don't work at MSFT any more, rofl.

The Steam Deck is far, far easier to use than a Surface or Surface Pro.

Well, that's your preference then.

And the Deck is a handheld PC, not a console.

... Because consoles cannot do all those... PC things.

Part of the whole ... appeal/concept, of a handheld PC... is that it is a multi tool, a jack of all trades device.

Its a handheld PC, with a gaming mode, not a console, because it has a PC architecture and has all these other capabilities that consoles don't.

If that doesn't fit your use case or budget, then sure, the Switch 2 might have a bit of an edge in terms of game rendering power, has access to exclusive, modern Nintendo games... but price points for everything are... more or less in chaos right now, so I hope you can find something that works well for you!

Also, lots of people dock work laptops to work on bigger screens and have a full mouse and keyboards... thats really common with office and remote work, not sure how doing the same with a Deck is... any more complicated than that but uh yeah... you don't need all that to use DE mode on a deck. You just hit 'go to desktop' and it also all works with the touchpads and such.

Becauase some people like the idea of a single device that is a pretty good lower resolution gaming handheld, and can also basically be used as a low/mid range laptop/tablet as well.

The DE mode uses a very nice onscreen keyboard which works either with your two thumbs on the Steam Decks touchpads, or, the whole screen is also touch sensitive, and you can do it that way.

Or you can just dock it and use an actual Mouse + Keyboard, and/or a distinct monitor, which can handle DE mode at a higher resolution than the Deck's built in screen.

Also, if you're into modding games or using emulators, you need to go into the desktop mode to tinker with things.

(I was actually quite surprised to find that a 3DS emulator just... worked, perfectly, with the Deck's touchscreen, without me even having to manually configure anything... so i could actually use the main controls for the main screen, and just poke the other screen that is usually some kind of inventory screen, or something like that.)

Or if you want to say... check your email.

Browse the web on a fully functional desktop browser (of your choice), watch youtube, go on lemmy or reddit, buy some stuff off Amazon or w/e.

Draw something or do some photo editing in Krita or GIMP.

Do office work style stuff with LibreOffice.

Use Discord, or record your own gameplay with OBS or something, and then edit and upload a (admittedly low resolution, most likely) video to youtube.

I've actually compiled from source and run Godot on a Steam Deck.

You can literally develop a game on a Steam Deck, and then test it in game mode, on a Steam Deck.

... If I ever start a band, I'm naming it 'Courtney Love's Shotgun'.

... This is unironically what all the rightwing conspiricists have been afraid of for two+ decades now.

This is what they thought Clinton, or Obama or somehow the UN or 'ZOG' would be able to use as the mechanism to instate tyranny.

... And now they are doing it themselves, so utterly deluded that they would short cicruit if you tried to explain this to them.

I grew up in a right wing nutjob household. This is what I was told my whole life, growing up. I was indoctrinated into it, and had to deconvert myself out of it similar how I had to deconvert out of christian extremism.

These people are perfect hypocrites.

Jesus.

Yeah, if you only read short passages of a book... well you definitionally lose all the context of the entire rest of the fucking book.

I guess the teachers are just assigning Cliff's notes summaries instead of the entire text now?

The attention span destroying effect of short form video content is literally stupifyjng us.

I've said this whole fucking time: TikTok should be banned for children. Not because its Chinese, its not like every US social media app doesn't spy on you as well.

All short form video content is addictive, habit forming, spreads mis and disinfo, and ruins your attention span and ability to concentrate, makes you more emotionally unstable, fucks with your sleep schedule.

This has all been studied.

Brain rot is real.

Short form video content apps are the modern day cigarettes.

Turns out this fakepost is actually a Boards of Canada fan detector mechanism, apparently.

Sorry your kid and you and your partner went through that... that must have been just cripplingly stressful in so many ways...

But uh... yeah.

You understand got lucky by basically random chance, at least in the monetary cost part of that situation... but of course, there are so, so many other nonsense 'exceptional' scenarios which... well actually millions of people end up in each year, and they just get to be saddled with debt for the rest of their lives, for things that happened to them which would generally have been impossible to precisely predict or prevent.

We are ruled by idiot, corrupt nepobabies who just actually cannot theoretically grasp things that do not specifically, personally affect or traumatize them.

'Functional Literacy' is generally defined as 2nd grade and up.

By that metric, yeah, 21% of the US is functionally illiterate.

