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I’ve looked, what you say is mostly accurate but getting a bit dated - the NVME performance gap with SATA SSDs keeps widening especially with DirectStorage games (eg Spider Man 2 - triple the load speed vs SATA).
This gap will continue to widen as devs focus performance improvements on the tech available to them, and as the price difference between SATA SSDs and NVME is diminishing rapidly (only a 5% difference in common mid tier models now) there is very little reason to recommend SATA over NVMe for cost reasons - which was kinda the focus of this thread. I’d not advise anyone today to buy a SATA SSD over NVMe for gaming unless the cost saving was large.
First article I could find from a website I recognised (there are so many SEO-stuffing AI-generated trash sites today to wade through its truly frustrating) - https://www.techspot.com/article/3023-ssd-gaming-comparison-load-times/
The performance improvements outside of load times, eg during gaming are significant but harder to benchmark, because pop-in of assets during gameplay is not something we can currently easily measure, it’s something you need to compare side by side videos of and there are many that show significant stuttering and pop-in for DirectStorage games like Ratchet and Clank. Another analysis with some videos double, triple or longer wait times in-games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl8wXT8F3W4
What? A SATA drive (presuming you mean a sata SSD, not mechanical) will do absolutely nowhere near the load times of NVME. SATA3 peak bandwidth is 600MB/s, closest drives gets in real world read speeds is around 550MB/s.
NVME drives do at least ten times that for a midrange one. Up to thirty times for the latest gen top of the line.
Edit - commenters have fairly pointed out that the difference in actual load times is not as huge as I thought, it might be triple as fast but it’s not a huge deal as it’s still sub-second. However, it is noticeable and increasing as games develop more for the new tech. Most PC builders do not recommend a SATA SSD over a NVME because the price difference is now minimal and they will be more future-proof as more DirectStorage and similar tech is utilized by modern games.
Bro have you seen the prices on large SSDs?
Nobody is buying a 256gb drive for games anymore. That’s like 1 to 1.5 games nowadays. Instead 2-4TB drive is the most common purchase for a ‘games drive’. AI has roughly doubled the cost in two years for such drives - even higher for premium quality drives.
I’m not gonna poor-shame people who still play on spinning disk HDDs. AI hype continues to make gaming more expensive by the day.
People cheap out on the dumbest shit.
- 4080ti
- 9800X3D
- ‘Gamer’ Mobo with all the swag*
- 128gb low latency ram kit
And then ‘the stuff that doesn’t matter so you can save some money’:
- bronze-rated PSU from ‘Seasorny’ or some other namealike knockoff
- $5 thermal paste
- $10 fans
“Bro my $3500 PC is crashing!”
I played a few DoTA games with friends while this was occurring and twice during gameplay approximately 10 seconds of play experienced some server-side lag for everyone in the game - there were moments of confusion that rapidly passed. Steam ops team did well.
Truly a tremendous impact and a fantastic use of the attackers time and resources.
The difference is that passworded zip files are used to distribute malware regularly. For a few reasons such as they’re very simple to use (malware creators are often lazy) and they can be generally be unpacked with preinstalled libraries or programs on the OS. A random encrypted file will require a DLL or runtime that can unpack the blob, and antivirus engines find that kind of stuff packaged together very sus.
Thanks for the effort digging. This does not actually point out any game doing it in particular though, and it’s actually a perfect example of a working antivirus picking up a suspect file (a password protected archive) in a game’s install tree.
This is from Aug 2024 and could even be from one of the games that distributed malware. Its absolutely something that Steam should be blocking/flagging for manual review, and a huge red flag that any developer would use this as a tool for distributing their game content.
Good it is not when the recommendation from security experts and reporters is to avoid any Steam games with low numbers of installs / reviews and betas from small companies. That’s where we’re at now.
Nobody reviews game code, as game code is not supplied, only binaries with their relevant resources. There are many security providers that would be able to provide better service that whatever Valve is doing - but who knows, because they keep tight-lipped about it every time there’s an issue, and just patiently await their defenders to hand-wave any concerns.
It literally contained a known version StealC malware in its payload, and had basic python scripting with the Telegram bot code and access tokens left visible to researchers (very bad OSINT). This was not sophisticated scripting, nor novel malware, just some script kid that sourced the whole setup on Telegram. The malware would easily have been captured by a competent security company’s automated scanner.
Who said you need to pay more for games? Steam already takes thirty percent of sales (for the vast majority of sales), they are a $10b+ game distribution company… They’re worth more than several leading security/antivirus companies combined.
I just don’t understand the mindset people get around Steam. They are a business that makes a fortune distributing games, run by a billionaire - they are not a little indie company struggling under the weight of their success.
