Garwoofoo

And the next mission features Eminem and has you taking out Slim Shady. I have no idea what IOI are doing with this game any more but it's quite brilliant all the same.

I think that's probably true, but you're talking about a level of technical knowledge that most prospective buyers of the Steam Machine won't have. I mean I'm fairly tech-savvy but I haven't installed Linux on a PC for twenty years or more and I remember it being a complete ballache (maybe it's improved). And I wouldn't know where to start in terms of making a nice living-room friendly low-power six-inch cube like Valve are offering. It's just a nice piece of kit, and people will be gaming on it within minutes of powering it up.

It's an interesting question though: how much of Valve's stuff is actually proprietary? Part of what makes the Steam Deck so good isn't so much the hardware but the experience of SteamOS itself and particularly all the work that goes on behind the scenes with different Proton versions etc that means that stuff works as well as it can and automatically picks the right versions of the compatibility layer etc so you don't have to faff around with all that stuff manually. And they work with publishers too to include Steam Deck presets in some instances. A PC gaming setup is never going to replicate the plug-and-play ease of a console (stuff still needs configuring, tinkering is sometimes still required) but honestly it's hard to see anyone getting much closer.

The Global Illumination part of ray tracing (RTGI) is the bit that really makes a difference visually, and you're right, it does in theory allow devs to spend much less time baking in lighting, but it also can look really, really good so I can see why people are pushing for it. In theory the current generation of consoles are a little underpowered for it which is why we've seen a lot of 30fps modes over the last few years, but games ARE starting to appear that use it well "by default" even on console and honestly you can't say that Indiana Jones or Star Wars Outlaws look bad in any way.

If it (a) looks better and (b) allows devs to focus their efforts on other parts of the game than methodically doing manual lighting passes, then it's a good thing. But it might be NEXT gen before it really becomes the accepted way of doing things.

Other M is exactly what it reminds me of.

If you can't run the chatty NPCs over with your motorbike the second they start yapping, then I'm out.

UE5 and Avowed in particular seem to get held up as examples of poor optimisation - is that just a PC thing? Avowed looked and ran great on Xbox, as have other UE5 games like Expedition 33. So it's not a universal thing.