Steam Deck Does What Nintendon't?

[hinch]

CGI-Quality said:

Conina said:

Yeah, I have enjoyed several opened PC-games and dozens of opened browser-tabs and a few apps in the background for decades.

Most games automatically go into pause mode when tabbing out and use only a small part of the system ressources. Of course there are some games which stay fully active in the background and don't play well with other games, but these are the minority.

Suspending whole xbox games to disk is an awesome feature, but that idea ain't new either. PC emulators have done that for decades... heck, even my C64 with "Final Cartridge 3" was able to write a memory snapshot to diskette (or tape) in the late 1980s:

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That was great for games without a save option or where you could only save at certain points. You were able to write a memory image on a floppy disk and turn the computer off. After restoring that memory image, you had to insert the game disc of course (in case the game wants to load further data), then you were able continue where you left the game. The number of memory images was almost infinite (if you had enough floppy discs) and not limited to a handful of games.

On modern PCs, such a memory dump per game for PC games ain't as easy, because the RAM allocation is much more flexible and the games/apps aren't sandboxed... which parts of the RAM is allocated with the game data and with DLLs/apps necessary for running the game, which parts aren't necessary? So the whole memory has to be suspended to disc, if you want to turn off the PC after that (hibernation mode).

Strangely enough features that only PCs have, get downplayed for years... but as soon as a console gets this feature, it is super important. For example downloads in the background while playing a game (or installing a game while playing another game), which PS3 and Xbox 360 couldn't do.

Or switching between a game and an app. Or switching between several active games.

Learned something new today (though that's no surprise from you on this subject)

To the Bold/underlined especially — exactly! Very much how SSDs are suddenly the gold standard when PC folks having been telling them about those drives for years. That they were game changers and many console fans wrote that off. Or, how 100+ fps was unnecessary and 30-60 was "good enough" and you were elitist for saying otherwise. Now? Oh, it's 120+ or bust.

This is true.. however going to disagree on some level.  the games industry will always follow consoles in some extent when it comes to the release and development of titles. And now consoles are slowly shifting away from HDD's and games being developed around them its a bit of a paradigm shift. And though PC's have had SSD for a good few decades, they just haven't been really optimised to take advantage of its speed. I mean even SATA SSD's give a comparative performance to Gen4 drives in the majority of games when it comes to performance and load times. How much will that change in upcoming games, we don't know. It isn't the silver bullet people claim though and not all titles like need/use fast i/o throughput of said fast SSD.. and the GPU will always be the most important part of 3D performance.

Like take for example, DirectStorage is still being developed and RTX IO. PC tech and hardware will always have the advantage of ever evolving technology.. though sometimes hardware isn't always the only de-facto especially if the software isn't there to back it up. API is just important as the hardware. So its not really all cut and dry. However technically PC's can do everything consoles can xP

The 60fps/120fps or nothing and overhype on SSD and stuff is kinda funny, but then we've been used to that for so many years and a lot of people have yet to experience that.

Saying that the new previews on the Deck look great.. Linus did a preview and tested Doom Eternal on medium settings (and ran quite smoothly which is mighty impressive for a handheld.

Last edited by hinch - on 07 August 2021