It's limited, but the limitations in a large part cancel out. It's still very capable.

It's because most of those games don't have the graphics to justify choking.

On lower end hardware it's extremely easy to notice who actually programmed the game and who just used the Unity defaults.

Depends on what the game can be reasonably expected to run on. Most games don't even approximate what would be technically possible on today's hardware and waste your electricity on lazy coding instead. "15 years old hardware" is what was cutting edge when Crysis 2 and Skyrim came out, so that's not a good excuse in the majority of cases.

I game on 1080P and never have issues with any games I play, though I am on a 3080. It's definitely people trying to max out every setting for their 4K monitor that they overpaid for. I might be giving 2K monitors a try soon on the other hand.

What makes this story even better is how it actually came about - this wasn't initially a top-down corporate initiative, but rather a passion project from a single engineer who worked on it after hours. The fact that Larian immediately recognized the value and threw their full support behind it says everything about their culture.

Swen Vincke shared the backstory:

> The story of how this came to be really is one of true passion. The Steam Deck native build was initiated by a single engineer who really wanted a smoother version of the game on Steam Deck and so he started working on it after hours. When we tried it out, we were all surprised by how good it felt and so it didn't take much to convince us to put our shoulders behind it and get it released. It's this type of pure passion for their craft that makes me fall in love with my developers over and over again. Considering myself very lucky to have people like him on my team. Try it out!

https://x.com/LarAtLarian/status/1970526548592623969

That combination of individual passion and company willingness to back good ideas is what makes Larian special.

Because they bought the game. After decades of PC gaming, it's totally absurd there is no system that tell you how bad or how well a game is going to play on your system. And if it's too difficult to make, how can we expect regular people to know themselves ?

IMO it's because a lot of these newer games just don't need that much horsepower. BG3 is not one of them, but looking at the broader industry.

A lot of times were seeing maaaaaybe a 5% bump in fidelity or graphics quality in exchange for 400% less performance.

Like ray tracing. Does Ray tracing look good? Yes. But not that good. Its not the PS1 to the PS2. I've seen baked lighting indistinguishable from Ray tracing in 99% of scenes.

Its just not a good trade off with modern games usually. Unless they really optimize them.

The only people still optimizing games is Nintendo from what I've seen.

I would have gotten a mini PC, but strangely enough the Ally was the cheapest steamOS-compatible option I could find.

Steam could probably build in a system to guess the performance if there was some benchmarking data, but game performance can change dramatically after release between updates to drives or the game itself.

   Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2024/08/21/linux...

I am amazed this game is even playable on the steam deck. Was trying to find an excuse to play it after cyberpunk. I guess this one it is…

I used to be a great fan of Prey Project, but I don't think it's installable on the Steam Deck without leaving Steam mode.

https://preyproject.com

That sub is mostly pictures of "jUsT bOuGhT a StEaM DeCk", sob bait, random steam sales, and rarely ever anything useful related to the Deck itself.

Every now and then I go to check top posts from the past month to see if anyone has posted anything significant, like the DeckMate or EmuDeck or actual useful stuff. Inevitably, it's all standard reddit garbage.

The only thing I've seen which is close is Star Citizen's telemetry: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/en/telemetry

500 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624

From my guess, Steam support Vulkan shader pre-compilation so that you don't have to wait in game (like the infamous 10 min Monster Hunter Wilds startup delay). They also seems to also be able to download the compilation cache from Steam if someone already have done the process on the same GPU + driver version. Since fewer Windows games use Vulkan this feature is often not used, but on Linux most games will run on Vulkan (esp. Proton games with dxvk) you may experience the process more often.

Disclaimer: I don’t even like macOS.

What am I missing here?

So for BG3, if you don't have 150Gb free on your disk, steam will download it on a different disk and then transfer it over, thrashing you disk.

It's bizarre, incredibly annoying, behaviour and I wish it would just ask so I'd know that was about to happen and just clean up some space. Or refuse the upgrade.

