Sure, but I guess this depends on what model you have of someone doing media consumption, are they going to fire up their PC to watch/listen to media, or their phone, or (smart) TV, or a smart speaker?
> At this point, moves like this are basically an advertisement for Linux and Mac.
I don't think it's the decisions themselves, but the (inevitable?) consequence in the coming months and years. The biggest example would be WannaCry attacking winxp in 2017, except it's not just individuals/companies who haven't got around to updating but additional hurdles added by MS.
I don't think it's dying, what I think has been happening and will continue to happen is that unless you're an enthusiast the PC presence is gradually being shrunk and tidied away in a corner and forgotten by many. For many having a 'home PC' would be a relic, similar to how they don't have anything like a dedicated stereo system for playing audio which might have taken up a significant amount of space (possibly more than a PC) years ago.
I think the biggest 'threat' to windows for general users has been mobile, besides that it seems like it's mostly running on momentum from the ecosystem of decades ago. The challenge is that most migrations for established users of any system take effort, and right now the effort of running activation/account requirement bypasses is low effort compared to changing to and learning a new OS.
The way of framing it which works for me is that there doesn't seem to be much reason to move to windows, if you were starting computing with a blank slate and could pick anything, why would someone want to pick windows? Most people need a mobile anyway which serves a lot of consumer needs. Gaming is a big one if you're not happy with mobile/console, but there's the wine/proton on linux route although there's a subset that won't work or has compatibility issues (from minor paper-cuts to major). And then there's those that need specific windows-only software with no alternative elsewhere.
I think the challenge is that uses for a PC, or even if you restrict it to "PC gaming" is such a wide net it's hard to make anything but the most vague/general readings from that audience. When the monthly steam hardware survey results come out there's always a crowd of enthusiasts putting their spin on what should or shouldn't be there, when that includes people playing simple low requirement games all the way through to reality simulators. For non-gaming uses, I think the most significant step was Vista, where they moved over to GPU acceleration for drawing windows (but with a software 'basic' fallback), video decode acceleration and to a lesser extent encode for any device with a camera, although I'd say mobile devices likely exercise encode capability more than desktops do generally.
Regarding ME4 (or is it 5?) the weasel word I keep coming back to is 'potential', it could be great, but whether they can accomplish that is something we can't say on the outside.
It relates to one of my bugbears about how a subsection of gamers have grown to dislike the big productions often for some valid reasons, there's a lot of potential pitfalls in making a game like ME, but a company like EA is the only place that big impressive experience can be done. Right from the earliest previews introducing ME1 they were going into the cinematic style of it and how good it looked, which was an evolution of what they'd done before with Jade Empire/KOTOR (and still seems to be there with parts of DA:Veilguard). While there's (again, potential) competition in the coming years from Exodus by Archetype, and Owlcat's The Expanse: Osiris reborn games, it's hard to see them providing quite what could be done at the largest games companies.
I'd say Bioware has been through a rough time for over a decade, between pulling in new directions to avoid being just a factory that spits out sequels and being pushed into whatever area the business/owner side wanted, but after clearing their plate by shipping and drawing a line under Dragon Age I think they need to prove themselves.
Apparently they're working as support for other studios while they do pre-production on the next Mass Effect, and that game needs to walk the line between staying true to the identity of the old games and bringing in new entrants. They're an established operating studio, but I'm not sure that counts for much when the mega publishers can shut down and start studios on a whim, they need to justify staying around whether that's because they make games that sell or because having a workforce in Canada is worthwhile.
I'd say the difficulty now is how online services are integrated as part of being able to function in many tasks we're now asking phones (or mobile computers) to do. If you're only doing local stuff then you can probably get by, but so much of the world prioritizes online and having secure payments if your phone doesn't respond correctly to those services then there's a risk of exclusion or a time/money cost to use them in a less convenient way.
At that cost I'd think more about seeking out a second hand phone that's survived and has good parts availability/repairability to keep it going. It would seem with both you're in the situation where google doesn't about you but at least the phone would be semi-smart enough to do some tasks and less drain on the wallet.
Windows containers are definitely a thing, but I think the implementation is at the "how to draw an owl: draw two circles..." stage and needs a lot of "...now draw the rest of the owl" in terms of being usable to the general consumer audience where their eyes are likely to gloss over if you say "go and install docker desktop". Having a simple method to maintain old software as usable would be beneficial, but it's hard to see what organization would want to do work to make it happen.
Legacy compatibility is one of windows biggest strong points, neatly containing 'old windows' and providing the best experience for it would solve the puzzle of why users should stick with windows if MS did want to prune the core OS without giving users reasons to move away.
I think the closest we've had is Cyberpunk 2077, although it's still a very different game. I can appreciate why they're hard to do, when you start piling on variations in how the player can approach situations plus short and long term story/character choices it quickly starts multiplying the complexity and quantity of work involved to make something satisfying for dozens of hours
In 2 years it matches the date of the prequel Human Revolution. On the technology side there's still a lot that remains sci-fi, but the themes are at least on the horizon.
Having played a good portion of Daikatana with a big fix-up mod, I'd say it's one of those games where there's a good game trying to get out and would have been a great if it released in a better state - but it didn't. However it's really hard to see how any commercial project could do an overhaul/remake to try and explore that potential and not deal with that baggage. Probably similar for Duke Nukem Forever, if that had been a well run project instead of a 14 year saga, it seems like the poison is being a bit drunk on earlier success and having too much money available without accountability for it.
As much as linux for PC gaming has made huge strides over the past few years, it seems really hard to avoid having a dual boot to keep windows available if you're serious about the whole breadth of available games. Or if you want to avoid pitfalls on those titles that run with a list of caveats, you can go exploring on protondb and some games need a collection of commmandline tweaks to get going well. It'd be nice to have a better experience for enabling those or opt-in to commonly used configs on particular games
It seems like a similar argument around the popularity of third party engines, whether studios should use Unreal, or whether they have the expertise/resources to change to and use another engine, or make their own bespoke engine, and if that will produce better results.
Something I wonder is if this new version is a linux build specifically targeting the deck hardware+OS setup, have Larian now committed themselves to following whatever Valve does in future for changes to that setup. In any case, they've got a fallback which is the windows version on proton, but it's inverting how Valve has trained many to behave which is to make just a windows version and delegate linux support to them.
There's also been persistent speculation about whether Valve would take on the burden of releasing SteamOS as a general distribution anyone can install on their own hardware (which I think is unlikely), which could in turn affect how Larian has to treat this port even if that is just communicating what it is and isn't.
I think one factor to this is that PC gamers are hostile to telemetry, and couldn't give a damn if the reasoning for it is advertising, real world feedback on game design which would feedback for future patches or the next game, or a mutual benefit of "hardware like (this) generally performs like (this) at low/med/high quality preset".
I think for Larrabee it was intel experimenting to find other markets for their Atom cores, and if there was market for it they needed to have the tenacity to cultivate it. Similar to how nvidia took huge amounts of time establishing GPGPU, CUDA, then machine learning, through to reaping the rewards over the past few years.
2010-2011 was also the time that AMD were starting to moan a bit about DX11 and the higher level APIs not being sufficient to get the most out of GPUs, which led to Mantle/Vulkan/DX12 a few years down the road. Intel did a bit regarding massively parallel software rendering, with the flexibility to run on anything x86 and implement features as you liked, or AMD's efforts for 'fusion' (APU+GPU, after recently acquiring ATi) or HSA which I seem to recall was about dispatching different types of computing to the best suited processor(s) in the system for it. However I got the impression a lot of development effort is more interested in progressing on what they already have instead of starting in a new direction, and game studios want to ship finished and stable/predictable product, which is where support from intel would have helped.
