Friday news, part two:

Elite Dangerous console development halted so developers can focus on PC
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/elite-dangerous-console-development-halted-so-developers-can-focus-on-pc/
Elite Dangerous: Odyssey was meant to be a big step forward for Frontier's sprawling sci-fi sim: The ability to exit ships and walk around on planetary surfaces "feels like one of the biggest leaps for the game in terms of scope and things to do," we said just ahead of its release in May 2021. Alas, it was in a dreadful state when it rolled out, and while multiple patches have been released since, it still holds a "mostly negative" rating on Steam.
The situation has definitely improved, although as Nat noted last summer, Odyssey's biggest problems demand more than just bug fixes. Frontier Developments has apparently reached the same conclusion, as it announced today that it is stopping all development of Elite Dangerous on consoles.

PC Building Simulator 2 promises even more components and a 30-hour career mode
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/pc-building-simulator-2-promises-even-more-components-and-a-30-hour-career-mode/
To be blunt, I thought making a game about building a PC was a terrible idea. Who wants to play a videogame about doing the same thing you just did in real life so you could play some videogames? But I was wrong: PC Building Simulator is actually quite good, and also very popular—popular enough that a sequel is coming to the Epic Game Store later this year.

Humble Bundle pulls sales from Russia and Belarus, will launch a Ukraine support bundle
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/humble-bundle-pulls-sales-from-russia-and-belarus-will-launch-a-ukraine-support-bundle/
Humble Bundle has suspended sales of all its products and bundles in Russia and Belarus following the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
"Like many in the world, we condemn the violent and unlawful invasion in Ukraine and the humanitarian crisis it is causing," the company said in a statement posted to its Twitter. "Today we are suspending sales of all Humble products and Humble Games titles in Russia and Belarus." Humble also said it is "actively working" on a bundle that will see all proceeds go to charities to help aid Ukrainian refugees and victims, with details arriving "in the coming week."

Six years on, the free DLC keeps coming for tactics RPG Battle Brothers
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/six-years-on-the-free-dlc-keeps-coming-for-tactics-rpg-battle-brothers/
Of Flesh and Faith is out now for Battle Brothers, a free DLC that'll add two new origins for your mercenaries and a suite of events and equipment to suit both. We're big fans of Battle Brothers at PC Gamer, a 2017 tactics RPG that has you run a mercenary company in a hardscrabble fantasy world called The Darklands. Our EIC Evan Lahti even penned a whole ode to Battle Brothers.

And these are the GOG and Steam deals during the weekend:

+GOG

• The Weekly Sale features up to 80% discounts: https://www.gog.com/promo/20220307_weekly_sale
• The Midweek Sale, full of management games, brings up to 85% discounts during another 46 hours: https://www.gog.com/promo/20220309_midweek_sale_managerial
• The Special Sale "Games for Food Lovers", with up to 80% discounts will also last another 46 hours: https://www.gog.com/promo/20220309_midweek_sale
• The first flash deal is Batman: Arkham City - GOTY Edition, 79% off during the next 70 hours: https://www.gog.com/en/game/batman_arkham_city_goty
• The second flash deal is Batman: Arkham Knight, also 79% off until Monday: https://www.gog.com/en/game/batman_arkham_knight
• The Weekend Sale features games from Koch Media up to 80% off: https://www.gog.com/partner/koch_media_and_friends
• And Piko Interactive puts new classics on the store with a 15% discount until March 18: https://www.gog.com/en/news/check_out_the_new_batch_of_classics_from_piko_interactive

+Steam

• The new daily deal is Edge Of Eternity, 45% off: https://store.steampowered.com/app/269190/Edge_Of_Eternity/
• The first Weekend Deal is Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, 25% off until Monday: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1184370/Pathfinder_Wrath_of_the_Righteous/
• WARNO, still in Early Access, will also be 25% off until Monday: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1611600/WARNO/
• Sable is getting a 35% discount until the 14th: https://store.steampowered.com/app/757310/Sable/
• Battle Brothers is getting a 67% discount until Monday 14th: https://store.steampowered.com/app/365360/Battle_Brothers/
• Journey will be 50% off until Thursday 17: https://store.steampowered.com/app/638230/Journey/
• Dead by Daylight is free to try during the weekend and will be 50% off until Tuesday, March 22: https://store.steampowered.com/app/381210/Dead_by_Daylight/
• Rockstar puts its games on sale, up to 70% off until March 24: https://store.steampowered.com/publisher/rockstargames/sale/rockstarsale2022
• And of course, there's also the weeklong deals.

