u/vividspecter

Well, I did say "maybe with a real d-pad", it's just the thumbsticks that aren't necessary.

I actually did play with the Steam Controller for years using the trackpad as d-pad. It was more of a comfort thing that made it less than ideal which was due to the shape/texture of the original SC, but I could live without it personally if it's done right.

I've even played shmups with it, with the right settings, but I get there is a learning curve and its easier to use a physical d-pad.

I understand the trackpads somewhat since they take up space, but the lack of back buttons is inexcusable.

Personally though, I'd buy a trackpad only deck (maybe with a real d-pad) but I know I'm in the minority on that one.

The ZOTAC handheld looks interesting, and while it's nice to see decently sized touchpads, they are very low on the device and it seems like that would be uncomfortable to use.

A bunch of back buttons would have mitigated the issue a little, but it seems like there is only two, which is a shame.

It's a bit of both, along with the Linux AMD drivers being superior in many cases to the Windows drivers.

I'll add for completeness that vkd3d-proton handles DX12 titles, and of course OGL and Vulkan are supported natively.

For me, it's not the steam machine itself but the peripherals like the steam controller that would come with it. There still isn't a proper replacement for the original SC that has: trackpads, gyro, back buttons, and full steam input support.

Everything else is missing trackpads and aimed at emulating a console controller, so you get weird situations where one mode supports gyro because it emulates a switch controller but doesn't support the back buttons and analog triggers, and another supports the back buttons and analog triggers but not gyro.

Funnily enough, the steam deck itself is the best option as a controller if you want all of these features.

Of course, a new steam machine wouldn't be required for a new SC to happen, but it makes sense to pair them, as they did originally.

Hopefully Australia follows suit, as we have our own Temu Trump in opposition coming into our election.

Is there a link to the actual study? The American Journal link seems to be a different one, and that one has a massive list of types of items classified as UPF (check Appendix A, Table 1), so it's hard to identify what the causal factor(s) are.

One of the vanishingly few benefits of not being a democracy, is that the people just can't just vote in an idiot. Of course, there are other avenues for an idiot to take over an authoritarian government (historically, usually by war or inheritance).

I think it's mainly Vietnam tariffs that will hit the Switch 2 (Nintendo moved manufacturing their to minimise tariffs in the first place). But they are harsh enough in their own right.

Yes, shallow and pedantic.

There's also an election coming up in Australia and the position of the conservative opposition is to give Trump whatever he wants. So contarianism is alive and well there.

It's the alpha version of the controller (or some mockup). The retail controller !controller doesn't look quite like that.

>Also, Valve has done driver work on plenty of things that they don’t use in their own hardware, from various AMD cards, Intel graphics, and even work on the open source Nvidia drivers

Valve developers are the main contributors to the RADV Vulkan driver so they've done work on pretty much every AMD card that supports Vulkan. So yeah, pretty silly rumour if that's the evidence.

They might ship the game without Denuvo on Linux which has happened before.

The plus side of RGB is that you can control it at least. So set it to white or some other soft colour (or turn it off completely), which is at least an improvement over blinding blue LEDs. Of course, the software and driver support on Linux isn't perfect.

In any case, the gaudy stuff sells, so that's how they advertise it.

That's true for normal Proton but GE is a third party version.

I've got two steam controllers on their last legs. I can't go back to shitty traditional controllers.

I'd like to see it show if there is any third party DRM as well, like the Augmented Steam extension does.