Summer doesn’t officially start until later in June, but around where I live the days are getting hotter and the nights aren’t as cool as before. That’s fine. I don’t need the outdoors. I’ve got new PS Plus games to download and play, like Sand Land, Battlefield V, and a whole trilogy of classic STALKER games.
Version
5.5.0 of the Podman container-management tool has been
released. Notable features include the addition of a podman machine cp command to copy files into a running Podman
VM, a podman artifact extract command to copy
contents of an OCI
artifact to disk, and a --mount=artifact option to mount
OCI artifacts into containers. See the release announcement for a full
list of improvements and bug fixes.
The next year for Ubisoft could be a quiet one. The French publisher announced that it’s pushing back some of its biggest games to allow them more time for development. The move comes after an internal review that took place last fall and could see upcoming sequels like Far Cry 7, Assassin’s Creed Hexe, and the next Ghost Recon
From
servers in a data center to desktop computers, many devices
communicating on a network will eventually have to filter network
traffic, whether it’s for security or performance reasons. As a result,
this is a domain where a lot of work is put into improving performance:
a tiny performance improvement can have considerable gains.
Bpfilter is a
project that allows for packet filtering to easily be done with BPF, which can
be faster than other mechanisms.
Meta’s frequent Horizon OS updates are coming at the cost of performance issues and bugs for developers.
Quest headsets arguably get new features, improvements, and changes at a greater pace than any other consumer tech device. Last year alone, for example, Meta overhauled how Horizon OS handles 2D apps to allow free positioning and keeping them open inside apps, delivered significant upgrades to Quest 3’s passthrough and hand tracking, and made dozens of other changes.
These new Horizon OS versions arrive almost every month, in stark contrast to Apple and Google’s strategy of shipping most new features in yearly releases. And this seems to be coming at a cost.
On an internal Meta issue tracking forum for select developers of successful store apps, the current most upvoted issue describes how the frame rate in apps has been steadily declining with each operating system release.
The issue report includes screenshots of average FPS logs documenting this decline, which began with v72 and has continued to get worse through v74, v76, and the pre-release builds of v77.
The issue has a significant number of upvotes compared to the average issue, yet has seen no response from Meta.
Standalone VR and mixed reality developers already have to put significant effort in to optimize their apps to run well on mobile chipsets, and system-level performance regression essentially erases some of this hard work.
Another issue emerged through an intentional but misguided decision from Meta.
Quest 3 & 3S offer a Battery Saver toggle in their settings. Since its debut at the launch of Quest 3, this feature capped the refresh rate to 72Hz, forced on fixed foveated rendering, and reduced the brightness to 50%.
But since v76, Meta silently changed the behavior of Battery Saver to instead force the refresh rate to 90Hz but cap the app frame rate to 45FPS. This, to be clear, happens regardless of whether or not the app uses Application SpaceWarp. In the case that an app doesn’t use AppSW, this causes a distracting double-imaging judder that makes many people feel sick, and these customers often blame the developer of the app.
This change to Battery Saver was not communicated to either developers or users, and Meta has now told developers that it’s reverting the change, though as of the time of writing it still remains.
Performance regression and the Battery Saver change are far from the only issues developers are encountering on Quest.
As well as the well-known SDK and Quest Link issues that have plagued Quest development for years, the store backend is a constant source of frustration.
Meta Quest backend is so cooked. For a group that supposedly runs multiple billion+ user apps the developer tech is noticeably decaying.
The metrics sometimes just go missing for a week. We spend hours fighting MQDH and the store a day.
Not a welcoming ecosystem @boztank
— Andrew Eiche (@buddingmonkey) May 11, 2025
Analytics for example often simply disappear, with the CEO of the studio behind Job Simulator and Dimensional Double Shift publicly describing the developer tech as “noticeably decaying”.
Another issue developers have faced is players suddenly losing access to purchased DLCs. This, as you’d expect, leads to angry support messages and emails to developers, who don’t realize this is a problem on Meta’s side. The only solution seems to be factory resetting the headset, a difficult ask to put it mildly.
At Meta Connect 2024, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth apologized to developers for the “constant state of change” involved in building for Quest, while then VP of VR/MR Mark Rabkin promised “a stable era”.
“It can be incredibly messy, and we know it’s been a tough ride for developers over the last couple of years”, Bosworth said.
0:00
Bosworth’s apology to developers.
Bosworth and Rabkin were mostly referring to shifting APIs, SDKs, and featuresets, and some developers do appreciate the consolidation on these issues. But what all developers want now is more focus on software and infrastructure quality; fully functional tools and services that they can rely on, and rapid fixes when issues do inevitably crop up.
Grafana 12 observability platform lands with Drilldown GA, dynamic dashboards, Git Sync, SCIM support, blazing-fast tables, new theming options, and more.
In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, you’ve most likely come across some Nevrons who aren’t keen on attacking you on sight. These special Nevrons will give you quests that offer some pretty nice rewards for your playthrough. One of the Nevrons is called a Hexga and they want you to collect some very special rock crystals.
RuneScape Dragonwilds wound up becoming a surprise hit seemingly overnight. It’s a far-cry from the original RuneScape, which was a grind heavy MMORPG with way too many skills to count. This is something more, something akin to Valheim or Enshrouded. But even if you have experience in survival/crafting games, this one…
As if the world of Wraeclast wasn’t tough enough to survive, what with over 100 bosses to fight in nearly Soulslike combat from an ARPG perspective. But developer Grinding Gear Games went ahead and added a new challenge in
Tell me if this sounds familiar: You dive into a big, modern blockbuster on day-one—maybe it’s an open-world RPG like Assassin’s Creed Shadows or a loot-heavy action-adventure with lots of items and numbers to keep track of like Monster Hunter Wilds—and you’re having a great time, but life gets in the way. By the ten…
This year’s PAX East felt small. There were a few big names on the show floor, like Bandai Namco which was there showing off Elden Ring: Nightreign and Larian Studios making its annual appearance with a Baldur’s Gate 3 booth, but many of the big industry movers and shakers who’ve appeared at the Boston games…
The first official trailer for WB and DC’s upcoming live-action Superman movie is here, and James Gunn’s take on the iconic superhero looks like the Man of Steel movie we’ve wanted for a long time.
With Fedora 42 having released last month, feature work on Fedora 43 continues heating up in working toward this next major Fedora Linux release due out around October…
After recently looking at how the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K “Arrow Lake” Linux performance has evolved since launch, many Phoronix readers were curious how a similar launch-day vs. now comparison would look on the AMD Zen 5 side. The article today is looking at how the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X Linux performance has evolved since their launch last year. These numbers are put alongside the prior Intel Arrow Lake results for additional context.
Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming service, Max, will soon have a new name. Well, not a new name. An old name. That’s right folks, HBO Max is back just a few years after everyone on the planet said it was dumb to change the name to Max.