Well since Steam provide absolutely zero details about their scanning process (or even if it exists), seems like conversely people are making a lot of really complementary assumptions about Steam, no?
This is certainly not the first malware distributed by Steam - this is in fact the fourth publicly-known instance just this year.
Seems like they need to step up their game if you ask me.
It had a password protected zip file in an update that hid the payload. That is pretty damn basic and would not have gotten past any retail antivirus program’s heuristic detection.
Chances are that Valve is treated as a ‘trusted publisher’ by Microsoft Defender and thus it bypassed the scan. The malware even payload explicitly checks that no retail antivirus was installed, and that Microsoft Defender was active, prior to attempting to extract and run its payload.
(See comments above from other users for explicit details regarding the malware)
Its also trivial for apps detecting any trivial attempts at scanning if they’re running in a VM to be detected, and masked.
Those are also valid concerns, but in an environment where admin rights are granted to games installers the vendor of the games (Steam) needs to adopt a highly curated and protective stance. To this date they provide zero details of their protection - their entire FAQ on malware on their store boils down to ‘if you find malware, please flag it on the store page for us to investigate’.
If anyone is gonna claim the steam store is highly curated… I’d point out to them that a very large amount of their store is shovelware asset flips with very few purchases and installs. There are over 150,000 games on Steam, and tens of thousands of them would fall into that category.
It really isn’t. Scanning code for vulnerabilities should be at a very high standard for the dominant and most wealthy game platform on Earth.
Very standard practice for malicious software scanning is to install the program in a virtual environment and then monitor its processes to see if it’s performing malicious activities: eg keylogging while a background process (eg alt-tabbed), or if it interacts with browser data (trying to get saved auth cookies or saved account info), running searches for strings that are common for crypto wallets, etc.
Its entirely possible that Steam has dropped the ball in a big way here.
I can only imagine the animosity in the comments if it was from a game on the Epic store or Ubisoft UPlay…
Is everything critical of Saudi Arabia Hasbara propaganda?
I hate Saudi Arabia’s leadership and brutal oppression of their people. Obviously, Kashoggi. Obviously, funding terrorism worldwide. Personally, a friend of mine witnessed a state beheading simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time while he was working in SA (he was an Indian immigrant worker) - scarred him for life.
Hasbara are in the walls so I presume they saw me type that out and I’ll just patiently await my cheque.
Graphene is a custom OS, not a root process. Further, Graphene OS is not rooted by default. The GrapheneOS maintainer has written at length explaining why they don’t include root access by default (tldr: makes the phone less secure).
Configuring root mode aka ‘rooting android’ is different to installing a custom OS.
No more over-the-air updates, no more locked bootloader. Those are both significant security downgrades that usually come with rooting Android.
Edit: downvoters apparently dont know that the main rooting methods all modify the boot partition, which prevents OTA updates from succeeding. Updates are very important to protect your phone with security patches against zero days and other vulnerabilities. Likewise modifying the bootloader requires unlocking it - which means no more secure boot and anyone who takes your phone can happily boot whatever they like on it. This is also bad.
The trade imbalance? With the US?
Take back your war on drugs, the war on terror, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, your insane tech broligarchy, rhe 2008 global financial crisis, your Evangelical hate brigades (actually you know what take back Mormons and Scientologists and 7th day adventists while youre at it), the GLOBAL trade disasters & inflation caused by Trump and his pissy tarrif wars, the global derailing of climate agreements again by Trump and his idiot Republican allies.
I’ll stop now because I could literally type all day the shit coming out of the US that has been causing immense damage to the rest of us.
What’s Australia’s shit?
Murdoch? He gave up Aussie citizenship and moved to the US in 1985, he’s spent the majority of his working career as an American living in America - we can at best take half ownership of him.
This handful of censorship wowsers taking down some rapey video games?
Mel Gibson?
Enlighten me because I think the numbers of your “trade imbalance” don’t even come close to adding up.
If they wanted any games banned all they had to do was talk to the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) in Australia, where they’re based. Any of the games listed would have likely been added to the ‘Refused Classification’ list and thereby banned from sale and import in Australia. If they wanted them pulled from Steam or Itch entirely they could have talked to those platforms.
But they didn’t want to raise objections through appropriate preexisting channels, they wanted to push their Christian-based ideology on the whole world by going Karen on the social media of all the payment processors.
Because letting extremely biased ideological groups dictate worldwide policy is always a bad thing that comes with negative consequences.
