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The Hot Take: Whoa, now if publishing house start publishing native you might get my buy in.
Steam just released its March hardware and software survey, and it's clear that the PC gaming market is going through a massive flux as inflated prices force buyers into new (and old) areas.
Read the full articleThe Hot Take: I think people are rebelling against the Fortnite clones.
Call of Duty has had a rocky reception over the last few years, but arguably the best series installment in the last decade, Call of Duty: Modern Warfarefrom 2019, is undergoing a huge resurgence of players on Steam right now.
Read the full articleThe Hot Take: Linux is coming for Windows Gamers for sure!
Linux gamers are seeing massive performance gains with Wine's new NTSYNC support, "which is a feature that has been years in the making and rewrites how Wine handles one of the most performance-sensitive operations in modern gaming," reports XDA Developers. Not every game will see a night-and-day difference, but for the games that do benefit from these changes, "the improvements range from noticeable to absurd." Combined with improvements to Wayland, graphics, and compatibility, as well as a major WoW64 architecture overhaul, the release looks less like an incremental update and more like one of Wine's most important upgrades in years. From the report: The numbers are wild. In developer benchmarks, Dirt 3 went from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS, which is an impressive 678% improvement. Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS. Call of Juarez went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands saw gains from 130 FPS to 360 FPS. As well, Call of Duty: Black Ops I is now actually playable on Linux, too. Those benchmarks compare Wine NTSYNC against upstream vanilla Wine, which means there's no fsync or esync either. Gamers who use fsync are not going to see such a leap in performance in most games. The games that benefit most from NTSYNC are the ones that were struggling before, such as titles with heavy multi-threaded workloads where the synchronization overhead was a genuine bottleneck. For those games, the difference is night and day. And unlike fsync, NTSYNC is in the mainline kernel, meaning you don't need any custom patches or out-of-tree modules for it work. Any distro shipping kernel 6.14 or later, which at this point includes Fedora 42, Ubuntu 25.04, and more recent releases, will support it. Valve has already added the NTSYNC kernel driver to SteamOS 3.7.20 beta, loading the module by default, and an unofficial Proton fork, Proton GE, already has it enabled. When Valve's official Proton rebases on Wine 11, every Steam Deck owner gets this for free. All of this is what makes NTSYNC such a big deal, as it's not simply a run-of-the-mill performance patch. Instead, it's something much bigger: this is the first time Wine's synchronization has been correct at the kernel level, implemented in the mainline Linux kernel, and available to everyone without jumping through hoops. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read the full articleThe Hot Take: What happens when you have a dual-opoly between 3 major chip makers.
It doesnât sound like Crimson Desert, the recently released prequel to Black Desert Online, will support Intel Arc GPUs anytime soon, if at all. On the gameâs FAQ page, its developer Pearl Abyss advised players expecting Arc support to apply for a refund. âIf you purchased the game expecting Intel Arc support, please refer to the refund policy of the platform where the game was purchased for available options,â the company wrote. Apparently, though, itâs not from lack of guidance from Intel. The chipmaker told Wccftech that it reached out to Pearl Abyss âmany timesâ over the past several years. The Intel spokesperson said that the company has tried to help the developer âtest, validate, and optimize support for Intel graphicsâ for years. Intel also tried to provide the developer âearly hardware, drivers, and engineering resourcesâ across several generations of GPUs, âincluding Alchemist, Battlemage, Meteor Lake, and Lunar Lake.â The chipmaker said itâs âhugely disappointed that players using Intel graphics hardwareâ canât play the game, but that it remains âready to assist Pearl Abyssâ however it can. It also advised players to reach out directly to the developer for âdetails on the choice not to enable Intel support at launch.âPearl Abyss, of course, doesnât have the obligation to tweak the game so that it runs on PCs with Intel Arc GPUs. The good news is that since the title came out just a few days ago, it will still be easy to get a refund. Steam, where Crimson Desert is now one of the top-selling games, issues refunds within two weeks of purchase. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/intel-says-crimson-desert-devs-ignored-offers-of-help-to-support-arc-gpus-155514896.html?src=rss
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