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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • TPM and SecureBoot are separate UEFI features. Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0. If your system meets the CPU requirements, then it should support this without needing to install a hardware TPM dongle. However, until recently, many vendors turned had this feature turned off for some reason.

    Where some confusion comes in is another Windows 11 requirement, that machines be SecureBoot capable. What this actually means in practice is that your system needs to be configured to boot in UEFI mode rather than CSM (“Legacy BIOS”) mode.


  • My experience is that Nvidia plays nicer without secure boot. Getting Fedora up and running with the proprietary Nvidia drivers and fully working SecureBoot was quite a headache, whereas everything just worked out of the box when I disabled it.

    But this is very much an Nvidia problem and not a SecureBoot problem. There is a reason basically no-one else provides their drivers as one-size-fits-all binary kernel modules.



  • you need a Microsoft signed stub to boot anything other than Windows on a PC

    Not necessarily, most motherboards and laptops (at least every single one I’ve ever owned) allow users to enroll their own Secure Boot keys and maintain an entirely non-Microsoft chain of trust. You can also disable secure boot entirely.

    Major distros like Ubuntu and Fedora started shipping with Microsoft-signed boot shims as a matter of convenience, not necessity.

    Secure Boot itself is not some nefarious mechanism, it is a component of the open UEFI standard. Where Microsoft comes in to play is the fact that most PC vendors are going to pre-enroll Microsoft keys because they are all shipping computers with Windows, and Microsoft wants Secure Boot enabled by default on machines shipping with with their operating system.


  • Yeah I think most people thinking we can just replace YouTube do not understand the scale of their operation. What YouTube does is many many orders of magnitude bigger and more complex than anything happening on the fediverse. PeerTube is a joke by comparison. There is a reason that even when VC money was flowing like crazy, nobody was able to even think about launching a competitor.

    On top of that, no platform can seek to replace YouTube without offering the same or better creator compensation. Free services will never meet that.



  • There is no way they could have put a DVD drive and the necessary playback hardware in the Dreamcast and still sold it for a price people would pay in 1998. Standalone DVD players still cost $600-$1,000 back then. The argument should be that Sega launched the Dreamcast too early, but they were in dire straits and needed to replace the Saturn sooner than later. I’m not convinced they had much choice.

    I think the PS2’s success is a lot more complex than “it was a DVD player and a game console in one”. The PS2 also benefitted from the massive amount of momentum built on the PS1, backwards compatibility, a better controller, and much faster hardware.


  • Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force.

    • It’s a first person shooter from a venerable studio in the genre, Raven Software.
    • Put out during their “golden age”, before Wolfenstein and Singularity flopped and uncle Bobby sent them to work in the Call of Duty mines.
    • Really cool selection of sci-fi guns, some of them pretty unique.
    • Campaign is essentially a prototype for Quake 4. It was built by the same internal team at Raven.
    • It has a more interesting story than Quake 4.
    • It’s an early example of a game that lets you choose your sex. NPC dialog changes to reflect this.
    • The whole cast of Star Trek: Voyager lends their voice talent to the game, including Jeri Ryan.

    It also has a sequel, made by another studio. Elite Force II isn’t quite as good, but it is still worth playing if you like the original. It loses the female protagonist option, likely because it was 2003 and the story had a love triangle. It’s a visual powerhouse though, really pushing the limits of the Quake III engine far beyond what many people likely thought possible.





  • You haven’t countered the basic fact that you have failed to provide any evidence.

    Every single AMD sponsored game has skipped DLSS despite the fact that implementation is free and trivial.

    So… It’s irrelevant to this post because it’s devastating toyour case? Kay

    How is it devastating to my case? I clearly labeled it as an unknown. It is a test of the predictive power of my hypothesis. If it has DLSS, then my theory can be called into question. If it doesn’t, it becomes another data point.

    Sure. Now get the data.

    Every single AMD sponsored game has skipped DLSS despite the fact that implementation is free and trivial.

    you’re not actually listening to my arguments and just wildly speculating from something you’ve already decided must be the case.

    The core of your argument was that these games lack DLSS because it is not open source. I laid out, very clearly, why that has very little impact on us developers decision making. You haven’t laid out a clear argument for why my explanation is wrong, you are simply attacking the way I constructed it.



  • Starfield isn’t relevant to my argument, we don’t actually know for certain if it will include DLSS. People are speculating that it won’t based on the established pattern of AMD-sponsored games skipping DLSS.

    I think there is merit to this pattern. It’s not something people started bringing up until there actually was a recongizable pattern. If there were any AMD-sponsored games with DLSS, then this would all be nonsensical. But there aren’t. For the majority of AMD sponsored games, adding DLSS support is as simple as ticking a checkbox, so the fact that they don’t is suspicious.

    Consider this: Why is it that pretty much every non-AMD sponsored game that supports FSR 2.0 also supports DLSS?

    Have I said AMD is my friend, or am I calling someone out on wild speculation with no evidence?

    We have a pattern that fits perfectly in line with common scummy business behavior, what conclusion do you expect people to draw? The fact that you find this just as unbelievable as alien abductions really makes it sound like you don’t even want to consider any of these possibilities.

    We’ve established that

    1. Direct comparisons between FSR and DLSS are unfavorable to AMD
    2. AMD is paying developers to implement their technologies like FSR
    3. Game developers have no real trepidation about using proprietary middleware and APIs beyond their licensing costs, of which DLSS has none.

    It is not much of a stretch to argue that AMD wouldn’t want the games they sponsor to be using a competitor’s technology, especially if it makes theirs look bad. This is a perfectly valid hypothesis that does not rely on any unreasonable assumptions, and does not contradict the data points we already have.

    You’re really making mountains out of molehills here, and I don’t think you even have any real development experience. So I’m not sure why I should trust your suppositions over my own firsthand experience.


  • You really don’t believe AMD sponsoring these games has anything to do with it?

    Ease of implementation in most cases can’t have anything to do with it, because most games don’t even need to do any work to enable it. DLSS support is included in Unreal and Unity, right alongside FSR. They’re both just checkboxes. Being open source has nothing to do with choosing to enable one but not the other. That is much more a philosophical concern than a technical one. Trust me, as a developer, a library being proprietary means very little to us when building a video game. How much it costs to use is the much bigger factor, and from that perspective, FSR and DLSS are identical.

    AMD isn’t your friend anymore than Nvidia, they just want you to think they are because they don’t have an abusable market position yet.


  • I think it’s a stretch to claim that proprietary software is inherently anticompetitive, though I won’t argue that Nvidia as a whole is often very anticompetitive.

    Implementing DLSS is no more fundamentally difficult than implementing FSR. Source-availability only makes things easier in certain edge cases, most uses will just use the precompiled library provided by the vendor. You don’t need any kind of special permission or agreement with Nvidia to use DLSS. The interface for these libraries is so similar that there are already community-made wrappers that adapt between the two for games that only support one.


  • I’m struggling to find games released in the last two years that support DLSS but not FSR.

    The problem is, like it or not, DLSS is way better than FSR. So naturally, people who have capable hardware feel a little miffed when they are saddled with the inferior solution.

    Plenty can be said about Nvidia’s anticompetitive practices, but I don’t think this is explicitly one of them. They don’t block games from supporting FSR, though probably not out of the goodness of their heart. They know DLSS is better, so having games support both makes it a lot easier for reviewers and consumers to make this comparison. AMD obviously doesn’t want this unfavorable comparison, which is why they pay developers to not include DLSS.