Nvidia recently started NVK for Turing and newer and even more recently it was made conformant going back to Maxwell, but that still doesn’t give me a lot of hope for everything between Maxwell 1 (so basically just the GTX 750/750Ti for desktop Maxwell 1 cards) and Turing after driver version 580.
Also, Nouveau works for Maxwell 1 and earlier but ymmv with that stack, and it’s still not like Mesa RADV and AMDGPU for Radeon cards going back to GCN1.
Plus physical media on consoles is effectively worthless now, even on the Switch 2 with most of its library set to be downloads with literal license dongles ala the Game-Key Card which is targeted at third parties as a cheaper option than putting the whole game on a cart.
That Game-Key Card format will effectively render most of the Switch 2 library impossible to emulate assuming they need online access to run.
And even on PC, there’s nothing stopping publishers from getting smart and using kernel-level anticheat as a DRM substitute for single-player games, EA already set a precedent internally within their operations for doing that with EAAC on the latest WRC installment, for example.
As for the Switch 2, I wouldn’t put it above Nintendo to completely axe the cart slot for the Switch 3, if there even is a Switch 3 and the games industry doesn’t collapse again before that has a chance to happen, and make it a digital-exclusive console.
I’ve been using the browser client.
And even if you do boycott Sony, that’ll discount entire market segments and almost entire content niches as I just mentioned.
Sure, but I’m not touching anything Sony with a 10 foot pole.
That’s going to discount most of the camera market if not the entire camera market then because Sony makes basically everyone’s imaging sensors, plus a large portion of the anime genre given that company bought out Funimation.
That rootkit thing failed miserably, thankfully, and audio CDs have been DRM-free ever since.
At least you can watch BDs without a web connection still. For now…
Also, LibreDrive is a thing for hacking BD drives with in order to bypass DRM, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that got blocked and/or taken down at some point.
And it’ll be nuked the moment it announces its existence publicly.
That’s odd given GCN1 and 2 will fully work in Linux with a compatibility toggle to enable AMDGPU support set in the kernel parameters, and GCN3 and newer natively supports AMDGPU without that toggle being required.
Even older dGPUs like the R9 270/270X or 280/280X, hell, even the R9 290/290X or 390/390X (R9 390/390X is just a faster 290/290X which ships with 8GB VRAM as standard issue), while admittedly pushing it a little, will also work fine for most indie titles and even truly ancient (as in DX9-era and earlier, think stuff like Silent Hill 2 which launched in 2002 for the PC) AAA stuff, you’ll just need to manually enable a compatibility toggle for GCN1 or GCN2 cards to work with AMDGPU in DIY distros like Arch or Gentoo while last time I thought some prebuilt distros like Fedora enabled it by default.
These are the compatibility toggles you’ll need to set in kernel parameters for GCN1 and GCN2 cards to work with AMDGPU if they’re not set already. GCN3 and newer natively supports AMDGPU without needing said toggles.
amdgpu.si_support=1 amdgpu.cik_support=1
Except AFAIK loose mainboards aimed at the DIY market, as well as barebones kits, don’t ship with SecureBoot turned on by default and an off switch for that is mandatory to the PC spec.
So you’re suggesting MS will somehow block non-Windows OSes from installing, even on hardware like loose mainboards for building your own PC with, or even on barebones mini PC kits or certain laptop SKUs, which don’t ship with an OS installed to begin with and expect the user to install it themselves? I mean, unless something extreme happens like changing the entire PC platform to be like the current Macs, that won’t be feasible.
Also, doing that would kill the Steam Deck which I doubt Valve would take sitting down.
Good luck locking loose mainboards sold for the DIY market, which don’t come with anything installed by default, to a given OS, the only way that could maybe work is forcing the OS in ROM.
Another way would be to discontinue the socketed desktop form factors and replace them all with mini PCs that are as locked down as the current Macs.
Good thing PCs aren’t locked into Windows.
I’ve been happily running the mesa-dev stack (mesa-tkg-git from the chaotic-aur repo) both on semi-current hardware (an RX 6600 that’s sidelined by a bad fan atm) and somewhat older hardware (the Vega 56 I’m using as a backup because it’s my second best card after the RX 6600) for a while now so I don’t know what you’re doing.
This is tragically ironic given Metal Gear Rising was recently ported to GOG.
That I played with on an old Pentium II rig? The now-defunct Crunchbang (Bunsen Labs is that distro’s successor).
That I actually used as a daily driver? Ubuntu 12.10.
I’ve been daily-driving Linux for well over a decade at this point and have pretty much settled on Arch now after multiple distro-hops in that timespan.
The Steam Deck is at least trying to attract the casual users in, and I feel like the Switch 2 getting hammered with bad press right now and getting destroyed by the Nintendo fanbase might convert a few people over to the Steam Deck too.
That sucks, how long before DR goes full Adobe and starts moving to a subscription model? And how long before Blackmagic paywalls some features on their cine cams like Canon started doing on their still cams?
If you didn’t switch already, switching from Windows to Linux might be a good idea soon too, especially with Win10 going EOL, and Win11 not only basically forcing new hardware in a lot of cases, but also being really bad as an OS atm.