But steam want to force upgrades on users before you can play anything, which for single player games is incredibly frustrating. I get why they do it, but it's another one of those things where you feel like you aren't in control of the thing you paid a lot of money for.

They don't want to deal with esoteric Linux bugs.

Anyways, BG3 runs perfectly fine, natively, on my Ubuntu 25.04 RTX 4090 rig.

I'm not sure if I can recall any tips other than just keep at it and it'll eventually become muscle memory. I don't think it's as good as KB+M but it wasn't something that was bugging me once we got significantly into the game. YMMV.

To me, the modding ecosystem is probably one of the two most important things about this game (the other being that Larian seems to be pretty awesome as far as studios go nowadays, with their CEO taking a firm stance against "crunch" to get games out and in favor of the model of offline games that don't require paid DLC or microtransactions, as well as their continued support of the modding ecosystem itself). Long before I ever considered writing any mods myself, I started referring to BG3 as similar to Skyrim in that the mods will likely keep things fresh long after new official content stops coming out. I still think this is true, but I also keep being surprised just how much work they're continuing to put into the game even with new content presumably finally having come to an end.

I've heard about multiple games that where steamdeck verified but the performance choppy. If it can't hold a steady 30fps, a game shouldn't be steamdeck verified in my opinion.

Is there any data to support this? IME most PC gamers I know don't give a shit about telemetry. They are stock Windows and Android users, love Google products, etc.

They only care whatsoever when it comes to adblocking, because they don't want to watch ads.

(I'm also in the US)

Yes

https://steamdb.info/depot/2330359/

You can download the native version on any Linux distro https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nokcej/laria...

outstanding work by larien however, I just felt strange reading your comment which somehow implied that the translation is the reason for bad performance, when it is actually more performent then the original

For the first few months, act 3 (in the city) was legitimately hard to play. Performance, stability, visual glitches, all pervasive. But later patches did do a better job of improving those points.

Act 3's still the most intensive part of the game by far so on many setups it's still wise to at least crank down the crowd density, but it's come a long way since the launch version of the game.

It’s possible that some of the engine improvements could be easily back-ported to BG3. Or even just compiler improvements could be a little more oomph.

Edit:

> Our Proton version runs on the Steam Deck via the Proton compatibility layer, which requires extra CPU processing power. Running the game natively on the Steam Deck requires less CPU usage and memory consumption overall!

Workaround for a performance regression helps some but I suspect more has gone on.

Here's a review of Steam Deck performance from early 2024: https://steamdeckhq.com/game-reviews/baldurs-gate-3/

I'm assuming this is just an effort to slightly improve things.

I'm just happy the Steam Deck seems to be pushing devs to make sure their games run on low power hardware. Really any game should be able to run fine on the Steamdeck, there's no gameplay that isn't possible to run on the hardware. It's just the lack of engineering time spent on making sure the graphics have a proper low option.

Gaming on Linux is hard because there's not one Linux, there's tons of Linuses. What version of the glibc/libstdc++/mesa/xorg/wayland/kernel/drivers are you running?

The Linux ecosystem is fragmented in such a way that only open-source and an army of volunteers can really work around. It is really not binary-friendly at a fundamental, philosophical level.

(You're not going to get game companies to open-source their games, except as an exception, and after their economic life is finished)

The Steam Deck provides one well-known hardware and software platform that a vendor can reasonably target. Don't expect much more except by the most dedicated developer.

The world is plenty big enough for all types of communities. Its okay for people to be proud of the things they lead, even if they aren't things that are interesting to you or me.

Unfortunately, singling out any individual developer, even for praise, can attract unwanted negative attention online. By acknowledging the passion and the work without naming the person, Swen gives them full credit internally while shielding them from becoming a public target.

This doesn't even necessarily have to be intentional harassment, but if this engineer is now the "SteamDeck guy" at Larian, their social media might get flooded by people who mistake their personal social media accounts for a support ticket.

I'm sure the engineer has the option to self-identify if they wish, but this approach feels like a sign of good and thoughtful leadership.

