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[Boombox On]

(By "Portability," I mean the ability of software to be transferred from any one system to another easily)

To me, Webassembly is one of the more intriguing recent software technologies. It's super early, but it's a low-level language designed for high end webapps to compile to. This means that high end C++ programs can run inside of a browser, but what makes it different than similar efforts from before is that Webassembly is a agreed upon, built-in web browser standard that all major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari) will support. Nothing is perfect though, and there is a performance hit when comparing a "webassembly app" to a native program running directly on the OS.

And it had me thinking about how gamers, specifically PC gamers, would look at something like this. So let's paint a hypothetical situation; Let's say there was a parallel universe where your entire PC gaming library as it stands right now runs in a web browser, and all games by default run across Windows, Mac, Linux, (if the hardware can manage it) iOS, Android, and any future Operating System that may not exist yet. You have the freedom to change browsers, operating systems, or ecosystems as much as you want and the games will generally work the same. The downside is there is a 50% hit on performance. CPU, GPU, RAM, everything. You would need to pay for double the hardware power to get the same performance on the same games as you do now.

Would you want it?

(Side note, Webassembly shouldn't be this taxing on performance. I just pushed it out to an extreme to make the discussion a bit more interesting)

 

[Crayon]

As a someone who primarily usues Linux I want portability. I want everyone to be able to use the software they want on the os they want. 50 percent is pretty nasty tho.

 

[LeChuck]

Even as someone not too fussed about performance, I would go for performance. Portability not that big a priority for me.

 

[pretty done]

Performance all day. I don't see the benefits of your hypothetical portability.

 

[Momentary]

I want both. Currently I have two console sized chassis ready for hardware. The S-4 mini may be a bit too small, but the Dr Zaber Sentry will probably give me what I want.

But sadly... I'm a fan of watercooling, and that's not going to be possible with these cases... Unless anyone knows about some new cooling technology that I don't know about.

Edit: After reading what this actually was talking about... Give me performance.

 

[Skyzard]

I'm good with Windows.

Max performance always.

 

[Htown]

And it had me thinking about how gamers, specifically PC gamers, would look at something like this. So let's paint a hypothetical situation; Let's say there was a parallel universe where your entire PC gaming library as it stands right now runs in a web browser, and all games by default run across Windows, Mac, Linux, (if the hardware can manage it) iOS, Android, and any future Operating System that may not exist yet. You have the freedom to change browsers, operating systems, or ecosystems as much as you want and the games will generally work the same. The downside is there is a 50% hit on performance. CPU, GPU, RAM, everything. You would need to pay for double the hardware power to get the same performance on the same games as you do now.

Would you want it?

I wouldn't want it if there was no hit on performance.

Anything that runs inside a browser isn't going to be mod friendly, first of all.

 

[jotun?]

I don't care about portability, as long as it runs on what I have!

 

[Leafhopper]

Performance, I play on a desktop.

 

[Swarna]

Performance.

Outside of gaming, all of these OS are good enough for virtually any task and usage comes down to preference despite what some fanboys would want you to believe.

No need to hinder two decades of PC gamers for mac/linux users who would have made the switch by now if they really wanted to play games.

 

[Speely]

Portability. Until the Switch, I was pretty much a PC-only gamer this gen, but the convenience trumps performance for me now. Good performance is nice, but since the Switch released I have barely played on my PC, and even then it's mostly indie games that don't take advantage of its power. They could easily be portable games. Seriously considering a GPD Win now, as well.

I am an outlier, to be fair, since I tend to focus on indie games outside of Nintendo and a few other big pubs.

Edit: your hypotgetical example is prolly something I would use a lot.

 

[tim.mbp]

Would love Linux desktop to really take off.

 

[Soldiussnaku]

Performance.

 

[Mechazawa]

I'd never bite the bullet on a game wholesale running worse just so that I could suddenly play that game across more computing environments.

 

[Corine]

Performance I don't care at all about portability.

 

[NoctisVsStar]

Performance all day.

Portability no love lost on my end.

 

[Vyrance]

Performance, don't care about portability at all

 

[Celcius]

Performance
/thread

 

[Pachael]

Depends on the game actually. Performance for something like Cities Skylines that eats CPU cycles for snacks, and portability for games like Hearthstone and Granblue (browser gacha)

Open platform enables different methods for trade offs (I am considering a GPD Win for instance)

 

[JBwB]

Performance all the way.

No need for portability when I do all my gaming at home.

 

[Woo-Fu]

Performance.

Gaming is important enough to me that I make time and space for it, no portability required.

 

[KillLaCam]

Performance. Im not even slightly interested in changing my OS or anything and probably will never be interested in that. So ill never have to worry about something being compatible with whatever. Plus Web apps suck compared to native apps

 

[Netherscourge]

Performance.

Why would I want portability with a PC?

 

[Myzer]

Performance all the way.

 

[Mephala]

As a gamer I want performance. As a consumer I want portability.

As a computer scientist I want to find that magic middle ground. There is only so much you can take from performance before it is not worth it and unenjoyable. As technology improves performance on portable software will improve too. The line is constantly moving and there is no real answer here.

