I’ve heard nothing but good things about Schedule 1. Haven’t gotten it yet since it doesn’t seem like has good gamepad control support yet but it’s planned. Modern gaming in practice, not as what’s most marketed as gaming, to me reminds me of the PS1 and back. A lot of really game-y games. Systems that you get really into. Learn the exploits. The patterns. Get high scores. Max damage numbers. The PS3/PS4 era is the cinematic narrative era. The late PS4 to present is a gameplay heavy era. Narrative heavy games may get the traditional media awards but it’s been a long time since I’ve felt like traditional media has been good at judging games for their gameplay. They’re more like junior film media. Felt that way to me at least ever since Starcraft 2 was topping/gave birth to Twitch.tv and then League of Legends and Counter Strike GO

Settlement Survival is pretty solid. I played that for a bit since it has an android version and it was a nice use of waiting room time

Qualcomm support on Linux has been too mediocre and late to take it seriously so far over x86 products

I bought into AM5 first year with Zen 4. I’m pretty confident Zen 7 will be AM5. There’s got to be little chance for DDR6 to be priced well by the end of the decade. Confident that I’ll be on AM5 for 10+ years but way better than the Intel desktop I had for 10 years because I will actually have a great update path for my motherboard. AM4 is still relevant. That’s getting to almost 10 years now. It’ll still be a great platform for years to come. Really if you bought early in the life of first gen chips on the socket for AM4/AM5, you’re looking at a 15 year platform. Amazing

Hoping the Steam Machine can match the Steam Deck in success and get pre-build desktop/minipc wins like Lenovo having Steam OS versions of the Legion Go. Steam Frame dethrone the Meta Quest hopefully

Nice. Waiting for RVA23 boards with a PCI-E slot to become widely available so I can test out box64 on those

Windows is their #1 marketing platform for their other services. They crash and burned out of mobile and television so in the name of expanding their business into more and more subscription services, Windows is their only popular consumer platform and problem for them is that basic OS functionality that people want pretty much was reached with Windows XP. Everything new is an application that is easily installed afterwards or in a web browser. Packaging it into the basic Windows installation just bogs things down and makes it more busy. It’s a marathon. Linux will win eventually by having features and services out the box. Practically no services. No onedrive, o365, and copilot nagging

That newer open source driver is still far behind but is progressing. Those graphics cards will have a great new life with modern kernels someday

Proton threads are where the leftists equivalents to sovereign citizens pop up. Learn the technology a bit and about legal systems. That’s what you have to operate within. If you want to feel more in control, encrypt everything yourself and only communicate/share in encrypted channels. At least then the primary sources of leaks is you and the receiver. If not, you’re whining about streamlined performant services that will never be perfect enough for your standards because they operate legally rather than the user unfriendly solutions that you aren’t willing to operate yourself for your life (maybe to be passed on) and/or won’t run/can’t afford to operate the illegal operation

Can’t speak for this month but last I tried was like October and I couldn’t alt-tab another window over a full screen game. I’m thinking of giving another go when 26.04 popos comes out

It’s always about bringing back the old Bioware names for star wars rather than the old obsidian Kotor 2 names. Kotor 2 raised the bar even with the rushed development. Raised it so high that the mega budget multiple single game story sized MMO with Bioware disappointed, Same with the book before the game. I don’t get what about these suits and Bioware alumni seem so allergic towards Kotor 2. Mass Effect was a step back compared to Xbox era Bioware and a major step back comparison to Xbox era Obsidian. Besides David Gaider, if the name is a former major Bioware figure, my interest plummets

Regardless, new studio. They probably don’t even have a clear idea on what the narrative even is. Probably spin the wheels on asset generation, concept art, and narrative round tabling with a back and forth with LucarsArts/Disney canon approvers. Keep expectations low. 2030+. Don’t expect risks. Bioware and the old Bioware alumni still directing games besides Gaider with Dragon Age 1-3 all seem obsessed with making Hollywood knock offs with very basic morality and basic heroes journey narratives. Pretty much covering up a new hope in new paint over and over again

Last I had it on my desktop was like 2 months ago. Oddities with games here and there was a deal breaker for me. Don’t remember if I could alt tab over video game windows yet. Not being able to alt-tab other windows over a video game is a deal breaker for me. There were random nich applications I don’t recall that didn’t handle dialog windows/file pickers well. That may be better by now. The file explorer is really bare bones even compared to nautilus. Not expecting Dolphin but I want something better.

High hopes though. I may give it another go as my primary with 26.04. The Cosmic applications are all pretty fast. I think I like how it looks more than KDE just KDE is way more fully featured

Hopefully he’s still weird. People often lose a lot their teenage/young adult fantasizing as they age. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just I feel the major thing missing from modern RPG writing is that they’re not idiosyncratic enough. Worlds written that cater too much to modern (American) sensibilities, slang - anachronistic. I like when it’s written like an all star dungeon master really going hard into the lore of the desert bandits 3000 years of traditions

Good luck on no stumbles to the first game. Then I guess reuse maps and assets as much as possible like Yakuza games though scope creed that requires major development is more common than not even with asset reuse

Iris is really good with faces. That’s it’s design. The reason is going from a high res up 4x takes too long and downscaling fuzzes up the picture a bit so things don’t get too smoothed out when you upscale a 2nd time. Also there’s a resolution limit on the upscale so can’t get too large

Iris I always use medium video quality source. Anything that needs low usually looks terrible on the upscale

Iris does seem faster to me compared to Proteus. Didn’t see much use for me from like Gaia compared to Proteus. I convert down resolution with Handbrake with a pretty high quality target for h264 and then run it again in topaz with Proteus. 4x with Iris, than resolution back down by 4 and then 4x back up with Proteus. I feel like Iris + Proteus gives a real good result for low resolution content

Oh. I like doing a round 4x in Iris and then converting it down and doing a 4x in Proteus. A lot of times Iris is enough. The newer starlight mini everyone says is way better especially with not making terrifying faces when there’s not enough data but I’m not subscribing again for that

I buy XFX. I think Sapphire is really well regarded. I feel like I had a Sapphire ATI card a long time ago. Pretty sure XFX and Sapphire are the major time tested brands. You can probably be good buying the cheapest brand though

Topaz is absolutely the best. There are other commercial software out there that’s talked up a bit but everything i’ve read says Topaz is still better. Free stuff, nothing really comes close. There’s this that i hope get’s better and more developer interest. Available on Linux and Windows

https://github.com/TNTwise/REAL-Video-Enhancer

If you’re Windows only, there’s this. It’s more mature in development

https://github.com/AaronFeng753/Waifu2x-Extension-GUI

But Topaz is better than everything else. It’s why I grabbed a used laptop with an Nvidia GPU for a good price

The free stuff is real hit or miss with real life video. Animations generally always looks good