Valve Steam Deck first reviews are coming out and apparently wowing reviewers. Mobile Second Life anyone?

[Nick0678]

Takes a laptop and goes to bed.

 

[Odaks]

I can see this rapidly degenerating into a "mine's bigger than yours" contest, if we're not careful!

[Maryanne Solo]

Oh great! I'm really looking forward to the Tsunami of "Deck" Pics both online & RL. 😬😂

For years I've wanted a second monitor array that swings over my bed or a couch or something.
When I go full e-commerce in RL, you could work right up to say 11pm/midnight, turn system & monitors
shutdown timers on, then just close your eyes and drift off.
I already turn my comp & monitors off this way and doze off watching a movie or something. 

[Setsuki Takeda]

14 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

That's not how any of this works.

 

Some games would run better with WINE than on XP and they were usually ones that ran in OpenGL mode rather than DirectX. I don't see how it is any different with the rendering for SL relying on OpenGL which has lost a lot of support in Windows over the years as they focus on mainstream gaming.

But you also get better performance with a similarly powerful Quadro than a RTX, which doesn't hold true for commercial games, but is true for graphics or video processing and things like GIS or remote sensing applications.

SL isn't rendered (and doesn't have the same basic asset libraries repeated over and over) like a game, so it doesn't work on the same standards most games do, why my "gaming PC" could play brand new 3D games at 60FPS without framedrop but when I launched SL on the same system I'd get half that if I was lucky.

 

While the SteamDeck does use SteamOS instead of pure Arch, it is still compatible with Linux code, so your graphics libraries can be expanded and updated to include whatever you need rather than relying on the ones Valve chooses to ship with their default installation. Same way I would get better performance on Slackware than Ubuntu, despite the game packaged being Ubuntu deb files, the code was still compatible even if I had to simlink a few libraries to get it working.

[Coffee Pancake]

7 hours ago, NanashiNyx said:

Some games would run better with WINE than on XP and they were usually ones that ran in OpenGL mode rather than DirectX. I don't see how it is any different with the rendering for SL relying on OpenGL which has lost a lot of support in Windows over the years as they focus on mainstream gaming.

The difference isn't the rendering, it's scheduling and IO (and windows has an aggressive AV subsystem that scans everything in and out)

 

[Aya Sweetheart]

On 2/9/2022 at 9:36 AM, NanashiNyx said:

Linux has far better OpenGL support than Windows, so a SteamDeck could potentially run this better than a more powerful Windows PC.

This actually has some merit...

I play on Linux, but i have Windows on the same machine.  Under Linux I get higher FPS in Firestorm than in Windows... its a noticeable difference enough that I don't play in Windows.

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, AyaWetts said:

This actually has some merit...

I play on Linux, but i have Windows on the same machine.  Under Linux I get higher FPS in Firestorm than in Windows... its a noticeable difference enough that I don't play in Windows.

If that was the case, all your OpenGL games would be faster too.

SL is IO intensive. It does a awful lot of data and file management between frame rendering. The longer this takes, the longer you have to wait for the next frame (which itself renders comparatively fast).

 

Overly simplified and not strictly correct, but you can read the source if you want the pedantic version

 

Games

The CPU just has to handle a little game & UI logic, player inputs and plays a minor role next to the all powerful GPU.

|--FRAME--|--FRAME--|--FRAME--|--FRAME--|--FRAME--|--FRAME--|--FRAME--|--FRAME--|--FRAME--....

 

SL

The CPU generates and manages the same amount of internet traffic as a small office, decoding progressive JPEG2000 image data into something the GPU can understand, managing a local cache of that data, unpacking and processing object metadata that invariably leads to more stuff to fetch and process, resolving a huge list of animations for every single rigged object (not attachment) for each and every avatar, a UI with desktop levels of complexity and data structures hundreds of MB in size, AND all the stuff regular games do  .. after all of that we finally have our ducks in a line and can ask the GPU to kindly finish up and give us the next frame.

|--downloading-decoding-cache-operations-avatars-anims-avatar-anims-avatar-anims-avatar-anims-dumb-stuff-|--FRAME--|--downloading-decoding-cache-operations-avatars-anims-avatar-anims-avatar-anims-avatar-anims-dumb-stuff-|--FRAME--|--downloading-decoding-cache-operations-avatars-anims-avatar-anims-avatar-anims-avatar-anims-dumb-stuff-|--FRAME--|....

