Steam cloud?

[AskWazzup]

Ok, so i installed windows (with the key that came with my motherboard) on my laptop today, to compare game performance against linux, on intel drivers. The thing is, i thought that the whole cloud synchronization thing is to save your progress in the cloud.... Well, it seems i lost all my progress in pillars of eternity!!!! and have no saved files, but the cloud synchronization thingy shows that there are 21 mb of data stored in the cloud. So my question is, what the fuck are they storing there if not saved files???

 

[AskWazzup]

Ok, so it seems crossplatforming is not a good idea with steam. I still have the saved files, but they are only compatible on the platform one plays on. So my pillars of eternity save files seem to work fine on different linux boxes.

Also, i tried streaming gameplay from my brothers linux desktop to my windows laptop, however on the windows side i can only hear audio without any view, so this also does not seems to work correctly.

As for performance, what's interesting is that pillars of eternity seemed to get higher fps on linux, wasteland 2 and xcom are equally unplayable and team fortress 2 is a bit smoother on windows. All in all, not much difference between linux and windows on my intel iris 6100 igpu.

 

[SuAside]

A few tweaks in your .ini file will greatly improve your performance in xcom2 (the unreal engine 3.5 tweak guides apply). but an igpu will always suck for graphically heavy games.

As for crossplatform saves, that's not Steam's fault.

 

[AskWazzup]

A few tweaks in your .ini file will greatly improve your performance in xcom2 (the unreal engine 3.5 tweak guides apply).

I have xcom enemy unknown, not the second one. But i had no idea the first one was so demanding, since i'm able to play team fortress 2 on highish settings in 1080p, however xcom (everything on low) runs at 13-18 fps on both Windows and linux. I'm not sure if it's just the sucky intel drivers, or if the game is poorly optimized, since on that level of graphics, the igpu should be enough for at least 24 fps~.

but an igpu will always suck for graphically heavy games).

Not necessarily true for the near future, since intel is soon coming out with the monster igpu:

Iris Pro Graphics 580, GT4e – 72 execution units with 64 or 128 MB of eDRAM, 1152 GFLOPS at 1 GHz

And amd's upcoming zen apu's might have HBM memory. Discrete cards will still rule the upper echalons, but the ipgu's are slowly creeping to the mid tier level.

As for crossplatform saves, that's not Steam's fault.

I thought since it supports the cloud option (and not all games do), that steam would be able to convert the saves to the right format, or actually i didn't think linux and Windows versions would use different save formats to begin with. Having thought about it more, i guess it would be kind of a hassle supporting it with all the different games.

 

[SuAside]

I have xcom enemy unknown, not the second one. But i had no idea the first one was so demanding, since i'm able to play team fortress 2 on highish settings in 1080p, however xcom (everything on low) runs at 13-18 fps on both Windows and linux. I'm not sure if it's just the sucky intel drivers, or if the game is poorly optimized, since on that level of graphics, the igpu should be enough for at least 24 fps~.

XCOM:EU is also Unreal Engine 3(.5), so the tweaks apply. Try them out, you might get lucky.

Not necessarily true for the near future, since intel is soon coming out with the monster igpu:

Iris Pro Graphics 580, GT4e – 72 execution units with 64 or 128 MB of eDRAM, 1152 GFLOPS at 1 GHz

That would be impressive a decade ago. Today it means little.

And amd's upcoming zen apu's might have HBM memory. Discrete cards will still rule the upper echalons, but the ipgu's are slowly creeping to the mid tier level.

While the igpus make progress, the games become more & more demanding as well.
Still, better than no progress.

I thought since it supports the cloud option (and not all games do), that steam would be able to convert the saves to the right format, or actually i didn't think linux and Windows versions would use different save formats to begin with. Having thought about it more, i guess it would be kind of a hassle supporting it with all the different games.

It makes no sense to expect Steam to magically bother with converting your saves, since they way they need to be converted is entirely up to the game itself. It would however be rather easy for the game developer to make the conversion (or simply use an OS agnostic file type), but nearly no one bothers.

 

[AskWazzup]

XCOM:EU is also Unreal Engine 3(.5), so the tweaks apply. Try them out, you might get lucky.

Thanks for the tip, but i'm going back to linux soon, as i'm planning on building a pc (my computer minimalism plans failed).

That would be impressive a decade ago. Today it means little.

Ehm, well, if you have a pair of nvidia titans running i understand your skepticism, but otherwise that igpu should get to around at least nvidia GTX 950m performance. Edram is basically l4 cache, hence the "e" for embedded. And igpu is still using your system ram (if you have some fast dual slot ddr4 ram + edram, that's a really nice combination).

While the igpus make progress, the games become more & more demanding as well.
Still, better than no progress.

About 30 times faster in the last 6 years~ and you can actually "play" modern games on some of them



That's on a pretty old (architecture wise) 140 dollar processor, no dgpu.

It makes no sense to expect Steam to magically bother with converting your saves, since they way they need to be converted is entirely up to the game itself. It would however be rather easy for the game developer to make the conversion (or simply use an OS agnostic file type), but nearly no one bothers.

That's what i would expect of those games that got the green light for cloud synchronization, or at least some kind of a heads up from steam that explains the save file
incompatibility when migrating from linux to windows, or vice versa, because i thought that i lost my saves there for a moment. Thankfully the saves work on linux and i will be able to finish the game once i go back to linux.

 

[SuAside]

I'm an old hardware enthusiast, so don't expect me to rave about igpus.

I don't like igpus because of many reasons. One of them being the fact they're forcing you to buy them even if you don't want to use them. The only way to get around it, is buy Xeon server processors.
They increase your thermal dissipation, even if you don't use them and bloat the cpu die.
With the trend for increasing screen size & increasing resolution, it's still lagging far behind.

But yeah, it's great that slowly igpus are no longer trash. It's especially good news for users with laptops. But it's just not something for the enthusiast.

 

[AskWazzup]

I don't like igpus because of many reasons. One of them being the fact they're forcing you to buy them even if you don't want to use them. The only way to get around it, is buy Xeon server processors.

Well, if you have the cash you can also get the intel haswell-e (or upcoming broadwell-e) monsters, or if one is on a budget - the whole amd FX series + the new athlon X4 845 (or upcoming 8 core zen). None of those have/or will have an igpu. So it's not so dire a situation, but it will probably become one if amd can't climb out of the gutter and intel get's a free reign on prices and decisions.

 

[SuAside]

Those Intels are all extremely expensive (and not worth it for gaming at this point).

And AMD has long since lost it's hold on Intel.

 

[AskWazzup]

Those Intels are all extremely expensive (and not worth it for gaming at this point).

Seems like your wish for a performance based, sanely priced cpu without an igpu will have to wait until zen:

 

[AskWazzup]

Ok, so it just now dawned on me that Steam purchases have 21% VAT in my country, but, from what i can tell, the VAT is not included in the listed price until you do the purchase. So basically all the prices should be viewed as being 21% more expensive than listed.

Now then, does someone know if GOG includes the regional VAT in the listed price, or is it the same as with Steam (i have searched for an answer, but i'm not sure i trust the ones i found)?