UnfortunateShort

Every day when I go to bed

For me, launching the game via GOG Galaxy in Wine caused issues. When I launched it standalone, everything was fine

I mean, can’t really tell while FEX has not been extensively tested, can we?

Valve has a great track record with (their contributuons too and use of) Wine, the devs are extremely competent and have been on this for ages, and Valve had any freedom to not choose an ARM chip, as low-power AMD alternatives became viable.

Can you go lower-power with ARM? Probably, but according to Valve it comes with a 10-20% performance hit for x86 Games at the moment. That means efficency takes a hit as well, whereas I would assume for 20% you are as efficient as an x86 chip at best.

My guess is that Valve isn’t doing this to chase some efficiency, but for strategic reasons. They are growing independent from Microsoft, now they want to get independent from the oligopoly that is x86 as well. One thing we cannot forget in this discussion is that ARM is likely much cheaper to get, with much more vendors available, and custom designs being quite common.

Maybe we will see custom ARM hardware with FEX acceleration from/for Valve and suddenly the overhead is almost gone.

I think the way that CS does it is really the best one. Prevent the simple cheats, record games and let people handle the edge cases based on reports and suspicious activity.

Demo was pretty cool

A word of warning: Garuda is kinda cool and allows you to try lots of stuff you would normally have to set up yourself. It is great if you want to experience what Arch is like. That said, it has not exactly been a stable experience for me. You are probably better off just running EndeavourOS or plain Arch (via archinstall) in the long run.

I mean, cool mod, but is there really that much use for 32GB given the (at this point) rather weak SoC?

Not a recommendation, but you should consider a handheld and a non-gaming laptop as an option. Beating the Steam Deck in terms of value is a real challenge, and a dedicated GPU + a decent CPU + 32GB RAM will drive the price of any laptop like crazy. A laptop with a mid SoC, 16GB RAM and 500GB storage is more than enough for everyday stuff and will cost you like half of that, while a handheld might be a better experience for non-keyboard gaming.

Note how the 3060 already had 12GB VRAM, and they still try to push 8 today

There is a way to kinda make this work, this would be hardware based security. You could use a TPM to make reasonably sure the kernel is e.g. mainline / hardened / anything else acceptable. Hardware vendors (i.e. Intel, AMD etc.) would have to provide a service where they hash the kernel alongside their keys for the game devs to check against (probably not for free). You would absolutely have to use Secure Boot tho, and eventually keys may be leaked. Another possibility would be devs connecting directly to your TPM to make sure (afaik this is possible in principle, but not mean to be used that way).

I think there are easier ways to prevent cheating tho, for example simply detecting suspicious activity on the server side, i.e. stats go way up, looking at data coming from clients other than yours.

I’m wondering what the problem even is. I mean, can’t you just put all the stuff relevant to 32 bit gaming into a ‘retro-gaming’ package and be like “there, now if you want updates, better find maintainers”?

If you have an old game, chances are you won’t need many new features. Only problem could be other packages or the kernel becoming incompatible. I don’t know how relevant that is in this instance.