If you haven’t been paying attention; Windows 11 has been recently added as an optional upgrade to Windows 10 users clinically insane enough to upgrade to an open beta… especially if they have an AMD CPU.
Microsoft’s chief product officer Panos Panay once said “If you’re a gamer, Windows 11 was made for you.” Unfortunately, a couple of days after launching, it’s turning out to be something of an unwanted gift. Besides being blamed for Far Cry 6 crashes and deterring an entire cloud gaming service, Windows 11 is now causing performance drops on AMD chips as well. That’s according to AMD themselves, who announced in a support post that updating to Windows 11 could cause a 3-5% performance drop in some applications as well as a 10-15% drop in “games commonly used for esports.”
There are currently two problems; L3 Cache Latency, and Microsoft forgetting how to utilize AMD’s core scheduling technology. There was a similar issue that took place years ago under Windows 7 with AMD’s “Bulldozer” processors, but in this case it’s entirely an issue with Windows 11 not working properly. The L3 Caching issue is kind of interesting; what is so different between 10 and 11 to cause such a performance loss?
Either way I spent most of my time under Linux these days… so. 😛
After a long delay in transit I finally, FINALLY got my 6800XT today! I’ve spent a better part of the evening benchmarking it for performance… what a beast! Unfortunately Manjaro won’t boot in properly with the new GPU in place, but I was planning on already doing a reinstall when the card arrived anyway. Manjaro has been giving me issues on every other boot, and I’m hoping Manjaro 21 might fix the issue, and hopefully not create new ones… Manjaro is already pretty easy to setup, so I might even be able to get back to work on my video project tomorrow! or at the very least be ready to tear back into it on Friday. I would have done it tonight, but I wanted to verify that the card worked properly PLUS I have an early work day tomorrow and need as much rest as I can get. I should be sleeping now actually, but I need my tea hydration fix.
I’m sure about one thing; this weekend is going to be awesome!
Did a small bit of clean up today, mainly brushing the floor and some pick up. It inspired me to also clean off my desk, at least to make room to charge the laptop. 😛 I drained half the battery playing DMC5, not bad for about 45 mins of gameplay!
Proton Powered Yakuza
Speaking of gameplay, that was pretty much how I decompressed for the rest of the day. Under Linux I played a bit of AMID EVIL, then I experimented with Yakuza Kiwami. I’m happy to report that Yakuza didn’t crash once, and it also had no problem pulling up my Windows save from the cloud. In fact, from what I’ve gathered so far, the performance was pretty much on par with Windows. I’ll need to analyze it further, and see if Yakuza 0 works properly now. 😛
The last bit of the evening was spent in Borderlands 3, ending my week long vacation away from Windows just so I could slay some creeps with a good buddy and one final London Fog Latte. It’s gonna be fun trying to nod off tonight…
Microsoft’s priciest video game acquisition, a $7.5 billion purchase of Bethesda Softworks parent company ZeniMax Media, shocked the industry on Monday. The deal puts Bethesda, one of the industry’s biggest publishers and owners of some of the most successful gaming series, under the Xbox brand.
Does this mean that all future Bethesda titles like Elder Scrolls, DOOM, Wolfenstein are going to be exclusive to only Windows and XBox? There would be a lot of franchises that would become exclusive under one platform… if I were a Playstation gamer I would be a little worried right about now. I know the article makes light of Microsoft not being interested in exclusivity anymore as they used to be… but this is Microsoft, and while I may use their products when needed, it doesn’t mean that I trust them.
Tonight I sat down and played a long overdue session of Borderlands 2. I wanted to do a recording as I do with a lot of things that I play, and as per tradition the encoder in OBS was overloaded, even on settings I usually use. Out of curiosity I decided to use the same settings under the Linux version, and while I’m happy to say that it worked perfectly out of the box with only a slightly lower framerate, the client itself seems to have become a time capsule of sorts of early adventures in Linux porting. I copied my Windows save over to the Linux side and found that my shield and certain weapons were missing, items that happened to be in the Commander Lilith DLC which they never ported outside of Windows (along with some other DLC packs).
Our content is in another castle
I did some further investigation and found that Aspyr is working on an update for the Linux and Mac clients, but until then if I want to play the Linux version it has to be with other Linux and Mac users on a much more ancient build of the game. I have to confess; finding that out after getting a successful recording under Linux was kind of a kick in the crotch to me. I have all of this power and capability now, squandered by missing content, alas… At least they’re working on it though, maybe if we’re lucky they’ll update the graphics a bit? (For the record D3D9 = DirectX 9 and OpenGL is OpenGL)
D3D9OpenGLD3D9OpenGL
It isn’t a dealbreaker or anything, but if Valve can get their games running under Linux with little to no visual sacrifice, then Randy Bitchford should be able to part with some of his Bitchford Bucks to pay for a better Linux experience (though I do like the ad free experience in the old version. :v ). That said, I was reading the Linux requirements and found that AMD and Intel GPU’s aren’t officially supported (Fuck NVidia). I wonder what an NVidia GPU under Linux would look like? Perhaps something for a future project on my gaming laptop.
