The RAMpocalypse has bought Microsoft valuable time in the fight against SteamOS
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Performance isnt the reason I'm leaving Windows after my 10 license expires. It's because MS is moving towards OS as a service/subscription and subsidizing that by invading my privacy. AFAIK that directive comes straight from the top and it doesn't matter how good the gaming division makes things work.
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Seems to me that Microsoft isn't going to have much better luck with hardware margins than Valve -- obvious pivot point here is: sell conversion kits aimed at existing Windows 10 hardware that can't run Windows 11. By "conversion kits" I mean: let people order a package that includes a couple of game controllers and a thumb drive that can be used to replace or dual boot into Steam OS with minimal fuss. They'd need to build out their support org, but at this point, that's likely cheaper than trying to compete with hardware.
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Microsoft has spent far, far too much money on AI for Windows K2 to kick AI creep to the curb. Personally, I'm expecting a little cosmetic work and that will be about it. And nobody gives up ad revenue once they've gotten a taste for it.
And given that the RAM shortage also means people are going to be keeping their rigs longer, unless K2 starts delivering right now, Linux has a clear growth path since it does just fine on older hardware.
And given that the RAM shortage also means people are going to be keeping their rigs longer, unless K2 starts delivering right now, Linux has a clear growth path since it does just fine on older hardware.
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Though with AI focus pivoting heavily to enterprise almost exclusively MS might not need the integrations directly with Windows since they've already integrated into the tools of productivity like Office, Sharepoint, and Visual Studio
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Christ but am I tired of AI, Windows 11, AI in Windows 11, and Microsoft's Thoughts & Prayers/We've Heard Your Feedback to Do Better.
The very first option in the Visual Studio right-click context menu is "Chat" (with copilot). Meanwhile, a computer can't even be trusted to shut down successfully (it often goes into a restart and will stay powered on, indefinitely , waiting for you to log in).
The very first option in the Visual Studio right-click context menu is "Chat" (with copilot). Meanwhile, a computer can't even be trusted to shut down successfully (it often goes into a restart and will stay powered on, indefinitely , waiting for you to log in).
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I'm sorry but at some point during Windows 10 (or right as it was released) Microsoft went from "reinstall the OS" to fix issues instead of having articles to fix issues with performance or crashed.
They're no longer a company, they're a sad excuse for a company.
If I wanted to reinstall the OS when something goes wrong, I might as well go to Linux.
They're no longer a company, they're a sad excuse for a company.
If I wanted to reinstall the OS when something goes wrong, I might as well go to Linux.
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Microsoft has the advantage though of having those hardware costs mostly externalized for Windows. Any vendor working on a steam deck clone is going to be hard pressed for sure, but MS can fall back on laptops and desktops to take advantage of the lack of the presence of the steam box right now to push into using machines as a console in supplement to flagging xbox sales.
If they can make the couch experience decent for users on middling laptops of similar caliber to the steam deck then it's just one HDMI cable away from using that as a console replacment.
That said it's abysmal how slow MS and Xbox were to respond to the steam deck, especially when you consider that this represents a potential solution to their losing battle against the PS5. There was a tremendous opportunity to reimagine Windows Xbox gaming as just being a PC that can run anything with a good couch UX and they utterly fumbled any movement on it until they were already behind on both fronts. This apocalypse buying them unexpected breathing room is almost deux ex machina levels of luck
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Microsoft historically has been very good at avoiding the spent cost fallacy and 86'ing features and initiatives that weren't panning out. Remember Microsoft AR? Windows 8? Metro? Windows RT? Windows S Mode? The Windows Store being C#/UPF only? If they decide shoehorning AI everywhere in Windows isn't worth the squeeze, it'll be gone within a year.
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The fact that Apple doesn't have a dedicated gaming device tells you that they still don't really understand that market. They have all the pieces to the puzzle:
High performance SOC(Although getting more 3mm chips is a thing nowadays).
Existing, powerful SDK.
Large installed user base(iOS + macOS).
Excellent design team.
Revive the iPod brand, slap a nice battery and thermals on it and you're done. Maybe Ternus can figure it out.
High performance SOC(Although getting more 3mm chips is a thing nowadays).
Existing, powerful SDK.
