Only one valid choice here if you truly want to not be dependent on Chrome and that's Firefox.

Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Ecosia, etc. All Chrome reskins with extra added bloat.

I had a similar battle with getting SC working with Vulkan. Good to hear you got it working.

I've used both tiers of at least one of the major AI slop machines and found both to be exactly the same: a complete waste of time.

Yea no I wouldn't even consider an NVIDIA GPU even if it was cheap, mostly because I'm a Linux nerd and NVIDIA stuff is way more annoying to get running there than say AMD or Intel.

I went looking last night after my reply because this chat has made me want to look at upgrades as well :P and I saw a single 6700XT on sale for the ridiculous sum of about $800 US or almost 4x the price of mine. Not worth at all.

If or when I do upgrade it'll either be a B580 or a 9060 XT.

Yea no the B580 is absolutely a solid card and you definitely made a good choice for sure.

yea its surprising just how much more playable SC gets when you go up to a 12GB card. I had the 6600XT for a bit and SC was NOT playable (at 1440p) due to not having enough VRAM. Traded it for a 6700 XT (which also has 12GB) and its like a night and day difference, that only got better with 4.5.

Best I can tell, the B580 is the faster card vs what you have. The one big thing I always hear though about Intel's Arc cards is that the drivers are kinda flaky (more so than AMD or NVIDIA)

So I went looking to see what the 2 were for me. In the US it was "How the Grinch stole Christmas" and globally it was Mission Impossible 2

Not sure how I feel about that

I mean its stock Windows 11 what did you expect?

You mentioned Turbo which comes with site-wide ad free. Twitch Prime had that same benefit when it started, and no longer does. Thought that what you meant.

Prime had Ad-free Twitch for quite a while and they got rid of it because it was cutting in to their ad revenue, so I rather doubt they'll ever bring that back

Makes sense, given how glitchy and hard to watch most of the 2K streams I've seen are, no need to make it worse by doubling the resolution, and those massively increasing encoding requirements.

the corporate users where MS makes most of its Windows money will of course not be subject to this garbage.

I feel like I lost a few braincells trying to read/understand that 2nd quote.

They were testing 4K streaming with certain channels in the Enhanced Broadcasting beta. Not sure if ever got wider deployment.