The other aspect with setting up third party firmware as a general "don't like the stock OS? then do this" option for many is besides the big headline limitations like safetynet/attestation, it also either involves a benevolent third party setting up and maintaining builds for your device (hope you bought a popular model) and any changes match what you want, or individuals doing so themselves
There's historical examples too, years ago people were pissed when Apple and U2 force downloaded their newly released album onto everyone's iPhone/Pod, and there's also the reverse where some highly anticipated game release will have servers overwhelmed by demand. It's hard to see any organic desire for AI in the general public, a new model releasing doesn't cause a wave of interest.
I think the big change over the past 17 years has been the app stores (and on the less 'personal' computer side businesses will be on support contracts), the from the manufacturers point of view hardware and software is a loss leader to try and funnel users to where they do as much computer related commerce through their middle-man. In some ways it's an evolution of bundling software where that would be another source of income.
I probably only have a basic understanding of MSAA, but isn't its advantage reduced owing to detail levels even in situations where it could be used. There's so many geometry edges in models and environments (before you consider aspects like tessellation) to AA and intricate shading on plane surfaces so to get a good result you're effectively supersampling much of the image.
Then you get the two wheeled side of the fence. You can do a one day compulsory basic training course and convince a trainer you know what you're doing, then drive on the road with everyone on a 125cc motorcycle (or 50cc at 16 years old), and then repeat the CBT every two years to keep on the road. It's only if you go for the full license that you need to study for theory as a prerequisite, so long as you keep out of trouble.
UE1 was in the timeframe that 3D acceleration was only starting to get adopted, and IIRC from some interview Epic continued with a software option for UT2003/2004 (licensed pixomatic?) because they found out a lot of players were still playing their games on systems where full GPUs weren't always available, such as laptops.
I know this is going back to Intel's Larrabee where they tried it, but I'd be real interested to see what the limits of a software renderer is now considering the comparative strength of modern processors and amount of multiprocessing. While I know there's DXVK or projects like dgVoodoo2 which can be an option with sometimes better backwards compatibility, just software would seem like a stable reference target than the gradually shifting landscape of GPUs/drivers/APIs
There's been some efforts to use GPU ray tracing to bring some of it back, IIRC Call of Duty from a few years ago had it, but as you say it hasn't caught on and displaced 'good enough' audio.
I also had a Vortex2 and it's not about requiring a high-end surround system, as I suspect even today there's still a significant amount of players with decent but not high-end audio. I was playing Quake3 with A3D before they patched it out with either basic stereo speakers or headphones and the placement was superb.
Then you've got to consider what are you optimizing for. Is the power bill going to be offset by the cost of a Pi plus any extras you need, or a cheap second hand PC someone wants to clear out, or free if you can put an old serviceable PC you have already back into use. Is it heat? Noise? Space that it needs to hide away in? Airflow for the location?
Right now I wonder if a browser or chrome embedded framework (and then when applications that use it update past the cut-off version) is the 'killer app' that motivates upgrades. The CEF cut-off for win7/8/8.1 was when their extended support periods ended, and presumably they upgraded the underlying SDK they to rely on features not present pre-win10, and presumably oct 2028 (+3 years) is when the same will happen again
I wonder if it'll promote having multiple devices, fragmenting into multiple ecosystems. One for the approved walled garden, another for uses that can exist without relying on those services (anything that doesn't need payments?).
Another approach I wonder about is single task specific hardware, like a GPS unit or media player, what tasks have developed over the past ~18 years within the mobile ecosystem and are mature and not rapidly evolving enough that they can be unbundled to their own devices, and desirable enough to stand alone that there's a market for it.
Trying to define "Personal Computer" is another rabbit-hole, it's such a broad concept. I'd argue someone could be right if they called an iPhone a PC as for many that is their computing device, at the same time as someone else's PC being a monstrous workstation that you'd need to load onto a trolley to move.
Even at the start they were unusual as they were funded by Microsoft millionaires, and presumably had little pressure to release before "when it's done", and HL1 being a huge hit started the ball rolling allowing them to acquire the team fortress and counter-strike mod teams, picking up even more momentum.