 

[wildfire]

Performance all day. I don't see the benefits of your hypothetical portability.

You can buy a MAC and play any game without worries of ports not coming.


You can hook up your smart phone to a display and input device and play desktop games.

 

[Kite]

You can buy a MAC and play any game without worries of ports not coming.


You can hook up your smart phone to a display and input device and play desktop games.

I have zero interest in paying extra $$ for a Mac, and playing desktop games in my phone sounds terrible. Tiny screen and no keyboard and mouse.. touchscreen controlls? Kill me now, no way.

 

[Crayon]

I have zero interest in paying extra $$ for a Mac, and playing desktop games in my phone sounds terrible. Tiny screen and no keyboard and mouse.. touchscreen controlls? Kill me now, no way.

You replied to a very brief post specifically about hooking a mobile device to a display and controls and playing the same game. How did you mess this up so bad.

 

[Aztechnology]

You can have it any way you want, small form factor PC's, there's portables or you can go hull hog power. Happiness lies I'm options.

 

[FLAguy954]

I'm good with Windows.

Max performance always.

This, at least max performance for a given budget.

 

[Rizific]

i have one rig that i game on. so uhh performance. i dont think anything is above performance on the totem pole, its why i prefer pc gaming.

 

[Sword Of Doom]

I don't know, that 50% hit on performance wouldn't make it very "portable". For me right now, I play my games at home. IF i think about the other ways I could play games in this hypothetical you're proposing (at work), the PC's would not be powerful enough for the more complex games.


Btw that thread title is going to throw people off. All day I saw the thread title and thought it was another Switch inspired "but portable.." thread so I didn't bother checking it out.

 

[m_dorian]

Can't i have both to a decent degree?

 

[poodaddy]

Performance.

 

[Crayon]

No portable like gameboy, you dopes. Portable like python.

 

[akira28]

port-ability.

 

[InsertCookiesHere]

Performance

 

[TaterTots]

Performance.

 

[Atomski]

I don't really get the portability focus.. I don't switch between different PCs much. *Shrug*

Performance..

 

[GLAMr]

If I wanted to pay twice as much for half the performance, I would buy a Mac.

As somebody who uses Windows and Linux equally at home, this kind of portability appeals to me. The main thing stopping me from going full-time Linux is loss of access to games and applications like Adobe CS.

 

[LCGeek]

Both.

In my life time I went from arcades and mega exotic hardware to the days pc gaming glory which push performance, fidelity and portability. We now have laptops that can hang pretty hard with desktops and then we can stream it to a device of our choosing.

I like performance when I'm stationary but on the go dragging my high end devices isn't worth the risk of investment. Portablility matters when out in the open or having to travel. I game for all sorts of reasons so having flexibility like we do now is not something I want to roll back on. Even at the beginning of this gen we lacked what we have now on both fronts.

 

[Spectone]

As an older gamer I much prefer portability it saddens me to see games lost over time. We should try to preserve as much history as possible. The problem is which formats to choose? How do you know that the format the developer has chosen will last 20 or more years into the future? An example of this can be seen with flash games. Flash is dying out and is not going to be supported in the future so how will anyone be able to play those games? Emulation perhaps?

Another problem of archiving web games is where is the game stored? Certainly on servers somewhere, so what happens when they shut down? It doesn't matter if the code can run on many systems if the server serving the code is gone.

What we really need is something like a standard virtual machine image that contains the code to the game. Then you can write software to run this virtual machine and people could keep copies of the games in archives. This has two problems, one is speed and the other is new technology is always being introduced so the machine would need to be updated all the time.

This doesn't take into account the problems that DRM or loss of multiplayer servers causes archiving.

 

[Sad Affleck]

Answering that is harder than I thought. I clicked on the thread ready to write "performance all the way" since good performance is really important to me, but the type of portability you describe does have a certain appeal. I'd say it comes down to two things: whether I can play offline and how much of a performance hit it would be. 10% I would be OK with, 50% is a deal breaker.

 

[PantsuJo]

Performance.

I use Linux only for jobs and studies.

I use Windows for everything else, games included. And I want all the performance tweaks possible ready to use on my OS, for every game.

 

[llien]

Portability of that kind is indeed interesting, but it's definitely not something for all kinds of games, as with mentioned tech there is a significant performance penalty to pay.

 

[laxu]

I would ditch Windows for OSX (Hackintosh so still the same hardware) if all games could be played on it. That said, I would not want to take a big performance hit...

 

[ChronotriggerJM]

I chose performance over portability, but I kind of regret it. I wish I'd gone with the laptop for use at school, and gaming in the bedroom with a steam / dual shock 4 controller. I built a pretty solid pc, but I'll be going portable from here on out.

So in your hypothetical, I'd choose portability.

 

[BobLoblaw]

Performance. Everything my PC does comes second to gaming.

 

[VlaudTheImpaler]

Performance of course lol.

Why would I want to take my headache with me wherever I go?

 

[secretanchitman]

Performance. However, I am going to pre-order a Dan A4-SFX case this coming Sunday so I will be getting the portability aspect without sacrificing performance!