Grofit

This tool is great for people who play fullscreen games, but if you play windowed it currently won't work properly for you (even in windowed mode).

I got it to try and bump my 1440p@60fps to 1440p@120fps without making the GPU want to take off via the frame generation, and unfortunately while it does have a windowed mode that either draws over your window (it's wonky and slow) or a mode where it just does fullscreen but with black space to pad to your window size, which looks silly.

I like what it does but I have other stuff I want to see on my screen while playing so want to keep my games windowed.

I would also say if you are playing a game that supports dlss/FSR with frame generation, just use that instead as it will use frame buffer data to drive the upscaling/frame generation, which is pretty efficient and the data is already on the gpu. Lossless scaling is basically taking REALLY FAST screenshots of your game and upscaling/frame gen then drawing it over your screen quickly.

There is too much to respond to all, will be interesting to see how the wolfire case continues then.

I just wanted to chime in on the last bit.

So as you say steam wins on features, and Epic and MS have both chosen not to compete on features. It's not that they can't, they both have the means and money to do so, they just don't want to invest the money on the infrastructure incase it's a big flop I guess.

Either way you are making out like the only valid perspective here is focusing on the game price, but as I said to me the feature set is VERY important. Literally the only reason I use steam over other platforms is the features, being able to use any controller and remap it to however I want. Knowing my saves can be transfered to any computer, streaming to the TV so the kids can play games on it etc.

I appreciate not everyone else uses these features, but some of us do, and this is why steam is the better platform. If MS let me stream games to my TV and use controllers properly etc I would happily get game pass, but their platform is rubbish, same for EGS.

This whole thing is just crap platforms complaining they can't compete when they havent even tried, they just want the free publicity in the hope they can get more users "in the door".

Wolfire v valve was thrown out right? So they didn't successfully prove valve were doing anything anti competition.

To my knowledge the price parity is only on steam keys sold elsewhere not for you selling a game on another storefront, happy to be shown evidence that isn't the case.

In terms of what is a "fair deal" we could quibble about the 30% but that's literally the only thing up for discussion right? And at the moment that's an "industry standard" so by all means lower it if they can, I'm all for savings as a consumer, but not at the expense of the service they provide.

For example if Valve personally came to me and said "you can either have games 10% cheaper but we would have to retire X features" I would happily keep the features and forgo the discount.

Also being realistic if Valve were to drop their cut to 20% game prices wouldn't change, the publishers would just pocket the difference, as we have seen with Epic.

Again most other mainstream platforms take 30% and while I do think they could ALL trim that down a bit, I don't see why Valve should be the first one to cut back when they offer the most bang for buck, get Sony and MS to reduce their cut and start offering more basic features, then once the competition is ACTUALLY competing we can turn our eyes to Valve.

I think that sums up my perspective here, most storefronts are not trying to compete, they are just offering the bare minimum for same cut and then wondering why everyone wants to use the more feature rich store front... Why wouldnt you?

I don't think it's quite as simple as "let's crack down on steam like other monopolies" as what do you crack down on?

They do little to no anti competitive behaviour, clutching at straws would be that they require you to keep price parity on steam keys (except on sales).

All these other monopolies do lots of shady stuff to get and maintain their monopoly, so you generally want to stop them doing those things. Steam doesn't do anything shady to maintain it's monopoly it just carries on improving it's platform and ironically improving the users experience and other platforms outside of their own.

Like what do you do to stop steam being so popular outside of just arbitrarily making them shitter to make the other store fronts seem ok by comparison?

The 30% cut is often something cited and maybe that could be dropped slightly, but I'm happy for them to keep taking that cut if they continue to invest some of it back into the eco system.

Look at other platforms like Sony, MS who take 30% to sell on their stores, THEN charge you like £5 a month if you want multiplayer and cloud saves etc. Steam just gives you all this as part of the same 30%.

Epic literally does anti competitive things like exclusivity and taking games they have some stake in off other store fronts or crippling their functionality.

Steam has improved how I play games, it has cloud saves, virtual controllers, streaming, game sharing, remote play together, VR support, Mod support and this is all part of their 30%, the other platforms take same and do less, or take less but barely function as a platform.

Anti monopoly is great when a company is abusing it's position, but I don't feel Valve is, they are just genuinely good for pc gaming and have single handily made PC gaming a mainstream platform.

• Suikoden 2
• Final Fantasy 7 (original)
• Dark Souls
• Resident Evil 1
• Castlevania SOTN
• D&D Warriors of the Eternal Sun
• Resident Evil 1 Remake (GC)
• Gran Turismo 4
• Road Rash 2
• Oblivion

Big shout out to SFA2, FFT:A/2, BOF series, Roadwarden.

