Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds

As long as games are running on user hardware/OS, you'll always deal with cheating. Server-side checks and computation can only go so far.

For example: in competitive shooters (where cheaters are most prevalent) you can't have things appearing out of thin air. The client needs to know about things ahead of time to play sounds and to give other environmental hints.

Exactly, nothing short of streaming the entire game fully rendered from the server will stop cheats. And even then you can probably still do aimbotting with modern day computer vision.

I've always thought the line about whats cheating, and what's not is unfair and arbitrary. How is it ok that some players can play 4k 200fps and others 1080p at 30fps.

The only way to be really fair is for everybody to Stream the game at the same res, frame rate and latency.

so consoles are better

This isn't exclusive to video games. Much of the improvements to world records in sports are due to improvements in gear, yet we don't consider those records to have been unfairly achieved.

Some games do impose limits though, for example Overwatch doesn't allow you to use an aspect ratio larger than 16:9 and selecting a wider aspect ratio actually cuts down on your vertical field-of-view rather than granting you more horizontal field-of-view. This lessens the potential advantage of ultra-wide monitors.

They are often more convenient and secure. If you don't mind a single-purpose device that severely limits your ability to modify your experience. Better is subjective after all.

How exactly will it stop cheats? Any skill based game can still be cheated. Just analyze the video stream, or go even lower tech, point a camera at your screen. Many games can be effectively cheated like this. For eaxmple Aimbots in counter strike and peak human reflexes in dota/lol.

Yeah and in real world people from different countries with vastly different economic backgrounds compete on the same stage, I think video games are fine.

This reminds me of a discussion around 2 decades ago, where someone showed a picture of his "undetectable aimbot" for a turn-based artillery game: a ruler, a page of charts, and a handheld calculator; followed by a copious amount of discussion of whether that was considered cheating.

I hope this was for gunbound, lovers that turn based artillery game.

How would consoles be any more immune to computer vision based cheating? Instead of feeding the output to a spoofed keyboard & mouse, you'd just be feeding it to a controller input. I'm not really seeing any difference in technical challenge here, and you wouldn't even need esoteric hardware since console controllers are USB devices anyways.

In certain competitive environments framerate is definitely limited. Here [0] are the rules for Fallout 4 any% speed runs, framerate must be capped at 60FPS. AFAIK that rule applies to all games in this engine due to physics behavior. I don't follow tournament FPS games, but it wouldn't shock me if there are rules for competitive play there as well.

If you are asking why games like counterstrike don't have limits on online play, that's mostly a commercial question. Would those games be as popular if they limited performance to what was achievable for minimum specs? I certainly wouldn't want to play at 1920x1080 on my nice widescreen monitor, but setting the minimum to a $1500 monitor and the hardware to drive it would guarantee very few players.

[0] https://www.speedrun.com/fallout_4?h=Any-Full-game&rules=gam...

Edit:typo

Surely the server can tell the client what sounds to play and what other environmental hints to do, just as well as the server can choose to tell the client where the other players are when they are in sight.

Maybe, but I think that would've been done already if it was feasible.

If the server says "there are footsteps from these coordinates" then it's telling the client there's a person at these coordinates.

Someone doesn’t know about the chronus zen or how big console cheating is!

Let’s just say that my finals experience isn’t the same as yours! ;)

The storage read, memory bandwidth, load computation, and gamethred pause to add the object to the game world is far more expensive than sending a move.

Due to latency, the client has to at least do a little prediction.

Since the hardware is better controlled and secured, and hardware attestation is a solved problem these days, it's not particularly difficult to enforce security to the point where you'd need to hardware hack a controller and connect it to a physical camera to bot.

That's still gonna be annoying for players, but it'll greatly decrease incidence, and if reporting a player for botting requires buying and hacking a new controller... It should be quite effective.

Controller-based cheats have been around for awhile, like Cronus which allows scripted actions; reduced recoil in CoD, for example.