Meanwhile, back in Windows; I researched that a bit as well and found some interesting tips that seem to get rid of the encoding problem, at least for my setup. Disabling Ambient Occlusion and switching from borderless window to fullscreen seemed to do the trick. I’m not sure why, but switching from borderless to fullscreen increased my framerate (the opposite if what I would expect), and disabling AO made the encoder overload error go away, at least for local recordings. The true test will be recording and livestreaming it at the same time. If I can do that then my soul will be at peace… until NVidia fucks it up again.
If you’re looking to make some tweaks to your install, no matter what OS platform you’re on I highly recommend the PC Gaming Wiki. They’ve helped me fix up a couple of games thanks to their community provided tips and tricks!
Had to do my first ever factory reset on my Fire HD8 today. I’m not sure how I managed it, but once in awhile when I plugged in headphones Alexa would try to activate, and since I don’t have the tablet registered with Amazon it begs me to register. I usually just hit the Not Now button and get back to the apps I’ve installed outside Amazon’s eco system; but there must have been a FireOS update that took it out. I tried to close out the app, but to no avail. I managed to get back to the homescreen, went into Waterfox and found that the only button I had at the bottom of the screen was the Back button. I had no choice but to restart, and found that I couldn’t continue any further until I registered the device.
Of course… I’m too much of an asshole to give up that easily. 😛 Factory resetting it did the trick, at least for now. I’ve been trying to replicate the problem again but haven’t had any luck. I’m planning to do a little science experiment with a little help hopefully not too far long down the road that could help prevent this from happening again.
I also had to fix a couple things in Windows tonight too, went under there tonight to play and privately livestream DMC2 (don’t ask). I wanted to run OBS in the background but found that my drivers were out of date, as the AMD codec was missing. Updating the drivers fixed the problem but… when installing the driver I had to hit reset on my computer because all of a sudden all of my USB ports fucking died. Windows went into Recovery Mode… and failed. I booted in anyway and sure enough, everything was fine.
So yeah, vacation is off to a great start. 😛 Better to have it now than during a busy bork week. Think I’ll end the night with a game that doesn’t end in DMC2…
I’ve seen this game run on PC’s, consoles, smartphones, printers, an ATM, and now Windows Task Manager on a server using 896 cores. I mean, why actually monitor usage across all CPU cores when you can just play DOOM instead?
It has been amazing watching what would be considered Console Exclusives finally giving PC Gamers long awaited access to titles that should have been sold across the board from the start.
I caught one of my British friends (MaddogSuperior) streaming the newly released PC version of the Halo Masterchief Collection these last couple of days, and I’ll usually leave Twitch on a 2nd monitor while I’m working on videos and stuff. The gameplay looked fun, but from what I also heard the input lag is quite terrible when driving vehicles. I’ll probably pick it up sometime down the road, right now it isn’t a big priority to me and I’d rather they work out any growing pains before I give Microsoft any money. Though I have to say I am surprised to see that at least the Single Player Campaign works nicely under Proton, which gets more and more awesome everyday it seems. It also seems that at least in Single Player you can mod the game to your heart’s content… moddable games are always a bonus for me.
Started and finished my Linux SSD setup today. Everything is back where it should be, and faster than ever before. I’ve taken the liberty of clearing off the old OS drive and plan to re-purpose it into a game/program drive for Linux, for anything I don’t want to run on an SSD. My first program is going to be SFM, of course. :melon: I may leave my computer on to let it copy over my assets from the Windows install. Now I can be just as fast going between two OS’s, just like on the gametop. :v:
I’ll get back into looking at video stuff tomorrow, maybe if I’m up for it a livestream or something. I’m in dire need of sleep mode.
Spent the earlier part of the morning going through my closet; it didn’t take me very long as things were already well sorted, then I had my stitches removed AND even got a phone call from my doctor telling me that I’m fine. That’s great news for me and bad for everyone else. 😛
I opted to play Hard Reset Redux in Mint today just to see if I could crash the game, made it to the 2nd level with no glitches or anything. It would still be nice if they made a native version considering the Shadow Warrior Linux Port runs quite decently given the beefy hardware. But it is nice to play the Windows version using Proton with impressive results. :happy:
I also tried a bit of Dishonored and a couple Sonic games; Dishonored works fine though it seems to pause while loading certain scenes. Sonic Generations however tried to rape my ear drums with corrupted audio, as well as possessing my controller to do weird voodoo bullshit, Mania worked fine, but the sound was a slowed down and distorted.
I’m going to be looking into getting another NVMe drive for my laptop, with how often I’ve been using Linux lately I’d like to dualboot it on my laptop and see how it performs on different hardware.
Last but not least I installed Borderlands 2 onto my laptop, thinking I’ll play it during lunch tomorrow. It’s a good thing I tested it out a bit, because for whatever reason it crashed like a drunken sailor numerous times. I think lowering PhysX may have fixed the problem, but considering that it has a 970m GPU in it that would be rather strange… I guess tomorrow will be my live test. I’ll be working full shifts every day this week, so my laptop is going to get some good usage. :happy:
