I've gone over to Linux after using Windows for 25 years.
As someone who enjoys older games, I am pleasantly surprised that Wine (with dxvk and cnc-ddraw) lets me run more games in a better way than I was able to on Windows.
I can run some 16-bit games on a 64-bit OS!
Games that rudely switch to fullscreen, I can run in Wine Virtual Desktop. Previously on Windows, I had to configure hacks like DxWnd and it didn't always work.
I only wish Wine also allowed me to zoom 2x or 3x, but this is where Gamescope comes in:
Also there is a potential to use a different Wine configuration (prefix) for every game specifically. So far I haven't had to resort to this.
I noticed some Unity games waste disk space with gigabytes of zeroes, Linux lets me run them from inside a compressed SquashFS image, this even makes the game load faster:
> Games that rudely switch to fullscreen, I can run in Wine Virtual Desktop. Previously on Windows, I had to configure hacks like DxWnd and it didn't always work.
At this point, that's exactly what Windows needs. As Microsoft only adds new features and doesn't remove almost any, Windows is getting reaaally bloated. And what was Microsoft's response? Everyone should buy a new faster computer to run Windows 11.
Tbh, a better strategy would to slim down Windows again would be to remove all the new user-facing stuff which was added over the last two decades. There have been significant improvements in the kernel and DirectX, but on the surface, Windows somehow managed to remove user-facing features while at the same time adding an incredible amount of bloat in layers above the core operating system. From a usability perspective the Windows desktop UI in Win2k was singnificantly better than anything that came after.
> remove all the new user-facing stuff which was added over the last two decades
That's not all that needs to be removed from Windows, and it's not what they're interested in removing. The old MFC, GDI, COMCTL, COMDLG, Winsock etc. must be a lot higher in their "do delete" list.
Well, yes, but APIs aside, as long as the developers and users have the choice, they won't choose a new backwards incompatible solution if when they can stay with their old solution.
Look at Apple Macs, all went from x86 to arm, breaking software and fixing incompatibilities later. Users had no choice but to use m1 macOS if they wanted a new device.
Same, but games run uncompressed assets as an optimization measure to trade disk usage for CPU usage, depending on which is the bottleneck for their particular game (iiuc)
So it'd be surprising to me if a developer chose to use uncompressed/lightly compressed assets, and compressing them caused performance to increase; because you're intentionally choosing the tradeoff in the opposite direction the developer did
Of course, there are game developers that are less technical and may not have knowingly made that tradeoff in which case all bets are off, but the games made by those developers tend not to be the kind that require beefy machines to run at 60fps+
The right tradeoff for compression ratio can change with just a few years of technological progress, or even quicker if it's a half-assed port from console to a high-end PC. There are similar issues for a game's decision of how many threads to spawn based on the CPU's core count. The developer's assumptions may not have been right to begin with, and even if they were, they're not likely to stay right for long.
Being able to rely on fast storage makes compression less necessary for performance reasons. But the higher price/GB of SSDs mean users have a stronger preference for games to keep the install size under control.
There was a time when console games would avoid disc seeks at all costs, even duplicating uncompressed assets. Compression can easily interfere with laying data out in blocks to read sequentially.
That’s not a problem with SSDs and most machines have more cores or even dedicated hardware decoders. Of course it’s also more worthwhile to compress since SSD storage is comparatively more expensive.
It never ceases to surprise me that people still embed 5+ MB resolution photos on their sites, then use them scaled down to thumbnail size, but here we are.
My power company’s outage website is about the only site I can’t access through my cell phone when our power is out because even the “low bandwidth” version is a bloated farce.
Reminds me of the mention of "contiguous zeroes" that used to be in the Apple App Store docs.[1] Which seemed like just a backhanded way to say "we encrypt and then compress so don't expect easy compression."
I suppose this might be asset padding or perhaps these are raw textures with full alpha sections? Still, it seems pretty strange. What game, what asset?
As someone who enjoys older games, I am pleasantly surprised that Wine (with dxvk and cnc-ddraw) lets me run more games in a better way than I was able to on Windows.
I can run some 16-bit games on a 64-bit OS!
Games that rudely switch to fullscreen, I can run in Wine Virtual Desktop. Previously on Windows, I had to configure hacks like DxWnd and it didn't always work.
I only wish Wine also allowed me to zoom 2x or 3x, but this is where Gamescope comes in:
Also there is a potential to use a different Wine configuration (prefix) for every game specifically. So far I haven't had to resort to this.I noticed some Unity games waste disk space with gigabytes of zeroes, Linux lets me run them from inside a compressed SquashFS image, this even makes the game load faster:
I encountered a game that crashes due to multiprocessor system, the fix is simple, restricting it to one CPU: