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I've had my gaming machine on a separate box for awhile now. Games and their DRM have been getting worse and worse. Even games like Kerbal Space Program, whic
by fpgaminer 6y ago
I've had my gaming machine on a separate box for awhile now. Games and their DRM have been getting worse and worse. Even games like Kerbal Space Program, which I loved, harvested all your browsing data. Like, seriously, WTF?
So I've kept all that garbage on its own box. It's nicer that way anyway, since I don't use Windows as my daily driver it helps me keep a Windows machine around for other toxic software like Photoshop.
I previously did it in a VM with GPU passthrough, which worked quite well and I think is a decent option for people who can't afford the cost/space of a second machine. Nowadays, thanks to the death of Moore's Law, I had a perfectly capable older machine lying around that I could use instead. That's slightly less maintenance, since the GPU passthrough would occasionally need twiddling after qemu or kvm updates.
EDIT: I will add, for the couples years I was doing GPU passthrough, I didn't notice any difference in performance compared to when I moved the same GPU over to a physical box. In fact, there was this weird audio bug that I originally thought was because of the VM, but it persisted on the real machine and turned out to just be a bug in NVidia's audio driver. So besides the maintenance burden, GPU passthrough was great.
- GaryNumanVevo 6y agoYup, I do all my banking / financial stuff on an old netbook. I keep the OS up to date as best I can, it feels good to know everything is kept separate.
- dyingkneepad 6y ago> I've had my gaming machine on a separate box for awhile now. I do the same, I bought my box from Sony, it's called Playstation 4. Never had to worry about driver updates, incompatible games, sanboxing, anything. 5/5 would recommend.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoOkay, but I like mods.
- aaomidi 6y agoI don't trust random third party code that doesn't even at least have a company behind them tbh.
- stallmanite 6y agoRun it on a sacrificial designated machine or virtual machine?
- amatecha 6y agoYeah I also love playing games at half the graphical fidelity, resolution, and framerate! :P I have all current-gen consoles, but none of them compare to a high-specced PC on a 144hz monitor.
- edoceo 6y agoIs PCMR leaking?
- jorvi 6y agoAt the distances people sit from their TV, taken with the average TV sizes, going higher than 1080p is not needed. You'd need to sit closer than 2m (!) to a 55" TV to be able to observe the fidelity increase from 4K.[0] The same goes for very fine particle effects or extremely high resolution textures. You just won't notice it. That is not to say those things don't have a place, they are amazing and definitely look amazing at the close distances one sits from a PC monitor. Its just not an apples-to-apples comparison. I also feel that past 60Hz+FPS, the higher numbers bring very diminishing returns, especially for controllers. Although I'd much rather see modern consoles go 1080p120fps than 4k60fps. [0] https://www.hellotech.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/screen-size-value-proposition.jpg https://www.hellotech.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/sc...
- amatecha 6y agoUnfortunately your assertions don't correlate with my experience at all. I recently swapped my 1080p 60hz 23" monitor for a larger 1440p 144hz 27" one and it makes a substantial difference, not only for gaming but also for computing in general. And yes the high-resolution textures make a difference frequently, for example when your game camera is near any game geometry or model and you see nice sharp details rather than smoothed scaling artifacts. Even in terms of the entire game experience, for instance at 5:29 in this video, this isn't even 4k vs 1080p, these are both 1080p at different graphical quality levels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo5Nh9am3RM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo5Nh9am3RM The difference in detail is immediately clear.
- GordonS 6y ago
- rmellow 6y agoI do the same! I don't care about the minute (imho) differences in graphics between a multiple thousand dollar maxed out PC for the newest games, vs a $300ish PS4 that is pretty much guaranteed to work fine FPS wise and look great. No driver issues though, but the frequent and sizeable updates are so bad. After a 2 year hiatus, my Destiny 2 installation (60ish GB) needed to download updates... amounting to 60ish GB. On my current connection, that was a huge chunk of the weekend.
- rmellow 6y agoThere is an attempt at intrusion from Sony though: To use the YouTube app, it asks you to associate a Sony app to your YouTube account, that can track your video history (in or out of the PS4) and reserves the right to share videos to your YouTube channel, publicly.
- ciarannolan 6y ago>Even games like Kerbal Space Program, which I loved, harvested all your browsing data. Like, seriously, WTF? Is the "Unity Analytics" thing? I'm just googling around but I can't find a good summary anywhere.