Three side remarks about China, which can be a peculiar example to compare to for Russia, maybe even any other country:

• They actually banned consoles for a quite significant 15 years (2000–2015), which strongly tilted their market towards PC.
• Their companies actively make PC-type gaming handhelds, and many of them are even well-established in the business ahead the current “Steam Deck” wave/bandwagon: GPD (once called GamePad Digital, first release in 2016), OneXPlayer (2020), Ayaneo (2021).
• Chinese gaming companies are quite at the whim of the censorship, and occasional “crackdowns” out of the blue, and many have therefore reoriented themselves for an international audience to de-risk their business.

If you want RTX though (does it work properly on Linux?)

Yes it does. For example, Hans-Kristian Arntzen declared the DirectX Raytracing (DXR) implementation in VKD3D-proton as feature complete in February 2023 (https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/issues/154#issuecomment-1434761594). And since November 2023/release 2.11, VKD3D-proton in fact runs with DXR enabled by default (https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/releases/tag/v2.11).

There has been:

• Watch Dogs
• Watch Dogs 2
• Watch Dogs: Legion

GIMP is a special case. GIMP is being getting outdeveloped by Krita these days. E.g.:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/9284

Or compare with:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Krita-2024-GPUs-AI

GIMP had its share of self inflicted wounds starting with a toxic mailing list that drove away people from professional VFX and surrounding FilmGimp/CinePaint. When the GIMP people subsequently took over the GEGL development from Rhythm & Hues, it took literally 15 years until it barely worked.

Now we are past the era of simple GPU processing into diffusion models/“generative AI” and GIMP is barely keeping up with simple GPU processing (like resizing, see above).

Have people actually checked the versions there before making the suggestion?

F-Droid: Version 3.5.4 (13050408) suggested Added on Feb 23, 2023
Google Play: Updated on Aug 27, 2023

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.videolan.vlc/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.videolan.vlc

The problem seems to be squarely with VLC themselves.

From my own statistics how many I feel worthy posting/linking on Lemmy, the most direct alternative to Kotaku is Eurogamer. PCGamer, PCGamesN and Rock Paper Shotgun are occasionally OK, but you have to cut through a lot of spam and clickbait (i.e. exactly this “50 guides per week” type of corporate guidance). Not sure if this is also the state that Kotaku will end up in. The Verge sometimes also have good articles, but the flood of gadget consumerism articles there is obnoxious.

The PS Vita side of Sony customer has gotten a deep taste of Sony’s issues of catering everything to a singular console. And same with PSVR2: Of course it must be PS5 exclusive, because everything are adornments towards their shiny console — and went on to not sell a lot of PS5.

See https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/u-mad, in particular the “Due to the agitating nature of the phrase, it is often considered a form of trolling.”

The “you mad bro” is found among internal Valve communication (Valve COO Scott Lynch to Erik Johnson and Newell, i.e. in the sense Johnson/Newell being “mad”, not Sweeney). It was particularly not sent out as a response to Sweeney. Another outlet already got tripped over this and had to make a correction: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/03/valve-coo-on-epics-tim-sweeney-you-mad-bro-when-launching-the-epic-store/

This is not quite as sensational as some people are framing it.

There is pre-existing context and criticism. And it is not about, or just being the perception of “this journalist”:

https://www.theverge.com/23992402/geoff-keighley-the-game-awards-layoffs

https://www.levelup.com/en/news/777306/He-doesnt-represent-us-devs-and-players-deliver-harsh-criticism-of-Geoff-Keighley-on-social-networks

https://videogames.si.com/features/games-industry-deserves-better-than-geoff-keighley

https://www.inverse.com/gaming/the-game-awards-2023-needs-to-acknowledge-industrys-lay-offs-problem

https://dotesports.com/the-game-awards/news/the-game-awards-layoffs-developers-no-respect

The problems also goes beyond just the layoffs, but his overt coziness and preferential treatment of large studios, over even the ones that actually won the award he is presiding over, and are supposed to be celebrated:

https://insider-gaming.com/geoff-keighley-shows-cowardice-at-the-game-awards/

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/the-biggest-problem-at-this-years-game-awards-was-disrespecting-the-winners/

https://www.eurogamer.net/the-game-awards-speeches-were-too-short-geoff-keighley-admits

https://www.ign.com/articles/the-game-awards-criticized-for-giving-winners-little-time-to-speak-amid-silence-on-industry-layoffs

https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2014/dec/04/sub-ire-as-hacks-slash-word-length-getting-the-skinny-on-thinnernyms

There are now summaries from non pay-walled (and English) press: https://www.eurogamer.net/new-the-day-before-report-alleges-employees-fined-for-making-mistakes

Retention, or the lack thereof, when cold-stored.

In term of SD or standard NAND, not even Nintendo does that. Nintendo builds Macronix XtraROM in their Game Card, which is some proprietary Flash memory with claimed 20 year cold storage retention. And they introduced the 64 GB version only after a lengthy delay, in 2020. So it seems that the (lack of) cold storage performance of standard NAND Flash is viewed by some in the industry as not ready for prime time. Macronix discussed it many years back in a DigiTimes article: https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20120713PR201.html.

And Sony and Microsoft are both still building Blu-ray-based consoles.

There are plenty of EDID blockers and emulators already on the market. Unfortunately, no, “find[ing] […] the monitor’s model number” is not as trivial as you may think, if somebody really wants to evade. It is quite trivial nowadays to spoof the EDID in hardware, without the software able to do anything.

AMD’s support for AI is just fine

This is quite untrue, especially if you do actual research and not just run other people’s models. For example, ROCm is missing in many sparse autograd frameworks, e.g. pytorch_sparse, or having a viable alternative to Nvidias MinkowskiEngine. This is needed if you do any state-of-the-art convnets with attention-like sparsity.

Yes. But one should also note that only a limited range of Intel GPU support SR-IOV.

This is absolutely not true, certainly not at the time of Bungie and how Microsoft made Halo Xbox-exclusive: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/10/jobs-turned-down-bungie-at-first-how-microsoft-burned-apple/

As a user of an ecosystem that I care about, I totally do not. Why should the health of an ecosystem be dictated by my usage patterns or that of people that I know? Bit self-centered, also?

Also, today’s Apple fans and their “Apple-no-gaming” fiction are too quick to “forget” Bungie and how upset Steve Jobs was when Halo became Microsoft-exclusive. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/10/jobs-turned-down-bungie-at-first-how-microsoft-burned-apple/

See https://archive.ph/QnQtX