TheRealKuni

Depends on the game. For example, on the Xbox Series X or PS5, I often elect for better graphics (raytracing, 4K, etc) at 30fps, especially with third-person titles where you can really appreciate the scenery. God of War Ragnarok in 4K with raytracing is a sight to behold on a big OLED TV. But some games (most first person titles, racing games, and perhaps surprisingly Diablo 4) I prefer the higher framerate.

If I were a squijillionaire, I’d have a 5090 and get both framerate and fidelity. But I am not. I am a humble console peasant taking his earliest steps in the PC gaming world.

although it also has a much higher display resolution.

I was about to say 1920x1080 isn’t that much higher resolution than 1280x800, but it’s twice as many pixels! 🤯

And 4K is 4x 1080p! No wonder 4K gaming makes graphics cards chug.

using Steam remote play to the deck

I’m going to pass on some advice that a friend of mine gave me: get Apollo (a fork of Sunshine) on your computer and Moonlight on your Steam Deck. You can install Moonlight in Desktop Mode and add it to your Steam Library so you can access it in Steam mode.

It’s far better at streaming than Steam’s own streaming system. Apollo treats it like a monitor on your desktop. I have it set up so that the Steam Deck is the ONLY monitor when I’m streaming to it. You can also specify resolution in Moonlight, so I tell it to give me 2560x1440 or 2560x1600. Because of the way chroma subsampling works, this looks much better when downscaled on the Deck’s screen than simply streaming the Deck’s resolution. Cyberpunk 2077 looks GORGEOUS on the Deck like this.

(Note this is best if your PC is on a wired connection to a router with WiFi 6/6E/7 support.)

I forced myself to complete the Diablo 4 campaign because of them.

That would be a lot easier now. The game improved enormously around season 4 I think. Whatever the Loot Reborn season was. And nearly every season has included some QoL improvements.

I honestly love Diablo 4. It’s a great podcast/audiobook companion.

Good thing Sauber is becoming Audi next season. That’s a lot of money for a title sponsor to lose (and it sounds like they deserve to lose it).

BG4: Modern Warfare will be a fantastic take on the D&D ruleset.

This issue was great. It gave me an excuse to upgrade to a better SSD, which also gave me an excuse to try Linux for the first time in like a decade (other than the Steam Deck). Threw Nobara on the drive that Windows would murder. Haven’t had time to play around with it much, but I’m excited to try it.

Even if the headline weren’t misleading, I wouldn’t be shocked if they have a hard time getting telemetry reports from failed drives from users if the OS is installed on said drive.

Then again, a modern OS should be able to phone home with a crash report as it crashes depending on what has failed, so I guess I’ve talked myself out of that hypothetical lack of shock.

So…disregard this. 😅

It’s not that computationally intensive to upscale frames. TVs have been doing it algorithmically for ages and looking good doing it. Hell, nVidia graphics cards can do it for every single frame of high end games with DLSS. Calling it “AI” because the type of algorithm it’s using is just cashing in on the buzzword.

(Unless I’m misunderstanding what’s going on.)

I feel like that should’ve already been a given when the 13th and 14th gen Core processors permanently kneecap themselves if they feel like it. But that’s just me.

I suppose with regard to Ukraine I should have said “our support was.”

The US is all about realpolitik, and begins to make a lot more sense when you look at everything through a Kissinger-shaped lens (rest in piss, you evil bastard). We pretend to be ideological so our citizenry can feel good about ourselves, but the way the nation operates is purely pragmatic. Look no further than Israel-Palestine and how buddy-buddy we are with Saudi Arabia for modern examples. Even our support of Ukraine, while overlapping with an ethical imperative, is driven primarily by the interests of NATO and the relatively inexpensive degradation of Russia’s military and political standing we can participate in. We only give a shit about “human rights” when it benefits us.

Operation Paperclip was pragmatism. It creates a sense of cognitive dissonance when we try to hold in our minds that we brought Nazi scientists over and the idea that we’re “the good guys” and fought for “justice,” so our brains try to reduce that cognitive dissonance by saying those scientists weren’t behind any of the evils of the Nazis. They were, obviously. That didn’t matter to our government, but they kept the operation classified for a reason.

Wernher von Braun by Tom Lehrer

R.I.P. Tom Lehrer

(Heard this first in For All Mankind, an excellent show I recommend to everyone, pirate it if you don’t have Apple TV+.)

Me too!

Like that locked door in Jedi Fallen Order?

Oh I forgot about WiFi 6E. Suuuuuper good for streaming from your PC.

Graphically intense games can be good too, especially in bed, streaming from a PC in the other room.

An etched screen protector can help, but isn’t as nice as the native etched glass. The underlying screen is the same OLED as the 512GB, I believe.

The OLED model is also just better. Got a few minor upgrades other than the screen. Faster RAM, better battery life, slightly lighter. Maybe some other changes.

You can get an etched glass screen protector that emulates the effect. The one I got isn’t as good as the base screen (which is essentially perfect), it has a very small amount of color scrambling if you look really closely due to the nature of the etching, but it’s not bad and I got used to it quickly.

That’s fair, but I can tell you from experience there’s no way it’s going to fall out during the lifetime of that elastic. I say this because it’s mildly annoying to extract it (which, admittedly, isn’t an issue with a dedicated pocket).