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.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
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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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.