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Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

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Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#71

Post by l11r »

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.

There are no ARM chips with enough power. They have said many times that they are not interested in minor performance improvements but rather want a leap. The Snapdragon X2 Elite chip is the leader (I cannot count Apple; they won't share their chips, obviously), but it doesn't even match AMD with their RDNA 3.5, and who knows when they will (or even if).

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#72

Post by poly2it »

IshKebab wrote: post #62
ozarkerD wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've done both. There are difficulties with both but overall I would say software is significantly more difficult than hardware. Most hardware is actually relatively simple (though hardware engineers do their best to turn it into an incomprehensible mess). Software can get pretty much arbitrarily complex. In a way I suspect it's because hardware engineers are mostly old fogies stuck in the 80s using 80s technologies…

What do you think about Atopile? I'm not a hardware person yet, but these seem similar.

https://atopile.io/

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#73

Post by MBCook »

l11r wrote: post #71
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.

There are no ARM chips with enough power. They have said many times that they are not interested in minor performance improvements but rather want a leap. The Snapdragon X2 Elite chip is the leader (I cannot count Apple; they won't share their chips, obviously), but it doesn't even match AMD with their RDNA 3.5, and who knows when they will (or even if).

I agree they won’t do a Steam Deck 2 that’s ARM. Maybe in the future?

BUT, what about a “Steam Deck Mini”? Something at/above the current Steam Deck, maybe a little closer to Switch 2, but smaller/thinner/maybe a little cheaper?

Yeah you’re not going to run Cyberpunk 2087: Johnny’s Rent Is Due. But older games, less demanding indie games, and many emulators would still work great. Plus remote play of your big desktop if you have one.

I’m not saying they will, but I could see it as a possibility.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#75

Post by zamalek »

fidotron wrote: post #2

> This is a very difficult combination to achieve, and yet that’s exactly what we’ve done for Valve with Mesa3D Turnip, a FOSS Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs. Look at that. Something Qualcomm should have been doing. Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS.

> Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS.

Cynical: Valve doesn't sell hardware or operating systems, they sell games. These devices are merely another storefront.

Optimistic: Valve has also figured out how to turn good will into a commodity. Blowing cash on Steam sales is a bit of a cultural centerpiece of the PC gaming community.

Gabe has proven that you can make stupid amounts of money by [mostly] doing right by the consumer. I'm not sure if there's more to the secret source, her sauce, because we've yet to see another CEO pull their head out of their arse far enough to see how lucrative this approach can be: consumerism is fickle, fanaticism is loyal.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#76

Post by SequoiaHope »

fidotron wrote: post #2

> This is a very difficult combination to achieve, and yet that’s exactly what we’ve done for Valve with Mesa3D Turnip, a FOSS Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs. Look at that. Something Qualcomm should have been doing. Much credit to Valve for pushing that out as FOSS.

I also just love that in open source you can call something “Turnip” because you’re not marketing it to anyone.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#77

Post by Philpax »

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.

There are rumours that they are working on this, but I assume they've chosen to keep the exact software experience of the Frame under wraps for now. It would certainly make the experience of gaming on a giant virtual screen even better!

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#78

Post by Uvix »

atrus wrote: post #35
amazari wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, their work on WebKit, Servo, Mesa drivers, the kernel, and more is seriously impressive! Their customers, Valve, in this case, deserve credit for being good FLOSS citizens (even if they are building a DRM walled garden on top of it :/), but the actual workers are the real unsung heroes. Them, Codethink, Collabora, and other open-source consultancies I might have missed are doing the community a huge service."

Steam DRM is entirely optional. Blame the publishers for DRM.

Valve doesn't disclose ahead of purchase whether a title has Steam DRM or not. So even if publishers don't take the option, I have no way to know that. Which means the option effectively doesn't exist.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#79

Post by Guillaume86 »

jsheard wrote: post #55
Spivak wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm definitely dreaming but I think it could be a win-win situation if Apple decided to licence its chips to Valve: the resulting handheld and VR headsets would be power/efficiency monsters and PC devs would finally have a good reason to target ARM, which could finally bring native PC gaming to MACs.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#80

Post by jsheard »

Guillaume86 wrote: post #79
jsheard wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm definitely dreaming but I think it could be a win-win situation if Apple decided to licence its chips to Valve: the resulting handheld and VR headsets would be power/efficiency monsters and PC devs would finally have a good reason to target ARM, which could finally bring native PC gaming to MACs.

The Nintendo Switch already provides >160 million reasons for gamedevs to care about native ARM support, but that hasn't moved the needle for the Mac. Being ARM-based is the least of its problems, the problem is that it's a relatively tiny potential market owned by a company which is actively hostile to the needs of game developers.
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