Large installed user base(iOS + macOS).
Excellent design team.
Revive the iPod brand, slap a nice battery and thermals on it and you're done. Maybe Ternus can figure it out.
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Well not SteamOS exactly. Official SteamOS is still a bit hardware specific. They are open to supporting other dedicated gaming devices though, and they've been expanding support. Maybe that'll mean an off the shelf SteamOS for everyone eventually.
You can get basically all of the same things from just running Steam in big picture mode on your OS of choice. Or if you want the full couch friendly experience, Bazzite-Deck is exactly that, just based on Fedora Silverblue instead of Arch.
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My gut reaction was "not like Microsoft is immune to the RAM-pocalypse" but that's not the point. Valve was full steam (hehe) ahead with SteamOS and proving that you don't need Microsoft for PC gaming. Now essentially the entire industry is on pause, it gives Microsoft time to breathe and try to do something.
I don't care though. Windows is dead to me and I couldn't be happier. If a game doesn't work on Linux, oh well, there are tons of games coming out all the time and I already have a library full of more games than I'll ever have the time to get around to playing.
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Actually S mode still exists on low end laptops. Ironically on one I bought on a whim it actually made full removing the McAffee bloatware more difficult unless you took it out of S mode because otherwise you can't run the cleanup tool from McAffee to remove some dead process stuff that the uninstall option leaves behind :|
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My turn to roast Microsoft. Hoo boy, here's a VIP-flamey one. It's a whopper... Get your unpopped popcorn and bring it within 30 centimeters of the below roast.
While my RX 5000 series GPUs can have fun in my newer rigs...
...I have a still very-frequently-used (Quoety-McQuoteFace) "Windows 11 Unsupported" (/Quotey) older supplemental gaming rig using i7-7740X PC with an RTX 3080 that runs games better than a newly bought computer today. So I do the unofficial tweak to make Windows forgive the symbolic unsupportedness.
That CPU is... drumroll... about to hit a DECADE OLD and can still do a mean 720fps 720Hz TestUFO.
It even does some supplemental Windows 11 software development, crissakes, using paid Office 365 and other paid Microsoft products. It's good to test stuff on what's still very happily upper-midrange-performance.
It can do a stable all-cores overclock to 5 GHz nicely too, while only a 4C/8T it still runs many games pretty well.
I admonish Microsoft on this lineitem of having obsoleted Windows faster than Apple, which was unusual. My 7740 has been unsupported by Microsoft since Windows 11 release in 2021 -- five bleeping years ago, and only a few years after I had bought the rig.
Well-specced systems today now tend to become durable appliances nowadays. Lasting longer than an average cheap new IoT washing machine with more expedious planned-obscolescence features than this Microsoft-Windows-Unsupported PC, chrissakes!
Unlike yesterday's 3 year upgrade cycles, era-highend CPUs can now be 10-12 year expected lifetimes of "better than midrange feel" (assuming later upgrades like a GPU upgrade, M.2 SSD, and RAM upgrade).
A 10-12 year old CPU (with just other upgrades) is now capable of being cheaply slightly faster at gaming than today's midrange newly purchased PCs because Moore's Law has slowed down so much. While the fabs have fun with AI chips, let us milk our old perfectly fine 10-year-old Ferraris of CPUs that still keeps up with currents.
(P.S. I use a bunch of Valve & Steam branded products too. Valve has made it so that I'm looking forward to Linuxing the i7-7740 because of Microsoft pushing me away from it. That could razor-and-blades to the rest of my computers in a few years eating the newer PCs because it was more fun to use the older PCs. But in this case, Windows 11 clearly still runs speedy on it without even intentionally trying to. Why doff this low lying apple?)
Microsoft's Display Team knows me as Blur Busters, of TestUFO fame -- and I willingly include 10 year old PCs as part of the office fleet that still outperform 0-year-old midrange PCs. I'm the one who convinced Microsoft to support 5000Hz. I'm not expecting Microsoft to allow the ugpraded "line itemey" features on older rigs, but the whole OS, just like that.
Some Samsung Android phones were supported longer than that i7 CPU!
Doesn't Microsoft want my willing ongoing subscription money to continue to milk those aging PCs?
