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Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

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Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#81

Post by atomicnumber3 »

zamalek wrote: post #75
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…

This is what I say a lot. Valve isn't even remotely close to having clean hands here. They invented loot crates. Hats. Etc.

It's just that the bar is so INSANELY low - it's probably somewhere deep in the earth's core at this point - that valve looks like a fucking angel by being only VAGUELY greedy on occasion.

When your competition is EA... it's not hard.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#82

Post by hurricanepootis »

Melatonic wrote: post #59
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...

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…

APUs have the GPU and CPU on the same package, or sometimes even the same die (with tiling). If there was to be an Nvidia GPU and AMD CPU type system, they would have to be separate packages.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#83

Post by soiltype »

doublerabbit wrote: post #56
zem wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apologies if you've already ruled this out, but hand pain is very often caused by strain/injury from further up the arms, the shoulders, or even the neck. You may find that pulling your shoulders back or relaxing them, or adjusting your arm posture, or straightening/relaxingyour neck gives you less pain while playing.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#84

Post by soiltype »

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…

> Not to mention that the Beelink comes with a Windows license, and the Steam Machine doesn't.

That's a mark against the Beelink for many :)

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#85

Post by bri3d »

poly2it wrote: post #72
IshKebab wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

PCB and RTL are completely separate disciplines.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#86

Post by saghm »

righthand wrote: post #14
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’d wait to see if they open source the Machine, Controller, and Frame before assuming buying their products supports open source that matters for everyone. Right now the Steam Deck is the only product that open source and supports that vision. Even this article it is not clear how beneficial some of their open source work is for everyone except Valve.

For a few years before I eventually got a Steam Deck, I played a lot of games that I bought outside of Steam, and over the past decade, the experience of doing this on Linux has massively improved. Plenty of their improvements get upstreamed to Wine, and there's nothing stopping you from obtain proton (or even one of the various unofficial tweaks of it) to run games that you don't buy through Steam to get the benefits that aren't upstreamed (or haven't been yet). The article itself mentions that they've implemented a driver for Mesa that has equal or better performance on ARM than the proprietary one from Qualcomm.

It's not clear to me what you're attempting to convey by saying the Steam Deck being the only product they have that supports the open source vision. The Steam Deck is the only new hardware product they've had since 2019, when they released their original first party VR headset that presumably is being replaced by the new one. Other than that, the only other hardware products they've ever worked on were earlier headsets made by other manufacturers or the previous iterations of the other two products announced alongside the new headset. From that standpoint, you could make a credible argument that the only product they even have right now that benefits from the open source work they've done in the past six years they did is the exact one you say supports this vision.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#87

Post by tapoxi »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #81
zamalek wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is what I say a lot. Valve isn't even remotely close to having clean hands here. They invented loot crates. Hats. Etc. It's just that the bar is so INSANELY low - it's probably somewhere deep in the earth's core at this point - that valve looks like a fucking angel by being only VAGUELY greedy on occasion. When your competition is EA... it's not hard.

> They invented loot crates. Hats. Etc.

Don't forget the part where they're encouraging kids to gamble with real money on Counter-Strike skins. They rely on an API that Valve freely provides and makes no effort to curtail.

But they like Linux and give refunds so they get a free pass.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#88

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#89

Post by RandallBrown »

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).

Do you mean there's no ARM chips that they can buy? Surely the ARM chips in Apple's devices are powerful enough aren't they?

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#90

Post by jsheard »

tapoxi wrote: post #87
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I say a lot. Valve isn't even remotely close to having clean hands here. They invented loot crates. Hats. Etc. It's just that the bar is so INSANELY low - it's probably somewhere deep in the earth's core at this point - that valve looks like a fucking angel by being only VAGUELY greedy on occasion. When your competition is EA... it's not hard.

> They invented loot crates. Hats. Etc. Don't forget the part where they're encouraging kids to gamble with real money on Counter-Strike skins. They rely on an API that Valve freely provides and makes no effort to curtail. But they like Linux and give refunds so they get a free pass.

> and give refunds so they get a free pass.

They only begrudgingly conceded refunds in 2015 after the no-refunds policy they had maintained for 12 years was found to be illegal in Australia.

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