Nothing else to add. Until next time, I wish you a happy and gaming weekend.

Tabs.. in File Explorer?! — Microsoft News Roundup

Microsoft is working on Tabs in file explorer. Thank fuck.

Steam Deck Windows drivers are now available

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1675200/view/3131696199122435099

Interesting that it's called Aeirth Windows Driver when you try and download it. Now the interesting thing that the GPU driver download is from Valve and not from AMD which brings up the question on whether or not we will get driver support from AMD or will they leave it up to Valve. In the past, AMD had this situation where they left the driver updates for their APUs to OEMs so every time a new AMD driver came out, the OEMs had to update their driver website for their devices and users couldn't just go to AMD's website and download it. This lead to many OEMs not doing it and users were left with APUs with old game ready drivers.

So we will see how this goes. Hopefully this is just because it's very early release and eventually, we can just download Steam Deck's GPU drivers from AMD. Also no Audio drivers and can't dual boot and doesn't work with Windows 11 yet. But it's all coming eventually!

Destiny 2 now playable on Steam Deck if you install Windows

AMD’s new Ryzen 7 5800X3D/5700X CPUs listed by first retailers

https://videocardz.com/newz/amds-new-ryzen-7-5800x3d-5700x-cpus-listed-by-first-retailers

I think it's a little too late for 5700X for $300 because Intel's prices are killer. It will be interesting to see the reviews of the 5800X3d though. If they had the 5700X last year before Alder Lake, it would have been great.

Absolutely understand your need for more than just 16 Cores/32 threads @5ghz. :P

But go back 15 years and your options were mostly Dual/Quad cores... And there was tangible benefits going to a 6 core HEDT chip.. For almost everyone. Suddenly you could run a AAA demanding game on 4 cores whilst trans-coding on another two cores... All came down to multi-tasking. Or just play Civilization which would eat every thread it could get it's dirty little hands on.

Then you had the Ram as well, quad-channel platforms tended to offer a ton of available Ram... But considering I am sitting on 128GB of DDR4.. Not much of a need to go above that unless I feel like putting SSD's to shame.

What AMD did though is essentially remove the need for HEDT for people like myself, I can multi-task until the cows come home.

Obviously high-end professionals will always need more as they are always core/clock/ram limited, but for regular workstation power users like myself, Ryzen 9 is definitely a sweet spot.

Sapphire Rapids X definitely looks juicy, aiming to upgrade sometime later this year and give my current PC to my grandmother.
So see how the chips fall, Intel might win me back or I might stay out of the HEDT game for a bit longer. Price/Performance definitely wins out... And at these thread counts, single thread performance is definitely my main priority.

Ok, sine Yuri (wisely) decided to rest for the weekend, here are a couple of hardware bits. Remember that one is a RUMOR.

Intel’s Mitigations For New Spectre V2 Exploit Affect CPU Performance, Up To 35% Drop
https://wccftech.com/intel-mitigations-spectre-v2-exploit-35-percent-drop-in-cpu-performance/
Branch History Injection (BHI), a new variant of the Spectre V2 vulnerability affecting several Intel processors and a handful of Arm cores, was announced earlier this week by VUSec, the Systems and Network Security Group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Linux site Phoronix performed tests showing a 35% drop in performance on the affected processors by the new BHI mitigations.

That 35% is for the i7 1185G7. For the i9 12900K, the max. drop is almost 27%.

While AMD was not affected by this new Spectre, Intel found something:

Intel Finds Bug in AMD's Spectre Mitigation, AMD Issues Fix
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-amd-spectre-v2-vulnerability-mitigation-bug-fix-patch-cpu-security
News of a fresh Spectre BHB vulnerability that only impacts Intel and Arm processors emerged this week, but Intel's research around these new attack vectors unearthed another issue: One of the patches that AMD has used to fix the Spectre vulnerabilities has been broken since 2018. Intel's security team, STORM, found the issue with AMD's mitigation. In response, AMD has issued a security bulletin and updated its guidance to recommend using an alternative method to mitigate the Spectre vulnerabilities, thus repairing the issue anew.