</roast>
Now you may go ahead and eat the popcorn you brought to my Wall-o-Text™.
My roast has sufficiently popped all the kernels. Hope the popcorn is not burnt.
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There's no way MS will use this time well though. Even if they did, there are plenty of other reasons not to choose them.
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Things have gotten so bad a Linux option is gaining traction without a hardware push. Or at least a hardware launch. I’m sure SteamOS hype helped drive adoption.
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Since early this year I’ve been absent any windows devices in my home for the first time since windows 3.1 was the current hotness.
I don’t do online gaming, or at least any that require root kit installs so my gaming experience has been good enough to all but consider windows dead.
I don’t do online gaming, or at least any that require root kit installs so my gaming experience has been good enough to all but consider windows dead.
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Has there been any improvement when running Linux on Nvidia cards? Last I saw you were giving up ~20% of Windows 11 performance on average. That seems like it should be a major focus for Valve given Nvidia's dominance in consumer GPUs. Limited compatibility, even if it's quite good now, combined with worse performance is going to remain a hard sell outside of people who hate Windows.
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I don't know if this sentence comes across the way it's intended? (Bold/italics mine.)
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If Microsoft were smart, they would’ve let the gaming division run autonomously and feed insights back to the OS group. Instead, the OS team is pushing their requirements down to the gaming side. It is the most Microsoft thing ever and the reason Steam is still winning.
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I find it hard to believe that a 7740X 4-core Kaby Lake CPU can keep up with a modern midrange CPU like the 9600X or the 250K. The 3080 can keep up with a midrange GPU like the 5060, but it's only 5.5 years old.
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They're not going to be any cheaper if you want a "gaming" rig. The Windows tax is a thing. If someone is looking that hard at a Steam Machine or a SteamDeck then there are plenty of ways to get something like Bazzite or CachyOS or Fedora on existing hardware or new hardware.
The number I saw was 11% of English speaking Steam PCs (39% of the total Steam PCs are English speaking) are now running Linux. China uses pirated Windows anyway. It's not like MS is getting a ton of money from them and China could very easily just mandate everyone use Linux if MS rocks that boat too hard.
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I run all AMD, but yes, in recent weeks / months nVidia has made some improvements to their driver and have more "in the pipe". The new driver from April (NVIDIA driver version 595.71.05) supposedly made some solid improvements, but I can't personally attest to it.
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Ehhhh, I'm guessing SteamOS users are more likely to consent to submitting their data to the Steam Hardware Survey. So it may be capturing a trend, but the magnitude could be off. Any third party analysis?
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I find it hard to believe that it would even compete with something like a 3800X, which is itself a pretty old design that can’t really compete with those examples. There’s no way a 3080 was ever a cost-efficient pairing for a CPU that slow.
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These comment threads are always heavily populated by people who (mostly justifiably) loathe Win11. So I'm just gonna throw my contrarian opinion in for the sake of variety: I like it. Lots of things annoy me about it, but a shit-ton of more important things annoy me about Linux. And don't even get me started on MacOS!
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I know this isn't really the same thing, BUT I recently dumped Windows for Linux on a 2016/2017 era laptop with an split Intel integrated GPU and an Invidia 1050 "helper". After install and doing all the updates (being noticeably impressed by how much faster Linux was even on a machine of that age), I decided to install the Linux Steam client mostly just because I could. I was absolutely amazed how smoothly it allowed me to install otherwise "Windows only" games. Now obviously that doesn't mean every game it installed would work on a machine that slow BUT just the fact I could essentially just click install and it would handle it was amazing.
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The RAM thing may allow current XBox units will hang around, rather than get replaced by a Steam unit. However, I'm curious how the PC side will go. There are too many unsupported Win10 PCs out there that don't support Win11, and a new system is now prohibitively expensive. There may still be some creeping Steam numbers as those people install any of the Windows-like Linux distros to keep their hardware. But, maybe it just means purchasing cheaper Win11 systems that can barely run any games.
The RAM shortage is definitely putting a strain on the Steam Deck adoption, and that's a real pity. It's a decent box for both the hand and the TV for most games.
The RAM shortage is definitely putting a strain on the Steam Deck adoption, and that's a real pity. It's a decent box for both the hand and the TV for most games.
