Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
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Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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But optimizing for low hardware does not mean its a win for everyone. For lot of people who have strong enough configuration does not care the performance at the portable level. There is no real benefit for them.
I don't like the implied sociopathy in that assessment. It smacks of "i got mine, fuck you ". I'm not implying that is your attitude, just pointing out that people who don't care because it does not affect them overlap the population that is all for fascism because they are in the "in" group and aren't (obviously) harmed.
Building to work well on low-end systems does not take from high-end systems unless the devs don't take advantage of it when it is available.even then, they are not worse off. They just don't get something better than "the pleebs" are getting.
I don't know how you can even get to this conclusion from what I said.
It depends on the optimization for low-end systems that is being done, if it will have an effect to high-end systems. All I say is, that optimizing a game for Steam Deck does not mean it will have an effect to high end machines (btw my system isn't even high end..., I'm not an elitist). In other replies I tried to give a few examples of what I mean.
A very simple example would be having low quality textures added to a game, to make it run with the constraints of the Steam Deck (or other low end machines). If the game was already running well at 60 fps with high quality textures, then it will not benefit from option to set low quality textures. And just to make it clear: I am not against optimizations for low end hardware. In fact I own a Steam Deck and love it and my PC is not even high end, some may even say low... (at least the GPU).
As I said in my comment, I was not implying you personally had any such attitude. I was commenting on my feelings about how that statement could be interpreted and the general attitude behind it is part of what I have in the past actually experienced when I advocated for the value of building for a less l33t configuration. The attitude by at least some and perhaps many is a weaponization of the attitude I saw in your comment (again, not seeking to imply you actually had that attitude).
When enough people just don't care because the problem does not directly affect them, the problem is not addressed because not enough people care. That is what I was attempting to say. Thus, I apologize for the appearance of saying you personally had a "bad" attitude on this. It's a common attitude and is a contributing factor to many real-world serious social problems, and I just don't like it because of consequences on a larger scale.
I understand the issue here. I just wanted make my intentions crystal clear, as you was not entirely sure. Although, I do not entirely agree. Why? Because it is in the right of not caring other what affects you. Unless someone goes out of the way trying to stop the "optimization" for low end hardware, its totally fine if someone says "I don't care, it doesn't affect me".
I am against elitism too. In example on a different subject, but similar reasoning is emulation vs real hardware enthusiasts. Those people don't like how easy we have access to expensive games and hardware (for free) and therefore they are against it. This is the definition of elitism. And this is a different issue than people with high end hardware not caring about low end hardware, because it does not affect them. Not caring is okay to me.
Understood. My issue is more abstract. It would be nice if some who don't need it also put their support behind the concept for altruistic reasons and because they realize it could affect them when their hardware is no longer cutting edge.
Optimization is good also for hi-tier rigs, since they can run cooler. Don't see the problem in targeting a specific mid-range device. Lately optimization is not even done right on PlayStation by big developers, it's just good enough.
Not just run cooler, but smoother too.
The Moto X was the best phone I've ever used, and thays because they took the time to optimize instead of just throwing more RAM/CPU/GPU at the problem.
Low tier optimization does not mean its running cooloer on higher tier systems. In example if a game requires 16gb of VRAM for high tier setup, then developers optimizing the game alongside for low tier handhelds that have less VRAM will not change the fact for high tier. Therefore not everyone benefits from it. Similar to RayTracing or other features.
Not everyone benefits from games making run on Steam Deck.
Optimization involves a lot of things. For example off-loading off-screen stuff, improving multithreading npc path-finding and other stuff using too much cpu cicles without any gain in quality. All these things could go under-radar if you test on hi-tier rig which may not get impact by these but of course increase cpu usage for, again, no gain at all. This of course heats hardware too.
Edit: once I seen a game main menu, with simple 2D UI and plain black background, using 100% of GPU (built with unreal engine of course)
You count specific optimization strategies that affect everyone. But not all optmizations or in the case of our discussion, making the game run on Steam Deck, won't affect everyone.
Indeed making the game run on Steam Deck involves more than optimization, like gamepad support and a proper UI scale (other than wine or linux friendly anti-cheat) which are beneficial not to EVERYONE but to what I think still a big piece of the cake.
What I was doin was speculating on optimization, which indeed is beneficial to everyone.
Being pushed to target a specific frame rate on a mid or low range device make you more aware of possible bottlenecks and things that can just be improved.
Lately there are a lot of studios who just don't care because they expect you to have an hi-tier rig (or because they use one to test their own game, resulting in good enough fps), so you end up in simple scenes which use 100% of Gpu or whatever just because the engine is doing something in background actually useless. But since you must be running this on a powerfull pc, that still means enough fps. This leads to bad design choices, which is also the trend with not so savvy unreal engine developers.
But its not true in all cases. Let's say a game is vastly optimized to run on high end hardware. There is not much to do, but they can optimize to run it on low end hardware with low resolution textures and other settings to make the game run on handheld. This would be optimized for handheld. And it won't change how good the game run on high end already.
Of course when we talk about mipmaps, lower resolution textures, lod, or other technics to improve lower end gpus usability, the gains are more toward those lower ends. That's granted, even because in that field optimization is more up to drivers and the engine itself rather than the studio (given they are not using an homemade engine).
Talking about other optimization, like cpu usage, again yes: results can be various, given not every cpus are the same. Lower ends commonly are faster in single threading rather than high ends which outperform in multi threading.
Ram usage too. Having the game more smartly using it would avoid issues, but still if your rig got soooo many GBs of ram, you can even load the full game inside lol (I know people having 128GB, mind blowing).
If you by "everyone", you mean it. Like 100% of gamers, of course it's not. One can play on the Frontier on all max-out settings.
I get your point that not everyone "wins", but the people with high end setup don't loose anything if the game is suddenly playable on the deck. On the contrary, people with steam decks, people on linux and people on lower end system get to have positive repercussions. So while high end gamers migh not always gain somethig, it's still neutral to them. Therefore, no one loses and it's a net positive
Neutral does not mean its a benefit. And not losing something was not the point of discussion or what i was talking about.
When we are talking about for example 10 years from now it means the people with strong configurations today, will still be able to play new games with the same pc if the games are being targeted to a lower spec (at that time) pcs. So it will benefit everyone and it's a win for everyone.
You make some assumptions about who will benefit. And those are not "everyone".