A knowledgeable user might be able to predict their performance reasonably well, based on publicly available benchmark databases, but you still can’t really get a good estimate FPS unless you find someone with exactly your hardware setup who benchmarked the game (and is willing to share).

Just remember that stuff like red dead redemption ran on those things with all of 512 MB of unified memory. It ran and looked better than borderlands 4 does on current consoles.

Thanks to Larian for doing cross platform.

The window manager, package manager, etc are completely custom. The OS is a read only image based system.

But sometimes something merely existing can prevent other things from flourishing, e.g. due to the mechanism of Schelling points:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schelling_point

If you're a very casual/young/inexperienced gamer then sure, you might have trouble comparing your own system with the min specs.

Less see how those benchmarks compare, now that just like with netbooks, Microsoft is finally acknowledging they need to react.

The translation is the reason SteamDeck will suffer the same fate as OS/2, and netbooks, building castles on other companies kingdoms.

For that not to happen, the SteamDeck needs to be sold on its actual capabilities, not by pretending to be someone's else platform.

As of right now, proton and proton-ge both build in and require Steam Runtime Version 3 to run in. The steam client itself is running in a runtime, and I think it is the scout runtime, so LD_PRELOAD based. This means that steam has its own common platform to "deploy" against, and all Linux native games have a common platform to deploy against.

It used to be that games had to be compiled in a chroot for Steam runtime 1.0, but now with Steam runtime 3.0, developers are heavily recommended to build their game in a "OCI-based container framework"—so podman basically—and enable the Steam Runtime 3.0 on steam. I know that TF2 and Dota 2 use steam runtime 3.0, and apparently so does Retroarch. Of course, since there is a podman/docker image, you can also test existing games to see if they run in the runtime too.

You can find a lot of more information about the steam runtime 3.0 here: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/sniper/sdk

Valve has a gitlab with lots of great docs for developers who want to publish a linux native game.

I think all native linux games will run in the Scout 1.0 runtime by default

Edit: I will say that as an end-user, running an up-to-date Linux kernel and Mesa stack is important for gaming. I know some people who run Mint and are surprised that their Radeon RX 9060 runs like ass. As long as you aren't using a Debian based LTS distro, like mint or ubuntu lts, or you are running those distro but get a newer kernel, you should be fine. This matters less for older hardware, but having a newer kernel and especially a newer mesa version is important.

This is the reason why I don't believe when people say that it runs great without trying it myself.

Seems enormously more likely to be the all to familiar story in the games industry of not providing credit to individual devs. Something that goes back to the earliest days of Atari.

1. Enroll is the discount program by running steam hardware survey. Steam holds onto your system specs.

2. Steam offers discounts for games that have insufficient benchmarks for your rough system.

3. For these games, steam collects performance data (either 5 minutes of benchmark before, during the game, first run, or maybe when the PC is idle (screensaver mode)).

There's all sorts of way they could do it. I'm guessing a large portion of people would be fine with a "Folding at home" style system, that just runs benchmarks for screensavers (with some coupons or whatever granted).

I would really love them to do a Fallout game. The original two games had a lot of properties to them that 3 and subsequent games just ignored or straight up went against, including NV. To me, as a fan who grew up with the first two, it's like a different game series.

I feel like this describe how I feel about life in general. maybe we really are living in a simulation.

There are some hiccups at times, but it is acceptable, IMO.

My question was about; do they enforce a device label?

How could you already have done this with the native linux build, which was just released today? I would think BG3 too long a game for that.

Or are you talking about playing the Windows build in Proton?

I think you kinda hit the nail on the head, but I believe there is an extra dimension to this: desire.

For BG3, it looked fun and I had good memories of BG2 so I was interested in playing it. After tuning the settings a bunch and not being able to get a consistent framerate / not have micro-freezing, I just said "oh well, I'll play it on some other platform in the future." I cared about BG3, but not that much.

