I think their use of 3rd party libraries could prevent them from releasing it as open source without rewriting a bit. This even happened to the original DOOM 1 where they used a sound library so didn't release the original DOS source code. Rather they released the Linux port which used a different sound engine that had different features/bugs.
Looking at the start-up of Doom Dark Ages (with new expansion today), they list Havok, Oodle, Bink, and SpeedTree. According to Havoc's website, that already starts at 50k$ alone. Oodle/Bink don't list prices.
You might not have noticed, but that's also where anti-cheats started. All 3rd party anti-cheats started on community servers because well you aren't getting them into official servers easily. And then game developers saw that and integrated it for the users. Quake 3 even had Punkbuster added at some point for example.
Plenty of modern community servers still do the same. Face-it servers for Counter-Strike 2 will have additional anticheat, not less. Modded Grand Theft Auto V servers, FiveM, built their own anticheat they call adhesive before RockStar ever added anticheat to the full game, and this prevents it from running on Linux to this day.
Ten year old desktop users aren't exactly known for buying new games, especially at full price.
The average spending gaming hardware are the consoles. No one is going to start building a game targeting a Playstation 4 today, they'll target the 5 year old PS5.
That would have to include your own position on your own client. Adding a delay of the RTT of the worst latency in the server to your inputs
Some games still do this. RTS games notably, but hide it with mouse and sound effects. If anyone remembers the Starcraft 1 option of "extra high latency", it would work by increasing the delay.
Sure, but it's also running on a GPU that's almost 10 years old and wasn't even high end at release. So I think it's fine performance for the hardware.
Not disagreeing with you about lighting, but there is a differnce in older games that make RT optional. They use RT as a "ultra high quality" shadows/reflection graphical option. So there's no point of having a high performant, low quality RT option.
This isn't the case with games that require RT. Doom Dark Ages can even run the RT entirely in software, implemented in AMD's Linux drivers: https://youtu.be/R5G2bYiA1hk
So I think it's fine to ignore benchmarks that mention RT, meaning it's basically testing the game at "ultra quality" settings.
That CPU comes with a cooler so you don't need that.
At 2TB SSD, you should compare to the $1350 steam machine instead.
The GPU isn't exactly equivalent. Gamers Nexus puts it closer to RX6600 performance. But that ignores the RDNA3 improvements so I don't really have a good comparison for that.
They did announce SteamOS for general computers, so I don't expect game support to be too different.
Last I checked the idle power consumption of the BC-250 was on the higher side to make me not want to use it as a media center, though that could be my PSU. No hardware decode/encode (yet) either.
And lack of DRM makes a PC in general a mediocre experience for official streaming services if you want more than 720p streaming. If you care about that.
Not a power issue but a feature issue. No ray tracing stops Indiana Jones and Doom Dark Ages (though you can do it in software on Linux): https://youtu.be/aU2qwlCLWm8 . Doom Dark Ages also added a check for Vulkan Variable Rate Shading, requiring a workaround to spoof it. Mesh shader requirement prevents Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth from running.
Unless you're on the absolute newest stuff with DisplayPort 2.1, HDMI 2.1 has more bandwidth than DP1.4. That'll be Nvidias 2000 through 4000 series. No DisplayPort 2.1 until the RTX 5000s.
And then monitors released during this time generally do the same too.
Also if you want to use it through a capture card, HDMI ones are way more common and cheaper
It's a bit more complicated than that (on Windows) because Steam doesn't make a virtual gamepad to the OS. The way Steam handles the input is by hooking into the games individually. So to use Steam for other games, you need to add them to Steam as non-steam games.
Even open source controller remapping tools (not just Steam Controller) and similar used ViGEmBus which is no longer maintained. You can have it do mouse/keyboard though, those don't require custom drivers.
Seeing as the original Steam Controllers kernel drivers were community reverse engineered rather than Valve contributed, I don't know if I believe in them to make one for the new one either: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Controller-RE-Kernel
Community servers don't want server-side anti-cheat either. Hell they invented client-side anti-cheats back in the day. Even current day community servers like Face-IT have additional anti-cheats, not less. Same with modded GTAV FiveM (even before the main game added anti-cheats)
Looking at the start-up of Doom Dark Ages (with new expansion today), they list Havok, Oodle, Bink, and SpeedTree. According to Havoc's website, that already starts at 50k$ alone. Oodle/Bink don't list prices.