10 feels too little to condense 40 years of games.

It saddens me as Windows 8 was absolutely awful and the first step towards the mess we have now. Windows 10 was better but still inconsistent in loads of areas and still felt faffy to use.

If you ignore the ads and bloat ware in Windows 11 it's not that much better than 10, the UI feels more consistent but still more painful to use than Windows 7.

We have no "good" versions of Windows to use, they are all bad and getting worse, I would love to jump to Linux but that has its own raft of inconsistencies and issues, just different ones.

I have a steamdeck and it's a brilliant bit of kit and if the whole Linux eco system had this same sort of cohesion and "out the box" working experience then it would probably be far more adopted.

Your point on stability is great, but for most people I would say they rarely see BSODs, windows is pretty stable too, I think a lot of the reasons that corporate servers use Linux over windows is more to do with licensing and permissions, I have seen plenty of windows server setups which works fine 24/7 so I don't think windows is any less stable, it's just more faff to setup things which are based on Linux conventions/features (i.e docker).

If Windows went back to how it was in window ls 7 where it didn't ram garbage down your throat every update I wouldn't have any problems with it.

Stuff just works on windows, I have a proxmox box with some Linux vms to run containers and I've tried several times over the last 20 years to move to Linux on my main pc but there are just too many faffy bits.

I really dislike what windows has become, it's bloat ware that's getting worse and worse, but I begrudgingly use it as I can be productive, the moment I can be as productive in Linux I'm off of windows, but even simple things like drivers are often not as good, lots of commercial software has barebones or no Linux support, there are many different package managers (on one hand great) but some have permission problems due to sandboxing when you need something like your IDE to have access to the dotnet package, also as a developer building apps/libs for Linux is a nightmare.

For example if I make an app for Windows I build a single binary, same for mac os, for Linux it's the Wild west, varying versions of glibc various versions of gtk and that's the simpler stuff.

Anyway I REALLY WANT to like Linux and move away from windows to it, but every time I try its hours/days of hoop jumping before I just end up going back to windows and waiting for windows to annoy me so much I try again.

(just to be clear the annoyances I have with windows are it's constant ad/bloat ware, it's segregation of settings and duplication of things, it constantly updating and forcing you to turn off all their nonsense AGAIN)

I don't really see phones as a problem, it's the rampant social media and ads that are the problem and unfortunately it's too intertwined with society/technology to undo it at this point.

I think a lot of us are just sick of Windows being eroded into garbage spyware, unless we want to run mac hardware there is no other alternative really.

Linux is really the only alternative, and I would love it to do everything better than the other OS' rather than being content with it just being good for specific use cases.

Every 5 years or so Windows annoys me so much with its nonsense that I salt the earth and install a Linux distro.

The last time I did this was Ubuntu (tried manjaro or whatever its called before too) and every time I find a problem that requires hours of trawling the Internet just to find I need to basically rebuild/test/maintain my own version of the library/component.

It gets to the point where I can't really be productive and I begrudgingly go back to windows as it's less faff and more productive for me. Then the timer starts again for I get too annoyed with windows.

I want to love Linux, but its not as simple as "just using it." (unless you are using a steam deck, that is brilliant for its use case).

Part of the problem for me I feel is that the Linux eco system is so wide and vast that we don't have a singular collective agreement on where to share effort to get something as stable and easy to use as Windows etc. From this thread alone people seem to hate Ubuntu, and sur maybe it's bad, but most non Linux people only know of that Linux distro.

The sheer vastness of the eco system is it's downfall, if there was 1 main shell everyone got behind and was used by companies and end users then we would have a huge knowledge base of problems and fixes as well as a concerted effort in a shared direction. As it stands at the moment most companies using Linux don't have a shell layer, then end users are probably all using various different shells and related components etc, so effort and support is not consolidated as everyone is pulling in their own directions.

I get this is one of the things that draws in the current Linux userbase, but for those of us who just want to do same stuff we do on windows/mac we don't really care about being able to mix and match stuff, we just want to get behind something that gets out of our way and let's us use the computer, not faff in the infrastructure of the OS.

I've tried them and they were hit and miss, also to make things more niche most of my music is a mix of video game music and film/anime music, which Spotify is quite short on.

Spotify and other services are trying to make you discover new music. While that's useful I just want it to analyse my local music and work out what to play.

Its a shame the tech exists but as its patented (I think) you can't simply make an open source version, I believe really it's just a 2d graph plot against tempo and some other metric derived from analysis.