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I can respect that. But I have fans from literally ~200 countries, pretty much nigh all of them -- who consider midrange differently;
Up front, to quiet those "PC semantics in MY country" torches and pitchforks...
...I have a 5080 and a 5090 as well, so I've got much more modern rigs. The 3080, however, really holds its "worldwide midrange" compared to the average PC GPU that the average country resident can afford.
Even the RTX 5060 is being called "midrange" by Western countries including my country Canada.
But the 3080 is faster for low-latency esports use cases; and has roughly 20% higher PassMark numbers.
Being Canadian with >90% of my fans being overseas and >50% of TestUFO traffic coming from multiple ideographic languages of social media and manufacturers, I'm probably not targetting the "midrange" definition to the same country as you are.
PCMR -- aka PC Master Race community -- respects even low-end machines pretty well (on average anyway) -- and there's a lot of esports players in some countries managing much more inferior rigs than an old ~3080. I cater to all sorts of fans worldwide.
Which authority dictates the definition of "midrange"? Microsoft has been the torchbearer of that in the past, but I argue against that, in my point. Are we accidentally perpetuating that we choose Microsoft as the defacto authority of "midrange" definition?
The definition of "midrange" by ~200-country standards is nebulous. Few disagree that Moore's Law has stretching the midrange timescales longer. My point was not about nitpicking whose worldwide-average definition of midrange (which country, buddy?) and my point was about Microsoft itself instead.
Game optimization has becoming crap, are we perpetuating that? Responsible game optimizers get older rigs. I also have a 3080 to make sure TestUFO blasts 720fps 720Hz, and it even keeps up at 480fps 480Hz on a 1080 Ti too. We don't downvote responsible game optimization. If we optimize better for "another country's average midrange", then our NVIDIA RTX 5090's and AMD 7900 XTX's sing louder with better graphics without lagging.
You know... Well tuned 10year-old rigs with clean Windows reinstalls, can feel faster than a newer rig with a crud-filled Windows 11 install that Microsoft gave an excuse to obsolete faster because Windows 11 crudfills so quick. A clean W11 on 10-year old rig outperforms a crudfilled W11 on much more recent rigs -- we have to reinstall Windows (and also slim its fat) just to keep it a rocket.
Are we really going to PCMR-define "midrange" in a specific country by "crud-filled Windows 11 performance standards"?
As a ~200-country fan bearer, what you can afford in your country is what I respect -- I'm not making fun of your midrange.
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Conversely, when I still had a Windows install for games, I only ever seemed to get the pop-up for the Steam Survey on Windows even though I used Linux more.
People shouldn't take the Steam survey as gospel. For a long time my results said I played at a res less than 2160p because my primary monitor was 3440x1440, but I often actually switched over to a 4k TV for games. I have never been counted as having VR hardware simply because I've never gotten the survey while using my headset. I used to get the survey on my laptop in college all the time that had Steam exclusively for playing Civ and rarely ever got it on my actual gaming desktop at the time.
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It's pretty impressive. I remember when I knew how little of my library had Linux ports. Now I have no idea. I don't care if it's native Linux or it's running a Windows build, I just click on the game I want to play and play it.
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XSportSeeker
Ars Scholae Palatinae
If fighting against Microsoft is a big objective for Valve, I'd suggest:
1. refocus efforts on SteamOS compatibility across multiple hardware;
2. continue effort to launch the device in other nations;
3. reach over to more companies other than Lenovo for collaborations;
This potentially at the cost of abandoning Steam Machine, Steam Deck, Steam Controller and whatnot. And I'm serious on this one.
But again, this is if fighting against Microsoft is a big objective for them.
Reason is simple - I don't think a Steam Machine will ever be an attractive proposition unless the company is willing to do similar sacrifices they did to put the Steam Deck out.
Which means selling it at rock bottom prices, willing to sell it at a loss.
It's hard to ask something like that from a company, even a company as big as Valve, for more than one product at once. So, refocus the strategy around a single line of product and the losses won't be as bad.
Linux gaining more ground over Windows would require SteamOS being more than an isolated gaming OS based on Arch, or alternative Steam itself being a platform that can work great in any distro. I think either are good choices. But the priority to dethrone Windows would be on those working well whatever Linux distro and hardware people are willing to install it on.