This is in contrast to Elden Ring Nightreign, which also had issues. I was able to get it to a somewhat stable 30FPS and celebrated that success before dumping 100+ hours into the game. Why? Well, because I love FromSoft games! I really really really wanted to play the game and was willing to put up with a somewhat subpar experience in order to get it. BG3, among other games, is just not that exciting for me personally so my tolerance of technical hitches is very different.

... which brings us right back to this native release. Hopefully the improvements we see are enough to get me over that "hill" and actually enjoying the game. I have the update queued on my deck now so I can try it out after work.

It’s a shame that large companies like EA/Bethesda/Valve/etc don’t do more to fight against it, instead of cowering and leaving indie devs that are barely surviving to fend this off.

I suspect not wanting to do BG4 is at the end of the day a negotiation tactic. There’s an amount of money and consideration that will make them put it back in the queue. But it’s likely at least five years out before they start on such a thing.

They’ll want to avoid the Torchlight trap, where the team got sick of doing Diablo clones and the company kind of cratered afterward.

The alternative is using (what is effectively) a cross compiling toolchain to target Linux from itself! Or spin up an ancient Debian image (including ancient compiler) to build against ancient glibc.

It's hard to blame anyone for just using Proton, with the perma-stable Win32 API. No build containers, no chroot, no locking the build to Steam. Just the same build infra you already have.

I can't think of specific names anymore since it's been a while since I have played it, but a lot of the developers for World of Warcraft used to be and likely still are active on Twitter. For a lot of them, the community knew fairly well which features of the game or which class they were responsible for. When I used to look at the replies to some of their Tweets (even ones completely unrelated to WoW), they were often full of complaints about their area of perceived responsibility.

I fully understand every engineer who just wants to put their head down and work on their stuff they're passionate about without having to also be public-facing. Even in a small company like mine, some of our devs constantly complain that some customers know that they are responsible for certain features of our product and email them directly rather than going through the proper support channels.

Your point about the games industry often struggling with providing proper credit to devs is well taken - it's absolutely an issue. But in this case, Vincke did actually do that, in a way. He could've just kept quiet and let the playerbase think it was a company effort, but instead he publicly highlighted and recognized the passion and work of one of their engineers (even though anonymously). That engineer can look at the countless positive replies to that post and get the nice fuzzy feeling without getting dragged into the spotlight.

Because these guys and gals are not famous enough to warrant large coverage, and because the phenomenon is unfortunately so widespread that noone is going to cover every case.

https://endofaspecies.com/oped/the-harassment-of-game-develo...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2621gzvkdo

https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/zoe13c/passionate_...

https://www.gameshub.com/news/news/video-games-developers-gd...

https://www.xfire.com/authorities-investigating-death-threat...

https://f1000research.com/articles/11-1518

WOTC were completely dysfunctional over the last few years and it nearly destroyed d&d.

- They tried to build their own bg3, except it was a VTT that they could fill with microtransactions, but they didn't know what VTTs needed to actually be used. They just thought: "Build something that we can nickle and dime all the users of"

- The new "backwards-compatible" edition that de jure isn't a new edition, but with the power creep is a de facto new edition.

- The OGL fiasco that shattered the community content creators who decided to attempt to make their own games "with blackjack and hookers". (e.g. daggerheart, dc20, draw steel, tales of the valiant, dragonbane, shadowdark, ) and bring their communities along to try the new games (including older offshoots like pathfinder 1e/2e, lancer, 13th age, etc...)

Imagine how much money they've had to pay their major community members (critical role, dimension 20, etc...) just to keep them playing the d&d branded games.

One could argue that Proton is a kind of a container. It has a runtime system, filesystem, wine itself has several executables and interprocess communication, etc.

To be fair, I've still spent a crazy amount of time with the Civilization games so let's say that was a partial success.

(Not saying mesa should be statically linked, but that we should be able to load and use it without libc)

BG4 will almost certainly happen, but by some other studio.

You seem to comment with generalizations a lot.

Here is some data:

https://steamcommunity.com/stats/1086940/achievements

"The City Awaits (40.3%)"

So 59.7% of all players didn't make it to Act 3 on Steam, a bit under a "vast majority".

