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Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

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Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#51

Post by yojat661 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #18
stavros wrote: post #4

I don't play games almost ever, but I'm going to buy all the products Valve releases soon, just to support their OSS efforts. They seem to be the only vendor that's opening stuff up, rather than locking it down.

The steam deck, especially the low-spec variant, was sold at very low, likely negative margins. They make huge profit on their games, but if you don't buy the games... They've implied that they're not going to sell the Steam Machine at a low margin because they're worried about people buying the Steam Machine for general purpose computer use without buying games. I'm not sure that's a rational fear. If you subtract t…

They could offer a $X steam credits with their steam hardware for a win win.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#52

Post by andyferris »

ryandrake wrote: post #20
wronglebowski wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s incredible how bad driver support is the ARM space. I was looking into some of the various Ambernic handhelds and their Linux firmware. Despite their SoCs being advertised as having Vulkan 1.1 support every firmware for the device ships with it disabled.

So many chipmakers and development board manufacturers see software/driver support as some kind of necessary evil--a chore that they grudgingly do because they have to, and they will do the absolute minimum amount of work, with barely enough quality to sell their hardware.

But - doesn’t open sourcing it kinda make it someone else’s chore?

Obviously it has to “work” at sale but ongoing maintenance could be shared with the community.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#53

Post by jsheard »

sbarre wrote: post #49
rpmisms wrote: post #43

It's incredibly obvious that they're trying to make Steam Deck 2 ARM-based. That's the generational change Valve is waiting for. This is gonna be fantastic.

Huh, I had not connected those (hypothetical) dots, but I could see it.. Or maybe there's 2 next-gen Steam Decks, an ultra-portable ARM-based one that's as small as can be, and a more performant x86 one with AMD's next-gen APU...

Yeah, there's a real gap in the market for a relatively compact handheld which can play low-spec PC games. The AMD-based handheld PCs available today are all pretty chunky.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#54

Post by Spivak »

sbarre wrote: post #49
rpmisms wrote: post #43

It's incredibly obvious that they're trying to make Steam Deck 2 ARM-based. That's the generational change Valve is waiting for. This is gonna be fantastic.

Huh, I had not connected those (hypothetical) dots, but I could see it.. Or maybe there's 2 next-gen Steam Decks, an ultra-portable ARM-based one that's as small as can be, and a more performant x86 one with AMD's next-gen APU...

Why not just make a performant ARM device? Apple demonstrated to the world that it can be extremely fast and sip power.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#55

Post by jsheard »

Spivak wrote: post #54
sbarre wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, I had not connected those (hypothetical) dots, but I could see it.. Or maybe there's 2 next-gen Steam Decks, an ultra-portable ARM-based one that's as small as can be, and a more performant x86 one with AMD's next-gen APU...

Why not just make a performant ARM device? Apple demonstrated to the world that it can be extremely fast and sip power.

Sure, but Apple isn't selling their silicon to anyone else and Valve, successful as they are, don't have Apples money and economy-of-scale to throw at designing their own state-of-the-art CPU/GPU cores and building them on TSMCs state-of-the-art processes. Valve will have to roll with whatever is available on the open market, and if that happens to suck compared to Apples stuff then tough shit.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#56

Post by doublerabbit »

zem wrote: post #5
stavros wrote: post #4

I don't play games almost ever, but I'm going to buy all the products Valve releases soon, just to support their OSS efforts. They seem to be the only vendor that's opening stuff up, rather than locking it down.

I had barely played games for years, and got a steam deck just because it seemed like a cool linux device I could use both for gaming and tinkering. it has definitely gotten me back into gaming in a big way, the experience really is very nice.

I just wish my hands wouldn't cramp on hand-held devices. I've never been able to use handhelds for longer than thirty minutes.

Goes for console controllers too.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#57

Post by PoignardAzur »

uejfiweun wrote: post #45

The Steam Frame shows a lot of promise in terms of letting people play games on a massive virtual screen. But with the hardware, even more is possible. I hope they are working on a compatibility layer that allows 2D games to be rendered in 3D, like the 3D TV of the 2010s. In my opinion that would be a killer app.

You mean like VorpX?

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#58

Post by Melatonic »

ozarkerD wrote: post #30
ryandrake wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many chipmakers and development board manufacturers see software/driver support as some kind of necessary evil--a chore that they grudgingly do because they have to, and they will do the absolute minimum amount of work, with barely enough quality to sell their hardware.

It bewilders me. Software's gotta be easier than hardware right? Not that either is easy but as a software engineer, the engineering that goes into modern hardware mystifies me.

Software can always ship a new update for bugs or features.

Hardware not so much

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#59

Post by Melatonic »

sbarre wrote: post #49
rpmisms wrote: post #43

It's incredibly obvious that they're trying to make Steam Deck 2 ARM-based. That's the generational change Valve is waiting for. This is gonna be fantastic.

Huh, I had not connected those (hypothetical) dots, but I could see it.. Or maybe there's 2 next-gen Steam Decks, an ultra-portable ARM-based one that's as small as can be, and a more performant x86 one with AMD's next-gen APU...

If they did an AMD CPU using the same TSMC node that Apple uses for Arm CPUs it wouldn't be that much less power efficient and have much great compatibility.

They would realistically gain the most efficiency by getting Nvidia to design a modern super power efficient GPU like what was used in the original switch and Nvidia Shield. AMD GPUs can be great for desktop gaming but in terms of power efficiency to performance ratio Nvidia is way ahead

An AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU might be a hard thing to actually negotiate however given that AMD is big in the GPU space as well. As far as I know most "APU" aren't really that special and just a combo of GPU and CPU

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#60

Post by bri3d »

ozarkerD wrote: post #30
ryandrake wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many chipmakers and development board manufacturers see software/driver support as some kind of necessary evil--a chore that they grudgingly do because they have to, and they will do the absolute minimum amount of work, with barely enough quality to sell their hardware.

It bewilders me. Software's gotta be easier than hardware right? Not that either is easy but as a software engineer, the engineering that goes into modern hardware mystifies me.

It's different definitions of "easy."

With hardware, you have about one billion validation tests and QA processes, because when you're done, you're done and it had better work. Fixing an "issue" is very very expensive, and you want to get rid of them. However, this also makes the process more of, to stereotype, an "engineer's engineering" practice. It's very rules based, and if everything follows the rules and passes the tests, it's done. It doesn't matter how "hacky" or "badly architected" or "nasty" the input product is, when it works, it works. And, when it's done, it's done.

On the other hand, software is highly human-oriented and subjective, and it's a continuous process. With Linux working the way it does, with an intentionally hostile kernel interface, driver software is even more so. With Linux drivers you basically chose to either get them upstreamed (a massive undertaking in personality management, but Valve's choice here), deal with maintaining them in perpetuity at enormous cost as every release will break them (not common), or give up and release a point in time snapshot and ride into the sunset (which is what most people do). I don't really think this is easier than hardware, it's just a different thing.

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