 

Pushing pixels is less important than scheduling and file operations. Windows and Linux differ substantially in this regard where as the OpenGL stuff isn't that different. The speed of IO operations is dependent on a lot of things and only a small part involves your graphics card. Windows ships with an always on, aggressive anti virus package that scans everything in and out, including all the cache operations made by the SL viewer. This alone is enough to dictate performance.

 

SL is also very single threaded. There is a list of things and those things have to happen sequentially before the next frame is ready, many of the things are dependent on things that were just done, so .. making it run on all the CPU cores isn't really doable with the architecture we have right now. 

 

The SteamDeck has a Ryzen 3 3100 equiv CPU (sub $100 budget part).

It's going to SUCK running SL, especially if you have to put the cache on the SD card. What difference will the OS make .. a little .. enough? Hell no!

 

Mobile Second Life is in another castle.

[Aya Sweetheart]

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

If that was the case, all your OpenGL games would be faster too.

SL is IO intensive. It does a awful lot of data and file management between frame rendering. The longer this takes, the longer you have to wait for the next frame (which itself renders comparatively fast).

 

Overly simplified and not strictly correct, but you can read the source if you want the pedantic version

 

Games

The CPU just has to handle a little game & UI logic, player inputs and plays a minor role next to the all powerful GPU.

|--FRAME--|--FRAME--|--FRAME--|--FRAME--|--FRAME--|--FRAME--|--FRAME--|--FRAME--|--FRAME--....

 

SL

The CPU generates and manages the same amount of internet traffic as a small office, decoding progressive JPEG2000 image data into something the GPU can understand, managing a local cache of that data, unpacking and processing object metadata that invariably leads to more stuff to fetch and process, resolving a huge list of animations for every single rigged object (not attachment) for each and every avatar, a UI with desktop levels of complexity and data structures hundreds of MB in size, AND all the stuff regular games do  .. after all of that we finally have our ducks in a line and can ask the GPU to kindly finish up and give us the next frame.

|--downloading-decoding-cache-operations-avatars-anims-avatar-anims-avatar-anims-avatar-anims-dumb-stuff-|--FRAME--|--downloading-decoding-cache-operations-avatars-anims-avatar-anims-avatar-anims-avatar-anims-dumb-stuff-|--FRAME--|--downloading-decoding-cache-operations-avatars-anims-avatar-anims-avatar-anims-avatar-anims-dumb-stuff-|--FRAME--|....

 

Pushing pixels is less important than scheduling and file operations. Windows and Linux differ substantially in this regard where as the OpenGL stuff isn't that different. The speed of IO operations is dependent on a lot of things and only a small part involves your graphics card. Windows ships with an always on, aggressive anti virus package that scans everything in and out, including all the cache operations made by the SL viewer. This alone is enough to dictate performance.

 

SL is also very single threaded. There is a list of things and those things have to happen sequentially before the next frame is ready, many of the things are dependent on things that were just done, so .. making it run on all the CPU cores isn't really doable with the architecture we have right now. 

 

The SteamDeck has a Ryzen 3 3100 equiv CPU (sub $100 budget part).

It's going to SUCK running SL, especially if you have to put the cache on the SD card. What difference will the OS make .. a little .. enough? Hell no!

 

Mobile Second Life is in another castle.

Just saying I can get 5 to 15 fps higher on the same exact machine in Linux vs Windows right now... I am not saying that will somehow make Steam Deck be able to handle SL... SL runs poorly on almost anything.  It would be playable at lowest settings in most areas with annoyingly bad performance.  I wouldn't suggest anyone do it beyond a test.

[FastTortillaJuice]

I'm in the queue for a Steam Deck, haven't been offered it yet though.

I just got myself a RTX3060Ti for my gaming desktop, though, and my preliminary tests streaming games from my phone are promising. Given that the Steam Deck is going to have a screen barely larger than my phone's... I might be all set with streaming from my desktop while on the go.