Technically, they can read and write at a very basic level... but not 'functionally', as in, they could not function in society. They couldn't read a news article and understand all the words. They have a very limited vocabulary.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate

Wikipedia is currently going with an 86% literacy rate for the US, and I'd be willing to bet the discussion page is full of arguments about how to reasonably compare different metrics.

You may also notice that 86% puts us as neighbors with Iran, Iraq, and Syria.

This is what happens when Ya'llQaeda takes over a country.

We had considerably better literacy rates a decade or two ago, more like 95%.

I mean, there is literally 0 chance Trump has listened to or even heard of the ... band? musical group? ... Boards of Canada, only took me 7 words.

But uh hey, if you've never heard of em, give em a listen.

In particular, here's the last song, the outro 'manifesto' of their album 'Music has the right to children', their debut in 1998.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=wnopyFg5msU

Rather poignant message.

Whole album is also great, of course.

Oh uh, headphones recommended.

If us Americans survive all this...

Well, here's your hyberbolic hypothetical argument for euthanasia... realized as an actual case study.

TFLOPs generally correlate to actual, general game performance quite well.

A very demanding game will do poorly on a gpu with a given TFLOPs score, but a less demanding one may do fairly well.

So, if you can roughly dial things into a TFLOPs value, you can get a result that is then generally applicable to all games.

The most graphically demanding games require the most TFLOPs out of a GPU to render well and fast, but less demanding games can be fine with a lower TFLOPs GPU.

Like... a GPU with a medium high TFLOPs score may only be able to push about 50 fps on CP77 ultra w/o RT, but it could likely easily hit something like 200ish FPS in say, CounterStike2, both games at 4k.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/all-games-with-ps5-pro-enhancements.1026072/

A PS5Pro can render CP77 at 'quality mode' ...which is roughly the 'high' graphical quality preset of CP77 on PCs, with... I believe all raytracing other than raytraced shadows off...

... at 2k30fps, or it can render at a dynamicly scaling resolution between 2k and 1080p at a locked 60fps.

https://www.gpu-monkey.com/en/benchmark-amd_radeon_rx_6700-cyberpunk_2077

An RX 6700 can render CP77 at 2k, 43 fps avg.

This site isn't 100% clear as to whether these GPU scores are done at the 'high' preset, or the 'ultra', all settings maxed out preset... but with all raytracing off.

https://www.gpu-monkey.com/en/benchmark-amd_radeon_rx_6600-cyberpunk_2077

A 6600 can do the same, high or ultra preset, with no raytracing, at 2k, with 31 fps.

1080p at 51 fps.

So uh yeah, even with the top of the line PS5 variant, the PS5Pro's graphical capabilities are a bit worse than a 6700, and a bit better than a 6600.

I have used many AMD cards, and yeah basically, if you only use raytraced local shadows?

At 1080p, or 2k?

Very roughly, you'll get about the same fps with a 'high' preset, and only raytraced local shadows, as you would with no rt local shadows, but the game's graphical preset bumped up to 'ultra'.

There are now like 6 different raytracing options in the PC version of CP77.

They only work well with Nvidia cards... and the latest iteration of AMD cards, that now have basically their equivalent of RT cores, though they're not as powerful, nor as expensive, as Nvidia cards.

Needless to say, PS5... normals, or whatever, are going to be even weaker than the 'somewhere between an rx 6600 and rx 6700' rough equivalence.

...

Playstation users only even see about 10% of all the graphical settings options that PC players see, really just the 4 post processing effects and motiin blur. PC players get many, many more settings they can tweak around.

Also, PS5 users generally seem to think CP77 is being rendered at 4k, in quality mode.

Uh, no, it isn't, its rendered at 2k max, and that is likely using FSR 2.1,with a bit of dynamic frame upscaling within CP77, meaning the actual real render resolution is roughly 5% to 15 % lower than 2k, then FSR upscales to 2k,... then the PS5 does its own upscaling outside of the game, likely via an emulator style simple integer upscale algo, to display at 4k on a 4k TV.

... I am saying all of this with confidence because I have spent a considerable amount of time fucking with customizing dynamjc resolution scaling, and other graphical settings, in CP77, on different AMD cards, on PCs.

The PS5Pro is using the same dynamic resolution scaling that exists in CP77 on PCs. PCs generally do best with an 'Auto' mode for various frame upscalers, but the dynamic setting on PC basically lets you throw out the auto settings and fuck about with your own custom tolerances for max and min resolutions and frame rates.