Disagree however about the value credit - personal credit has concrete value (career wise, status wise etc), warm and fuzzy feelings less so. Right now we can only guess whether the dev had a say in the matter.

That's kind of a twisted interpretation of events. It was coloured by one incel who though he owned the developer of a game and a whole lot of incels who sympathized because they too were owed a vagina by the ones who controlled them. Now it's spread to broader issues and higher levels of politics and is still going.

You can classify a vendor as a pain in your ass but if they get results, it’s time to look in the mirror and think about why you kept telling them to go right when they went left, and everybody loves the results.

Though it’s also true that a lot of key people have now left WotC and we are slowly working toward a situation where a Darrington Press game is more likely than a WotC game.

* Based on my experience

The engineer can still leverage this (LinkedIn, internal promotions, industry networking) without being forced into a public-facing role they might not want. When they're interviewing or networking, they can point to Vincke's public acknowledgment and say "that was my project" in contexts where it's professionally relevant, without having their personal social media permanently associated with it.

Considering Vincke was impressed enough to publicly acknowledge this individual's passion and initiative, there's no doubt in my mind that this engineer could get named credit or something that would acknowledge their role in the project if they wanted it.

But to go a bit meta: I think it's strange that we are discussing this in the context of a CEO publicly acknowledging one of their engineers (even if anonymously). Vincke is, at least in the context of the broader industry, going above and beyond. I doubt you'd see Ubisoft, EA, or Blizzard publicly acknowledging a single engineer's after-hours passion project in this way.

Feels a bit like misdirected energy, I guess? Why are we debating about the nuances of named vs anonymous credit and recognition when industry leaders don't give any?

It's like calling someone out for only tipping 10% while ignoring the guy in the top hat who's tipping 0. If you want gaming companies to get better about giving credit and recognition, you should support the companies that are at least moving in the right direction. I know it's easy to be cynical, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

I don't think you need a case quite this specific because of the following:

> then attacked for issues with the company beyond their purview

Ultimately, whether an employee is praised or not is completely irrelevant to the nutjobs taking their anger out on them because of something their employer did.

I am not trying to victim blame or anything, I just can’t imagine a situation where I could forget something so big.

It's the #10 top most played game on Steam Deck.

https://store.steampowered.com/charts/steamdecktopplayed

a) glibc will drop older versioned symbols over time making your binary not work at all

b) glibc owns ld.so and is not afraid to make incompatible changes, which is why running Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri linux port requires that you dig out not just libc, but the entire dynamic linking stack and know how to bypass default executable interpreter in ELF files.

That's irrelevant, because Proton is literally a Windows emulation layer, (the product of decades of cumulative work). "they" (Larian) didn't have to do anything for that.

Certainly Larian's effort for making a Steam Deck native version is commendable (I hear it was the result of one single employee's effort). Larian is a rare beacon in the video games industry biz for the amount of post-launch support and content they provide.

But my point remains: supporting Linux broadly is a far larger, and ultimately unreasonable, ask, than just supporting the Steam Deck.

In terms of the wifi itself, I have two mesh routers in the house, one directly connected to the modem in the living room, and the other upstairs in my office, with the desktop plugged into it via ethernet. I'm lucky enough to be in an area with gigabit fiber, which made it seem worthwhile to invest in a good mesh setup, and I honestly might ended up with fairly low local latency mostly by accident from that. I've read some things that indicate that WiFi 7 might be a significant part of why this works well for me, but having never tried streaming games before having this setup, I don't have anything to compare it to.