People are still waiting on the promise to install SteamOS anywhere they want to.
A major reason why Steam Deck still didn't reach most of it's potential market is because it's still only officially selling in... what? 8 nations?
Markets in developing countries and poor countries will be smaller than developed nations, but it is still significant to have a presence in those if you really wanna make a significant impact.
This is why piracy has been so important to elevate cultural relevance of gaming and computer in general - because it enabled those to break free from affordability barriers and dominate the cultural landscape.
If Valve can't or is unwilling to put effort into official sales, presence and stuff like aftermarket support and whatnot in other nations, it should close deals with brands and companies that are willing to do it for them, so an official Valve/Steam portable gaming device reaches the retail market in said countries. Valve is failing to reach the mainstream ethos because it has still not made any real effort to reach end consumers that don't necessarily already know and understand Steam.
What they need is either themselves, or another brand, to advertise official Steam hardware in ads, in retail space, in regular Internet spaces, in places that can reach more people who are not necessarily gamers, not necessarily already familiar with Steam and whatnot - as a platform for gaming. And this would include going after the many many hardware developers that are behind so many models of portable gaming PCs these days.
Personally, and this is just personal opinion, I think Lenovo was a bad choice to start this. The brand has a bad history, it's on my personal blacklist for hardware purchase, reason why I haven't been following nor even considered getting the Legion Go 2 with Steam OS installed. Again, this is a personal take, others may disagree.
The only two brands selling a portable gaming PC officially in my country right now is Lenovo and Asus, they are both overly expensive, but at least you have some warranty and some support that the companies are supposed to give.
If I opted to import something which would leave me with no real warranty or support to rely on, but could perhaps get a better deal overall, then it's all products that are not guarantee to work with either Steam OS, or Linux itself. Might work, might work without many of their features, or just not work at all.
Mind you, I'd have bought the first Steam Deck on launch if it was available here. It is a significant investment since electronics are always very expensive and something that you think twice before buying due to importation taxes and other taxes more than doubling their prices - but I'd probably have bought it, because that was how much I wanted to get rid of Windows. It was going to be a stepping stone towards Linux migration.
But that was 4 years ago. Since then, I migrated all my computers to Linux Mint, and also realized that I don't really need a portable gaming PC - even more with the rampocalypse. I don't need a device to be a stepping stone towards Linux migration anymore.
I might need a new portable computing device in the future, but I'm not even sure if this will take form of a laptop anymore - as I don't use this stuff while I'm on the move.
Something I can easily take around and setup in fixed stations, such as at home, at a hotel, at a relative's place - that I know I'll continue needing.
Kinda why I was seeking the Steam Deck too in the first place - OS and software fit for the hardware, no need for fiddling, at a reasonable price, that I could take around.
Anyways, my personal take on this. I will personally never go back to anything Microsoft, but I agree that if Valve doesn't wake up and start focusing their efforts towards things that makes their hardware line more visible and attractive to a larger crowd, Microsoft will eventually catch up.
Proof in the pudding - Asus, like I said, is one of the only two brands officially selling a portable gaming PC in my country. You know what I noticed recently? They took down both the ROG Ally and ROG Ally X and replaced them with ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X. You can't buy the non-Xbox version anymore. There could be multiple reasons for this happening, but it's what happens when you don't care about having a presence in other nations. And Valve is particularly bad at this. If they can't wake up that they could have large markets in other nations, Microsoft will drink their milkshake.
1. refocus efforts on SteamOS compatibility across multiple hardware;
2. continue effort to launch the device in other nations;
3. reach over to more companies other than Lenovo for collaborations;
This potentially at the cost of abandoning Steam Machine, Steam Deck, Steam Controller and whatnot. And I'm serious on this one.
But again, this is if fighting against Microsoft is a big objective for them.
Reason is simple - I don't think a Steam Machine will ever be an attractive proposition unless the company is willing to do similar sacrifices they did to put the Steam Deck out.
Which means selling it at rock bottom prices, willing to sell it at a loss.
It's hard to ask something like that from a company, even a company as big as Valve, for more than one product at once. So, refocus the strategy around a single line of product and the losses won't be as bad.
