Comment by fooker

For the particular use case I mentioned in my earlier post (Visual Pinball), 4k@120 is actually a pretty big deal. We often play on screens 42" and up so the 4k detail is put to good use and makes things like the instruction cards in the corners legible. But the bigger difference is the smoothness in gameplay that 120Hz gets you. The ball travels really fast so 120 Hz helps gameplay a lot while reducing lag at the same time. And because a large chunk of the playfield is static at any one time, you don't need something like a 5090 to hit 120 Hz at that resolution like you might with a triple-A shooter.

It's a blocker if you want to use a TV, there are almost 0 TVs with DP. This HDMI licensing crap is also the reason a Steam Deck can't output HDMI > 4K@60 unless you install Windows on it.

Up until a year or two ago, the majority of monitors (and graphic cards) used DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.1. With HDMI 2.1 (42 Gbps) having more bandwidth than the DisplayPort (26 Gbps).

This is my case with my relatively new/high-end RTX 4080 and OLED monitor. So until I upgrade both, I use HDMI to be able to drive a 1440p 240hz 10-bit HDR signal @ 30 Gbps.

The Chinese tech manufacturers are so sick of the HDMI licencing mafia that they've developed their own replacement for it:

https://www.techpowerup.com/335152/china-develops-hdmi-alter...

I want to play games on the same fancy lg tv I use with my consoles. I just checked and it does not appear to have displayport.

TVs don't support displayport, so it makes Linux PCs like the Steam Machine inferior console replacements if you want high refresh rates. A lot of TVs now support 4K/120hz with VRR, the PS5 and Xbox Series X also support those modes.

(Some games support 120, but it's also used to present a 40hz image in a 120hz container to improve input latency for games that can't hit 60 at high graphics quality.)

Yeah, that's hilariously impractical if you like these games.

> pub servers

Most of these popular competitive games probably don't even have community servers of any kind. Maybe some games like RTSes have custom matches, but they're not used much for the standard game mode, at least not for public lobbies.

Sorry but you're just old IMO :) PUBG or Arc Raiders have over 100 players in a game. Even Valorant or League have 10 players in a match. It's definitely not easy to find 9 friends to play the same game at the same time as you. And playing any of these games with a cheater can completely wreck the match. If the cheaters go unchecked, over time they start to dominate games where like 30% might be cheaters who can see through walls and insta headshot you and the entire multiplayer mode of the game is ruined. Even worse some cheaters are sneaky, they might have a wallhack or a map showing all players but use it cautiously and it can be quite hard to prove they're cheating but they build up a huge advantage nonetheless. Most of us are happy to have effective anti-cheat, and it's not forced upon us. I understand the tradeoff to having mostly cheater-free games is having to trust the game maker more and am fine with that. Riot for example is quite transparent about what their anti-cheat does, how it works and I don't consider it "malware" anymore than I consider a driver for my graphics card to be "malware" even if they do operate in kernel mode.

Usually the one with kernel anti-cheat is competitive one(GTA, BF, LOL).

You clearly don’t play competitive shooters and thus aren’t qualified to opine on the matter.

Competition vs other human beings is the entire point of that genre, and the intensity when you’re in the top .1% of the playerbase in Overwatch/Valorant/CSGO is really unmatched.

I think the problem comes when someone makes a cool, fun, silly little game that is otherwise great when played with randoms, and cheating just sorta spoils it.

Case in point from a few years back - Fall Guys. Silly fun, sloppy controls, a laugh. And then you get people literally flying around because they've installed a hack, so other players can't progress as they can't make the top X players in a round.

So to throw it back - it is just a game, it's so sad that a minority think winning is more important than just enjoying things, or think their own enjoyment is more important than everyone else's.

As an old-timer myself, we thought it was despicable when people replaced downloaded skins in QuakeWorld with all-fullbright versions in their local client, so they could get an advantage spotting other players... I suppose that does show us that multiplayer cheating is almost as old as internet gaming.

At one point I recall that Valve implemented a rating system so that cheaters who got reported would all end up playing in the same pool with each other.

This console idea would also be better for truly competitive games, because players should have a level playing field in terms of framerates.

Not really. Measured boot and remote attestation are a thing. Couple with reproducible builds to address security and privacy concerns.

Hardware support would inevitably be somewhat limited but that's still better than the situation with either consoles or kernel anticheat.

Personally I'd be interested to see what would happen if Sony/MS did what they could to make keyboard/mouse experience as good as possible on their consoles (I'm writing from a position of ignorance on the state of mouse/keys with current consoles) and encouraged developers to offer a choice in inputs, so that the locked-down machines can become the place for highest confidence in no/low cheaters. If other people want to pay through the nose to go beyond what consoles offer on the detail/resolution/framerate trifecta then I'm sure they could do so, but I really don't see how you lock down an open platform. That challenge has been going for decades.

This really depends on the friends you have. I've never encountered this limitation because no one in my friend group plays competitive ranked games. Basically anything with private sessions doesn't require anticheat, so Valheim, RV There Yet, Deep Rock Galactic, etc. all work fine.

My friends are understanding that I don't play games with rootkit anti cheat (whether on Linux or Windows). There are enough games that we can play other games together still, and when they want to play the games with such anti-cheat (e.g. Helldivers 2) they simply play without me. No big deal.

Well yeah but then eBPF would not work and then the anti cheat could just show that it's not working and lock you out.

This isn't complicated.

Even the Crowdstrike falcon agent has switched to bpf because it lowers the risk that a kernel driver will brick downstream like what happened with windows that one time. I recently configured a corporate single sign on to simply not work if the bpf component was disabled.

The interesting solution here is secure boot, only allow users to play from a set of trusted kernels.

Uh, you'd have to compile a Kernel that doesn't allow it while claiming it does ... And behaves as if it does - otherwise you'd just fail the check, no?

I feel like this is way overstated, it's not that easy to do, and could conceptually be done on windows too via hardware simulation/virtual machines. Both would require significant investments in development to pull of

Great point. As I mentioned there are other attack vectors and you can mitigate them. For mitigating what you are mentioning for instance you don't just run one eBPF program, but you run a cluster of them that watch each other:

(The following was refined by an LLM because I didn't remember the details of when I was pondering this a while back)

All your anti cheats are eBPF programs hooked to the bpf() syscall itself.

Whenever any process tries to call BPF_PROG_DETACH or BPF_LINK_DETACH, your monitors check if the target is one of the anti cheats in your cluster of anti-cheats.

If an unauthorized process (even Root) tries to detach any of your anti-cheat processes, the eBPF program uses bpf_override_return to send an EPERM (Permission Denied) error back to the cheat.

(End LLM part)

Of course, you can always circumvent this by modifying and compiling the kernel so that those syscalls when targeting a specific PID/process name/UID aren't triggered. But this raises the difficulty of cheating a lot as you can't simply download a script, but you need to install and boot a custom kernel.

So this would solve the random user cheating on an online match. Pro users that have enough motivation can and will cheat anyway, but that is true also on windows. Finally at top gaming events there is so much scrutiny as you need to play on stage on vetted PCs that this is a non-issue

but how can you prevent the user from modifying the kernel?

DX12 is overwhelmingly the default for AAA games at this point. The three titles you listed all officially require DX12, what DX11 support they have is vestigial, undocumented and unsupported. Many other AAAs have already stripped their legacy DX11 support out entirely.

Id Software do prefer Vulkan but they are an outlier.

The best description I've been able to give of the dichotomy of CS is this: there is no way for a person to become good enough to get their signature into the game, without using kernel-level ACs.