On the software side of things, I mostly use the defaults that the AUR `sunshine` package comes preinstalled with for the server (although I'm not sure how much of that is tweaked from upstream). I don't have any ports exposed to the wider internet, and I have LAN encryption disabled, which likely reduces the overhead a bit. I'm not sure if it matters, but for the sake of completeness, but my GPU is a Radeon RX 6900 XT, and I'm running the standard Arch repo versions of of mesa, Plasma 6, and the `linux-zen` kernel (with Plasma configured to use Wayland rather than X11). On the client side, the Steam Deck is using Moonlight from the flatpak listed in the "Discover" app in desktop mode, with the resolution set to 1440p (since that what my monitor has, and I've found a lot of games lower the quality of the graphics if I lower the resolution to match my Steam Deck's native 800p) and the refresh rate set to 90 FPS, which the app then displays as converting to a bitrate of 49 Mbps. I have it set to fullscreen (since I don't really have any need to use the steam deck for other things when gaming, and it still does allow me to easily get back in to the local settings without much issue even with that set) and Vsync off, the boxes checked off for "Optimize game settings for streaming", "Capture system keyboard shortcuts", "Enable mouse control with gamepads...", "Enable HDR", and "Unlock bitrate limit" (the last of which presumably overrides the auto-computed bitrate mentioned above), as well as turning pretty much every audio setting I can off or at least to the lowest possible value since I'm pretty much always either watching TV or listening to music nowadays when playing. I left the video decoder and codecs as "automatic".

The only two things that ever seem to go wrong is that the Steam Deck sometimes seems to decide to render the on-screen keyboard below the streamed desktop rather than above it, and occasionally (maybe once every 10-12 hours of playing over several days?) the connection will start to degrade over the course of a minute or so and become unable to sustain the necessary bandwidth. The keyboard issue seems like it might be a bug in Moonlight, since I'm able to fix it by disconnecting and restarting the client itself, and the connection issue seems like it's either an issue with Sunshine or my network itself, since I can always fix it by simply disconnecting (without needing to restart Moonlight itself). The experience overall has been so good that I've almost completely stopped playing anything locally on the Deck itself (with the only exception being occasional emulation of Gameboy Color/Gameboy Advance games, which obvious don't require much in terms of hardware). I'm able to play games with much higher graphical settings than I could locally on the Deck, and the battery life is significantly improved (maybe around 6-8 hours of dedicated playing). It's such a smooth experience that I've been seriously considering upgrading to the Legion Go literally just to have a higher-res screen for this setup without having to change much (since SteamOS is supported for it nowadays; I don't have much interest in the Legion Go 2 with Windows, and the more powerful/efficient hardware wouldn't do much for me with my current setup).

[1]: I didn't have a ton of experience with mesh wifi honestly, but after some basic research I ended up buying of two of this mode (which seems to have a version of 6.1.0 from checking just now)l, and they seems to work reasonably well: TP-Link Deco BE25 Dual-Band BE5000 WiFi 7 Mesh Wi-Fi Router https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DKVKLJX3

As palata mentioned the "trick" is to build using the oldest version you plan to target. You can use a Docker image with, say, Debian (which has official docker images going back to Squeeze released in 2011) to build the binary and release that.

AFAIK there are some tools that allow you to fudge symbols, etc to allow you to use whatever you have on your system but these feel like brittle solutions and the easiest one is to just build on an older/stable release. It isn't like it takes more than a second to make a VM or docker image anyway :-P.

But it was too close of a tangent towards criticism of establishment journalism in general, so of course establishment journalism countered back with the only weapon it has, and suddenly the vast majority of people forgot any of it had to do with reviewing and promoting good indie video games.

People who make indie games are not losers. People who want good games to be promoted are not losers. It is an art. It's not for everyone. People who just want to play the latest AAA sequel can stick to those. But if you've ever tried a niche indie game and been more impressed than you expected, you know it's art, and you'd want other people discovering and promoting the good ones, and talking about what makes them special.

Every single one of them later turned out to be a sexual predator. This is now known as the "softboi" or "male feminist". This kind of person is still out there and is dangerous as ever, so it's important to keep an eye out.

(None of these people were in tech; instead all my tech coworkers who were men and lived in SF also heard "we need to respect women", but being kind of autistic engineers took it too literally and didn't seem to know any women, so they seemed to think the right thing to do was go out and find a woman and literally just start respecting them. This didn't work out for them and they mostly ended up getting scammed by scammers who happened to be women.)