Linux gaining more ground over Windows would require SteamOS being more than an isolated gaming OS based on Arch, or alternative Steam itself being a platform that can work great in any distro. I think either are good choices. But the priority to dethrone Windows would be on those working well whatever Linux distro and hardware people are willing to install it on.
People are still waiting on the promise to install SteamOS anywhere they want to.
A major reason why Steam Deck still didn't reach most of it's potential market is because it's still only officially selling in... what? 8 nations?
Markets in developing countries and poor countries will be smaller than developed nations, but it is still significant to have a presence in those if you really wanna make a significant impact.
This is why piracy has been so important to elevate cultural relevance of gaming and computer in general - because it enabled those to break free from affordability barriers and dominate the cultural landscape.
If Valve can't or is unwilling to put effort into official sales, presence and stuff like aftermarket support and whatnot in other nations, it should close deals with brands and companies that are willing to do it for them, so an official Valve/Steam portable gaming device reaches the retail market in said countries. Valve is failing to reach the mainstream ethos because it has still not made any real effort to reach end consumers that don't necessarily already know and understand Steam.
What they need is either themselves, or another brand, to advertise official Steam hardware in ads, in retail space, in regular Internet spaces, in places that can reach more people who are not necessarily gamers, not necessarily already familiar with Steam and whatnot - as a platform for gaming. And this would include going after the many many hardware developers that are behind so many models of portable gaming PCs these days.
Personally, and this is just personal opinion, I think Lenovo was a bad choice to start this. The brand has a bad history, it's on my personal blacklist for hardware purchase, reason why I haven't been following nor even considered getting the Legion Go 2 with Steam OS installed. Again, this is a personal take, others may disagree.
The only two brands selling a portable gaming PC officially in my country right now is Lenovo and Asus, they are both overly expensive, but at least you have some warranty and some support that the companies are supposed to give.
If I opted to import something which would leave me with no real warranty or support to rely on, but could perhaps get a better deal overall, then it's all products that are not guarantee to work with either Steam OS, or Linux itself. Might work, might work without many of their features, or just not work at all.
Mind you, I'd have bought the first Steam Deck on launch if it was available here. It is a significant investment since electronics are always very expensive and something that you think twice before buying due to importation taxes and other taxes more than doubling their prices - but I'd probably have bought it, because that was how much I wanted to get rid of Windows. It was going to be a stepping stone towards Linux migration.
But that was 4 years ago. Since then, I migrated all my computers to Linux Mint, and also realized that I don't really need a portable gaming PC - even more with the rampocalypse. I don't need a device to be a stepping stone towards Linux migration anymore.
I might need a new portable computing device in the future, but I'm not even sure if this will take form of a laptop anymore - as I don't use this stuff while I'm on the move.
Something I can easily take around and setup in fixed stations, such as at home, at a hotel, at a relative's place - that I know I'll continue needing.
Kinda why I was seeking the Steam Deck too in the first place - OS and software fit for the hardware, no need for fiddling, at a reasonable price, that I could take around.
Anyways, my personal take on this. I will personally never go back to anything Microsoft, but I agree that if Valve doesn't wake up and start focusing their efforts towards things that makes their hardware line more visible and attractive to a larger crowd, Microsoft will eventually catch up.
Proof in the pudding - Asus, like I said, is one of the only two brands officially selling a portable gaming PC in my country. You know what I noticed recently? They took down both the ROG Ally and ROG Ally X and replaced them with ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X. You can't buy the non-Xbox version anymore. There could be multiple reasons for this happening, but it's what happens when you don't care about having a presence in other nations. And Valve is particularly bad at this. If they can't wake up that they could have large markets in other nations, Microsoft will drink their milkshake.
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I fall somewhere in the middle: I kind of loathe both of them. I just installed the newly-released Kubuntu 26.04 on my laptop to give it a burl and see if things work any better than before and it was still a total shit show.
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What was a shit show? I'm not Ubuntu fan, but I don't even want to think of how many times I've installed it and it just...works.
