A frog who wants the objective truth about anything and everything.

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  • 97 Posts
  • 324 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Just to narrow it down further, were you getting bad performance on Linux Mint too, or did you only install games on Kubuntu?

    Another user mentioned that the power settings can have a huge effect, which also seems like a good lead to look into. You should be able to check it by opening your settings panel and going to the Power Management section. In there should be a Power Profile setting. If it’s set to power save mode, it’ll limit your performance quite a bit.


  • Ahh okay. The big thing I was concerned about was if you’d installed graphics drivers from the AMD website, as those would likely be worse performing compared to what comes with Linux built in, and can do wonky things if done slightly wrong, so most avoid them unless they need to do like, scientific compute stuff.

    The performance of the Linux driver is very good compared to the Windows one, usually being at parity or even slightly better. Proton can introduce a slight overhead, but not enough to explain the delta in your experience.

    The only thing jumping out to me is that you mentioned running hi-fi rush at maximum settings as your benchmark. I looked into the recommended hardware for that game on its steam page, and while it does have a fairly low minimum requirement, the recommended specs are actually very beefy, suggesting an RTX 2070 or RX 6600, which are multiple times more powerful than the integrated graphics on your Beelink.

    When I look at what other people are able to achieve on Windows with the same APU as yours in hi-fi rush, their graphics settings appear to be set to low/medium settings, and with a small resolution of 1366x768. At those settings, they seem to be getting around 60fps.

    Are you absolutely sure you were maxing out the graphics settings in hi-fi rush on Windows, and at a higher resolution than 1366x768? If you drop the settings to match what is displayed in the linked video, can you achieve similar performance on Linux?

    Its been a while since I used AMD graphics on Windows, but I seem to recall that the Windows AMD driver had an ability to automatically set graphics settings for you for an optimal experience, and I suspect it may have lowered the settings automatically without you realizing it, making the performance seem surprisingly good.





  • I also wasn’t a fan, mainly due to how often you need to resupply to stay alive. You get a very small window of opportunity to do actual exploration before you need to go find more food and water, on top of gathering a bunch of other materials.

    I liked parts of it, but ultimately just got frustrated with the tedious parts and bailed.










  • He wouldn’t have any problem whatsoever if Debian was publicly endorsing right wing views and losing leftist contributors.

    Linux and the GPL FOSS movement is inherently leftist, snd right wingers have been wailing about leftist views in various FOSS projects for over a decade. I recall many threads on reddit accusing Linus of having been made ‘woke’ by his daughter when the CoC was introduced, back during the gamergate era.

    It’s all the same shit, all the same complaints, and all a waste of time. As the US descends into extreme fascism to the cries of approval of the MAGA cult, it becomes harder and harder to stomach them in a project.

    The more concerning thing going on is Debian potentially embracing AI, which I am very much not a fan of.


  • Older desktops can have a somewhat hefty idle power draw due to the overall system consumption contributing more than expected, such as the southbridge. According to this old review of the i7-2600k, the system idles at 74w, which at $0.12 per KWh, would cost you roughly $77 per year. Though you might want to confirm that with a Kill-a-watt meter if you can (libraries sometimes lend them out), since I’m pretty sure that total system power chart includes a discrete GPU, so the real number for a GPU-less system is probably around 40 or 50w at idle.

    If that is accurate, you could potentially replace your i7-2600 with a used Dell Wyse 5070 thin client from ebay for about $40 (in the US), and that idles at 5w, which would only cost you $5 a year at the same rate.

    Older thin clients and laptops tend to have much better idle power draws compared to desktops. For other people reading this, if you’re using a desktop for a low-power use case, it’s probably worth finding out what its idle power consumption is and doing the calculation to determine if it’d be worth replacing it with a more efficient used thin-client or office mini-pc.






  • Muntedcrocodile: “I believe in the right to spread hatred as long as it’s not calling for violence.”

    Lemmy: “Um, okay. Let’s give that a try. We hate hateful right wing views, and call people with those views total assholes.”

    muntedcrocodile: “Wait, not like that! You should tolerate us so there’s a diversity of views!”

    Ironic.



  • I’ve made multiple attempts to finish Deus Ex over the years after giving up each time due to aspects of the gameplay. I would normally never give a game so many shots, but I love so many aspects of Deus Ex, I want to finish it, but I just can’t push myself to continue at certain points.

    I think the biggest blockers for me is I love stealth games (thief 1 & 2 are all time favorites), and since Deus Ex does have a stealth system (though primitive), I tried to play it like a stealth game. a vanilla install means that tranq darts make enemies run around like headless chickens for a minute, and knocking people out with the baton is unreliable. Combined, stealthing is both visually comical, and realistically very frustrating to play.

    I could deal with that, and I’ve tried switching it up by going more guns blazing, but the gunplay of Deus Ex is just as clunky, with slow firing weapons that deal little damage on fairly bullet spongy enemies. Combat just doesn’t feel good.

    I tried mods and overhauls to see if I could rectify either of those points, which do sorta work as a bandaid. GMDX makes stealth WAY more fun by making headshots with darts work instantly, and baton-ing more reliable. With it, I was able to get all the way to France without quitting, but I think due to GMDX, I hit a massive difficulty spike where my stealth build became much less viable, and it once again just became frustrating. Perhaps a gun-build with GMDX would’ve been the winning combo.

    I think my best experience was with the Revision overhaul, but by then I had started the game over so many times over so many years, I just didn’t have the appetite to get all the way back to France.

    It’s a truly spectacular game in terms of story and open-ended level design, but the mechanics really are a turn-off. I wish my first playthrough had been with the Revision overhaul (though I wish it didn’t radically change the level design so much), but even still, I think it would benefit from a Nightdive style remake.


  • I don’t believe it, or rather, I think Warren Spector and Ricardo Bare really didn’t intend for it to be political, as both of them were far more focused on the game parts of Deus Ex; the mechanics, the balancing, the level design, etc, and are seemingly oblivious to how the writers took those puzzle pieces and made it political. Though the extent that Spector is completely unaware of that fact seems unlikely, and instead he almost appears to be whitewashing what the writers intended? Based on his stance that only movies and books can be political (which is a wild take, since games actually seem the most ripe medium for that), he may be trying to frame Deus Ex as A-political because of that.

    It’s very odd that this article didn’t interview the lead writer of Deus Ex, Sheldon Pacotti, for an article about the politics of the game. Sheldon absolutely intended for it to be political, and in an old interview even goes into how capital is used to exploit and suppress the working class, which is what leads to radical terrorist groups, such as the NSF. He mentions in the first part of that interview series how the designers would create the levels without any concept for a story (citing the blown up statue of liberty as an example, which the level designer just thought would be an arresting sight to the player, but didn’t consider how it would tie into a wider narrative).

    I think Ross’s Game Dungeon on Deus Ex really shows how Pacotti was able to make Deus Ex realistically political by tackling real societal problems that we all now face, and very few games dare touch, which continues to set it apart it decades later.

    Also @[email protected] & @[email protected]