And, as a result, Phoronix has also done some testing with AMD: https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=30973

And here's the rumor:

AMD FSR 2.0 might be announced soon, “impressive performance and image quality”
https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-fsr-2-0-might-be-announced-soon-impressive-performance-and-image-quality
The developer of CapFrameX benchmarking and monitoring software claims to have seen the footage from the FSR 2.0 demo. This would be the first time a demo of AMD’s next-gen upscaling technology is mentioned.

According to the tweet, the FSR 2.0 is based on temporal upscaling, which would be a major shift from the current implementation of FSR. Interestingly, unlike XeSS and DLSS, no AI-acceleration would be required. This means that the technology could work with a wider range of GPUs. The developer claims it would be supported by all vendors, but does not mention which GPU architectures specifically.

FSR 2.0 to come/announced soon. Saw some footage today. Very impressive. ?

▶️ Temporal upscaling + optimized AA
▶️ Does not need AI
▶️ Runs on GPUs from all vendors
▶️ Impressive performance and image quality

AMD even claims that it can be better than native. ^^#FSRGen2

— CapFrameX (@CapFrameX) March 11, 2022

AMD claimed FSR can have situations that's better than Native as well but we all know how that turned out. Still I am certainly interested in FSR 2.0, especially on the Steam Deck. The lack of AI is a bit disappointing but given since we know RDNA 2 is lacking in the Ai acceleration department compared to Nvidia. Overall I think it will be close to TAA Upscaling which will certainly be a good improvement compared to FSR 1.0 but we won't really see a good alternative to DLSS until they go full Ai and that's probably at least 2023 or later.

Yeah, it won't be perfect, but if it improves the results and can be easily supported by Nvidia and Intel, then it's a win for all of us.

By the way, that Intel has fallen again for Spectre is a bit facepalm worthy, more so given that Alder Lake is a new architecture.

I installed Windows on Steam Deck and I regret it

I once said the Steam Deck was a Trojan Horse for Linux and this video is essentially what I figured would happen. Running the Steam Deck on Windows is very bad to the point where I'd consider it be unusable. It's one thing to not have features like suspend and resume but when the experience is this buggy? It really feels like Valve wants people to use SteamOS.

We will see if Valve fixes these issues in the future but until then, Windows is certainly not something that's worth considering which imo is a huge knock against the Steam Deck as that could have been a good fallback as Valve continues to try and address compatibility.

Skimmed through the review and the performance issues and broken battery indicator alone makes it a deal breaker to consider installing Windows on it :s Which is a darn shame because I really wanted a small, capable Windows PC.

Hopefully they'll work with AMD for more fixes in the upcoming year. Though it doesn't look like it will reach anywhere near the level of polish and optimisation for which Valve has done for the Deck and Steam OS. Ngl, disappointing but not that surprised at the results.. though didn't expect there to be such a massive gulf in performance between the two OS's.

Oh JEMC already posted FSR 2 news oops.

Yeah should be interesting, we shall find out if they can achieve the results they are aiming for. I like how open AMD is making FSR to platforms.

Yea tbh, this is a deal breaker territory for me. And it's not just the performance but also how buggy the entire Windows experience really is. And since there is no Radeon settings or anything like that on Windows, it goes back to the comment I posted a few days ago where, is the Steam Deck an OEM only device where AMD is hands off with the driver and it's up to Valve to implement the game ready drivers that AMD will provide them?

Because now it no longer becomes a "PC" experience. It is now a Steam OS experience. And while Valve will improve compatibility and such, there is no fallback to Windows if shit hits the fan. And the issue is that it's hard to tell whether or not they will improve the Windows experience. And even if they do fix all the Windows issues, the biggest question is who is managing the Driver?

Ironically I am regretting the fact that my device is coming so early now. If I keep it, then I might regret it in the long run but if I get a refund and it turns out to be a non issue, then I basically have to wait until next year. Dang it Valve...