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Just off the top of my head, KRDP doesn't support NVIDIA GPUs, Mumble's push-to-talk doesn't work under Wayland, there's no Autohotkey-equivalent for Wayland -- there's one for X11, but (K)Ubuntu has moved away from that --, KWallet just suddenly crapped all over itself and stopped working and the only way I could figure out how to fix it was nuking all of my settings, half the stuff isn't translated, is poorly translated or has tons of spelling errors making it a really jarring experience to try and use Finnish as the language -- had to change to English just to have some consistency, most of my laptop's Fn-key combos don't work under Linux and so on.
I just woke up and I'm all tired, so I can't remember what else there was.
EDIT: Oh, I just remembered a (K)Ubuntu-specific annoyance: having to purge all the snap-stuff after installation. I didn't bother testing in 26.04, but in 25.10, H/W-acceleration in Firefox doesn't work with an NVIDIA GPU if using the Firefox-snap -- have to install Firefox deb from Mozilla's repos to get it working right! Not to mention how fricking slow snaps are to launch compared to quite literally anything else.
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In raw multi core it can't, but games aren't microbenchmarks. Most modern games are keeping the PS/XB as a baseline and just don't take huge advantage of the latest CPUs. A million e-cores and huge caches isn't going to help games that are barely multithreaded enough to use the 4 big cores in that 7th gen and use engines designed to maximize the few megs of cache in the consoles.
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That's just not true. Techspot recently did a test of the past ten years of Intel CPUs and the 270K gets 206fps average and 157fps 1% lows at 1080p medium in a 14 game test suite, while the 7700K only gets 95fps average and 67fps 1% lows. That's over 2X performance in games. The 250K will be a bit slower than the 270K, but still much faster than the 7740X or 7700K.
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Exactly, and a 3080 still outperforms a 5060 by 20% in PassMark.
It's still out-framerates perfectly fine during organic low-latency esports use cases a lot of my fans are after.
My gorilla silicon (e.g. 5090) can be used for lots fun things, but a 3080 is still damn respectablely "high-end-ish" in more than 50% of countries.
The whole blue marble isn't entirely lucky, and a 3080 still sprays framerate out of the wazoo for generic 400 Hz monitors that now cost only $100-$150 in some countries (~$180-$220 on Amazon USA for lots of generic esports brands). Even 240Hz OLEDs are quickly going to follow suit, the AOC 240Hz OLED just fell south of $350 and an INNOCN miniLED locally dimmed 240Hz for only $200. An RTX 3080 still pampers those babies at the resolutions they sell at, for the specific games they're targeted at.
A 10-year-old CPU with a 5-year old GPU has still won some 2025 online esports championships in some far away countries.
A more upgraded system is obviously better; but for some titles that don't bottleneck on core-count, it's surprisingly razor thin when large number of your competitors in your specific country are using internal or cheaper GPUs. Most competitive esports isn't core-heavy.
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Reread the game titles -- not every single title of that list are esports online championship games. Most such games aren't heavily multicore, although some are.
Some of my fans optimize for 1-2 specific games they play, or a whole specific category, and the margins become tighter.
I do still love me a modicum of framegen in the right places, with good game of Cyberpunk 2077 or Wukong, but we're moving goalposts at this juncture. The goalpost opening venn diagram overlaps. I do write about loving framegen ... But that's not today's goalpost.
In years like 1991 and 1996 with the torrid Moore's Law velocity in clock speeds -- the goalpost movement speed was supersonic.
You had 386SX-25 in year 1990 turning into an AMD Athlon 1 Ghz in year 2000. In just a subset of that decade, it was relatively easy for the 10%-ile slowest system of a few years later to outperform the 10%-ile fastest system.
This is not the case today. Even the frame rate numbers you say are less than a 2x difference.
And the frame rate numbers are less than the frame rate numbers of games like Counter Strike and Fortnite type games. There are popular esports games today where you can get an RTX 3080 to blast 400fps organic frame rates for a cheap $150 priced 400Hz generic esports monitor is "good enough" for many. The websites want to earn Amazon affiliate income on the new GPUs and lovely monitors (not a problem, I do too, I earn Amazon affiliate income too). But with due respect, it also incentivizes omitting my point entirely.
VennDiagramOverlap(yourGoalPosts, myGoalPosts); /* still has a goalie opening thanks to pokey Moore's Law. */
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