I’m not familiar with either of those programs, sorry.
You might want to check what mpv and/or va-api is reporting.

Do you have any specific issues?
I’ve been using a 9070 on fedora (42 initially, 43 for a few days) and hw acceleration hasn’t been an issue. I’ve been using newer mesa drivers from a copr repo FWIW, but I don’t think hw acceleration was any issue before that.

Which is a bummer imo, since I don’t think people already considering a lower midrange PC today are the target demographic, but I would love to be proven wrong.

OptiScaler works just fine with BG3 fwiw, so you can get either that way.

In the same vein, this YouTuber did their own testing/comparison last year.

Yep, that’s a good point, thanks!
Re DLSS, I’m actually very happy with it so far. It’s certainly not available in every game, but most games where it matters for a good balance of image quality and performance have good DLSS support. And being able to patch in DLSS4 very easily via proton is an obvious plus.

Yep, text is definitely not handled well on most OLED monitors (or TVs) because of their pixel substructure. It’s usually been better on Linux for me and I essentially don’t notice it anymore, but I also haven’t used Windows in years so I can’t compare.

And still no OLED screen… why Framework, why?

I got one of the latest Framework 13 a couple months ago for work, and while I’m happy about the prospects of future repairability and upgradability down the line, it’s not a great laptop given its pricepoint.
The build is subpar, with the screen flexing a ton, the keyboard and trackpad are lacklustre and pretty uncomfortable, but the worst is the screen, it’s dim, with poor colour reproduction and 3:2 is frankly not for me. And fractional scaling is a mess with XWayland, while it was much better on my 2019 XPS 13.

I love what Framework are pushing for and actually achieving, but tradeoffs are very much at play. I’m hoping for an OLED screen replacement in the near future though.

Glad you were able to get it working!
I need to get around to creating a bug report, I’m guessing the issue is with gamescope and not Heroic itself, but I’m not sure.

Ah, good catch. In that case, I’ve hit this bug before, although usually when trying to select a different version of Proton afterwards, and I managed to get the drop-down working in Desktop mode.
If OP is already in Desktop mode, then I’m not sure tbh.

What happens when you click on the drop-down menu to select the version? I’ve had issues in the past with Heroic where the drop-down menus would only work in desktop mode on the Steam Deck, FWIW.

I’m not sure how ProtonUp works with native games, installed outside of Steam or Heroic for instance, but it certainly doesn’t allow for per-game Proton version changes with Steam games.
EDIT: I was wrong, there’s a separate list I wasn’t aware of where you can change per-game versions. You can do the same thing in ProtonPlus FWIW.

This is akin to ProtonUp, with more compat forks available to download within the GUI.

Excerpt from the dev’s website (very bottom of the page):

This game is a work of NON-FICTION. Any similarity to actual agencies, policies or ethnic groups of the PRC in this game is INTENTIONAL.

Oh, TIL - I’ll have to try that, thank you!

Setting a high refresh rate is somewhat of a given, but won’t negate anything which VRR helps with - screen tearing. If you’re always playing with VSync on and getting constant frame rates, that’s not an issue, but that’s also far from the usual experience.

Yes, I’ve been bothered by VRR flicker on my OLED monitor (LG 27GR95QE) since I started actively gaming on it with my Linux build a couple months ago, it was never an issue with consoles for me.
I’m on KDE FWIW, and the flicker is more pronounced during games with mouse cursor on screen afaict. I can’t compare to Windows.
I think VRR flicker is less of an issue when running games within a gamescope session, but it’s not ideal either.

Is it still actively maintained? It’s also not working on Wayland fwiw.

LACT works just fine with my RTX 3080.

You can refer to list of games with HDR support.
As far as HDR in native Linux games, recent changes won’t help, but you should be able to get that working with a couple env vars.