I’m not personally familiar with any of the games in this ban wave, but Steam’s stance prior is that these games are free expression of art, made by adults and it’s not Steam’s job to police art. If a group does want to impose limitations on art on a worldwide storefront - that should be a national limitation performed by an appropriate body - Australia already has a stringent games rating system, and if these games do not meet any approved standards they would be hit with ‘Refused Classification’ and thereby restricted to be sold (banned from sale or import) to Australia and Steam would region block them for sale to Aus. As is the case for many games already.
However, this group deemed following the appropriate channels too much work, so instead went for a Karen smear campaign of the payment processors on social media - stating that they supported the sale of rape and incest games (simply by working with Steam), thereby pressuring the payment processors to put lobby Steam to remove the games entirely as the easiest path for Steam to avoid financial processing impacts.
That’s even less consumer friendly. If you purchase a game and it turns out to be shovelware that barely works and has a bunch of gamed reviews on the store page? Oh too bad sap, you got conned this is non-refundable.
Consumers had to fight for games that do refundable, I don’t think we should be quick to consider loopholes.
Halo 3 was peak.
I know some don’t like it because of some choices they creative team made that weren’t exact to the lore of the games, but I’ve been enjoying the Halo TV series. Had some moments that reminded me of the campaign and game series highlights. I’d say it’s worth a watch if you’re a fan - don’t be put off by the initial backlash.
Yeah i’ll remember the good times fondly for sure. In its peak it was a great time and I don’t regret the time spent one bit.
The puck added a fun dimension, being able to fairly effortlessly run it up walls or onto the roof (compared to the ball), and the wonderful semi-glitchy physics of pinch hits on the flat surface of a puck. Nothing like pinch-hitting it against another player’s vehicle and watching the puck rocket unstoppably across into the goal. “Calculated”.
“NICE SHOT!”
“NICE SHOT!”
“GREAT PASS!”
In their defense I don’t think they could have come up with any standard chat lines that wouldn’t be used sarcastically by toxic players.
If I was a dev if you spammed the lines 3 times in a row I’d change the third one to something to diffuse the hate, from a random selection of lines that are hard to take sarcastically. "I love you! ", “Wooo!”, etc
Yeah agreed. Best time to get into most competition games is when they’re in their ‘growing playerbase’ phase with lots of new players, still room for casual players. Then they slowly get pushed out.
There’s room for modes that encourage casual fun though to keep that part of the playerbase active, which is what made Psyonix’s decisions so frustrating.
TLDR: dunno if anyone wants to replicate it today, because the experience of early years Rocket League is completely gone now. So ‘they’ dont even have a reference point to replicate.
Psyonix fumbled RL so hard its not funny. I have 1500 hours on Steam since launch. In my experience, like with a lot of competitive online games, RL became more and more sweaty and toxic as time progressed - it’s already not the largest pool of players, and even when queuing casual matches you’re matchmade with similarly-skilled players - so once you’ve been playing for say 50 hours you find yourself in quite a few toxic matches with higher-skill players. But, there was thankfully a remedy - anyone wanting to chill simply used the fun modes (snow day, rumble, and hoops) and told anyone who was toxic in game to get bent. I had a crew of several dozen regulars that I’d befriended and we enjoyed hitting those modes because they were taken much less seriously than the standard 2v2 or 3v3 matches. Many many laughs had over the years I played. Then Psyonix retired those modes from the casual queue/playlist and made them competitive-only around 2019 - no reason cited. This pretty much quadrupled the queue times for those modes, and ensured the matches were higher stakes (rank points) and more toxic. Why?
This was not the first or last time Psyonix made decisions that the community at large hated. Every controversial change they made was met with a lot of pleading on the forums (and Reddit) with devs to reverse course, which they would hand wave with ‘we’ll take this feedback on board’ kind of responses, then as time ticked on we saw lootbox after lootbox/decal/season-pass/timed-exclusive-grind-drops/paid-cars hit the game… And dev focus started to become clear. Before you say ‘they had to pay for the game’, this was all before the game went F2P. It became obvious that dev priority was ways to make the game even more of a dopamine-to-wallet loop, and casual fun is not a priority, they wanted an e-sports scene. I guess the casual players fit none of those goals.
At that point my RL friends persisted gettinf together regularly for private matches (so we could still load the fun modes), but the ability to just load into the game and queue up some relaxed no-stakes silly car soccer (or hockey, or basketball) was long gone for experienced regulars - i can’t imagine it was easy for new players to get into the game at that point. Gg. Haven’t even had it installed for a few years now, and I read now they removed the ‘fun modes’ entirely from the ranked queue options now, so they just come back for seasonal events? Why??
Psyonix had a money printer and they broke it by trying to make the money print faster. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
Yeah, very reasonable. I updated my original comment to highlight that I was overstating the problem. Thanks for your comments.