Wonder if later they will get to do WebXR Browser work for Linux / this hardware too.
Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
141–150 of 327 posts
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#142Earlier 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.
>It's just that the bar is so INSANELY low - it's probably somewhere deep in the earth's core at this point - ...
Sounds like we need someone to.. raise the bar.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Taking games designed for desktop GPUs and running them on mobile GPUs with tile-based-deferred-rendering hardware will be a disaster. Mobile GPU designs will choke on modern games as they're designed around hardware features that mobile GPUs either don't have, or that run very slowly. Peak theoretical throughput for the GPUs you find in ARM SoCs is quite good compared to the power draw, but you will not get peak thr…
You don't have to use tile-based rendering on these chips anymore. They can directly draw to the entire screen.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#144> 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.
It's actually very easy for skilled people to deliver good products when they aren't just tasked with sucking off shareholders. Public trade of companies makes them worse every time.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#145> 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.
Every major company open sources software that is not part of its core competitive advantages. It’s part of “commoditizing your complements”
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#146> “If you love video games, like I do, working on FEX with Valve is a dream come true,” said Paulo Matos, an engineer with Igalia’s Compilers Team
Life is great sometimes. Particularly when your nerd hobbies like contributing to open source connects you with important industries so you get justly rewarded
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#147> 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…
No one is hiding anything. No one is pretending to be something they're not. Life is not a Saturday morning cartoon. There are no good guys vs bad guys. There are just businesses trying to earn more profits.
Valve is a business. When Microsoft introduced a Store they threatened Steam's market share. In theory Microsoft could one day update Windows so that it's hard to buy games through non Microsoft stores. Valve responded by investing in open source OS stuff. Their goal is to commoditize Windows, so that Microsoft doesn't wrest control of video game sales away from them. Commoditize your complement is a strategy as old as the software industry itself.
We've known all this for years, it's been discussed publicly and no one is hiding it. It always annoys me when people think we're in Lord of the Rings and one company is Sauron or another is Gandalf. It's all just business. To everyone who makes decisions, it all boils down to numbers on a spreadsheet. They want their number to go up.
What you SHOULD care about is competition. Valve would never have invested in all these OSS technologies if Microsoft hadn't tried to compete with them. They wouldn't be consumer friendly and they wouldn't make investments if they thought they could sit on their ass. They would just coast and enshittify (like Microsoft has in the OS space with its Windows monopoly).
We don't need good guy companies, we need strong pro-competition laws and strong enforcers of those laws. You can vote accordingly at the ballot box, and you can also vote accordingly with your wallet, buy stuff from the little guys.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#148The 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.
Not sure if this is what you had in mind: Projected 2D views into a 3D "movie screen" environment is a feature of the Frame, per my understanding of their marketing, and of early reviewers' experiences. If you meant, "do they take 2D render frames from videogames and convert them into pseudo-3d or actual 3d where the user can tilt their head to see a different view INTO the 2D game's universe, e.g. see behind bushes…
I mean, you don't need to go THAT far, regular 3DTVs didn't have that capability. But the possibility is there for fixed-position 3D.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#149The 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?
I mean like an official Valve fork of VorpX that works just as well as Proton. I have not had the best experiences with VorpX. But it becomes a much easier problem if you have standardized hardware and software.
Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices
#150It'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.
Maybe, but I think it's more about the millions of ARM devices already deployed: android phones