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My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable

blog.matthewbrunelle.com

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Re: My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable

#21

Post by onfromsofa »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #16

You cannot play two different games at the same time with your 50ft hdmi cable. Can't people see any usecase for the steam machine? I understand, you are not in the market for it. I am, I have a good usecase which possibly will make the cost drop below a ps5 over the years (if you include games cost)

You also can't turn it on from your couch.

There's a potential meme image demanding to be made.

One shows the steam machine user playing a game with resume feature in just 2 panels. One sitting down and pressing the controller, the next playing.

The other half of the comic has 10+ panels. One sitting down. One facepalming. One standing up and turning on the pc elsewhere, one sitting down, one opening steam link one staring at the screen waiting for the pc boot, one facepalming, one going to the pc to launch steam, one sitting down, one waiting to connect to steam big mode, one waiting for the game to launch because no resume feature.

Re: My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable

#22

Post by swiftcoder »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #16

You cannot play two different games at the same time with your 50ft hdmi cable. Can't people see any usecase for the steam machine? I understand, you are not in the market for it. I am, I have a good usecase which possibly will make the cost drop below a ps5 over the years (if you include games cost)

> You cannot play two different games at the same time with your 50ft hdmi cable

... do you spend a lot of time playing 2 different games at the same time?

Re: My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable

#23

Post by onfromsofa »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #18
Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #16

You cannot play two different games at the same time with your 50ft hdmi cable. Can't people see any usecase for the steam machine? I understand, you are not in the market for it. I am, I have a good usecase which possibly will make the cost drop below a ps5 over the years (if you include games cost)

Have you looked at what sort of FPS it gets on the games you want to play? Overall it's performance is... Quite poor even on the lowest settings for lots of games

If the benchmark has the words "RT" on it, like a lot did, you can safely throw them in the trash. That's people benchmarking the device in the same spirit as people who thought the Steam Deck and the Switch 1 could do 4K. Worthless.

Re: My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable

#24

Post by fragmede »

swiftcoder wrote: post #22
Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #16

You cannot play two different games at the same time with your 50ft hdmi cable. Can't people see any usecase for the steam machine? I understand, you are not in the market for it. I am, I have a good usecase which possibly will make the cost drop below a ps5 over the years (if you include games cost)

> You cannot play two different games at the same time with your 50ft hdmi cable ... do you spend a lot of time playing 2 different games at the same time?

ADHD and cutscenes means a laptop game and a console game so you're never ever waiting. Must be nice to have a brain that doesn't need that.

Re: My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable

#26

Post by weird-eye-issue »

onfromsofa wrote: post #23
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you looked at what sort of FPS it gets on the games you want to play? Overall it's performance is... Quite poor even on the lowest settings for lots of games

If the benchmark has the words "RT" on it, like a lot did, you can safely throw them in the trash. That's people benchmarking the device in the same spirit as people who thought the Steam Deck and the Switch 1 could do 4K. Worthless.

Okay but we aren't talking about a handheld device here. You should not need to literally put it on handheld graphics settings to get decent performance.

Also this thing is literally designed for running on TVs and everybody uses their TV at 4K resolution...

Re: My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable

#27

Post by fbnlsr »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #16

You cannot play two different games at the same time with your 50ft hdmi cable. Can't people see any usecase for the steam machine? I understand, you are not in the market for it. I am, I have a good usecase which possibly will make the cost drop below a ps5 over the years (if you include games cost)

> Can't people see any usecase for the steam machine?

The only problem with the Steam Machine is the price tbh, and that's mainly Valve having a really bad luck with timing once again.

Having a custom-made "Steam Machine" for the past 3 years thanks to ChimeraOS, it really changed the way I play for the better. I can play on my couch with my son and wife, and it made my wife (who wasn't really into gaming) buy a Steam Deck and enjoy my 500+ library instantly.

Now, I can play CS2 in my office, my son can play Astroneer in the living room and my wife The Witcher 3 next to him. The Steam ecosystem is simply amazing, it's a real shame Valve had to launch their machine during a worldwide component crisis.

Re: My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable

#28

Post by dmpanch »

tskulbru wrote: post #19

Ive been using Moonlight on my Apple TV, with a 8bitdo controller connected to the Apple TV. My gaming computer is running bazzite and runs Sunshine as streaming server and it handles basically any game. I did use Steam Remote Control earlier but i found it quite unstable and slow compared to Sunshine which basically just works out of the box. Ive beaten Silk song and Elden ring on the setup. Its just wired 1gb netwo…

I use similar setup (CachyOS, Apple TV, Moonlight/Sunshine), but I play on a projector instead of a TV, which results in slightly higher latency. With that in mind, I connect gamepad via Bluetooth to my PC rather than to the Apple TV to minimize input latency; all single-player games are fully playable without any noticeable lag.

Re: My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable

#29

Post by swiftcoder »

fragmede wrote: post #24
swiftcoder wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You cannot play two different games at the same time with your 50ft hdmi cable ... do you spend a lot of time playing 2 different games at the same time?

ADHD and cutscenes means a laptop game and a console game so you're never ever waiting. Must be nice to have a brain that doesn't need that.

I mean, I also have a smartphone to play games in quick 5 minute breaks

Are console loading times really still that shit? I haven't found PC loading times to be much of an issue since fast SSDs came around

Re: My Steam Machine is a 50ft HDMI cable

#30

Post by joe_mamba »

fbnlsr wrote: post #27
Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #16

You cannot play two different games at the same time with your 50ft hdmi cable. Can't people see any usecase for the steam machine? I understand, you are not in the market for it. I am, I have a good usecase which possibly will make the cost drop below a ps5 over the years (if you include games cost)

> Can't people see any usecase for the steam machine? The only problem with the Steam Machine is the price tbh, and that's mainly Valve having a really bad luck with timing once again. Having a custom-made "Steam Machine" for the past 3 years thanks to ChimeraOS, it really changed the way I play for the better. I can play on my couch with my son and wife, and it made my wife (who wasn't really into gaming) buy a Stea…

>The only problem with the Steam Machine is the price tbh

It's not just the price, it's more like the hardware that is dated on arrival(weaker than a 2020 PS5) and customers are expected to use for 6+ years into the future when more and more new games are demanding RT.

Is not a problem for Nintendo to ship dated HW, sine one it's cheap, and two, since developers will walk through fire to optimize games for the Switch but that's because they're Nintendo and they ship tens of millions of Switches while Steam Boxes will not sell in such numbers to warrant this level of extra developer effort.

Good if you're only intro playing older games or are willing to stomach a lot of upscaling and low graphics setting or must have a just-works linux PC, but given the price and performance this isn't gonna be a mass appeal product.

>and that's mainly Valve having a really bad luck with timing once again.

You know the saying "you make your own luck? Or the saying "luck is opportunity meets preparation"?

So, no, it's not bad luck, it's that the problem with Valve is they just take forever to launch a product. Which is fine for stuff like Steam or games that you can keep delaying and delaying until you get it just right exactly the way you want it, but HW has a limited shelf life where it's most valuable and once you lock in a BOM, you're on the clock to get it out the door and need to haul ass. See the titanic efforts Microsoft put into launching Xbox and Xbox 360 on schedule, it was a rootless bloodbath, as all consumer HW is, but if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

So there's no bad luck here, just bad preparation on their part. Valve could have easily launched this earlier if they just spent less time trying to engineer everything from scratch with custom parts just to fit the HW inside a cube as small as possible just to flex their HW design skills, and instead just focus on quickly getting the HW in another boring VCR box into consumers hands ASAP the way MS did it with the first Xbox.

The whole point of the Steam Box is the Steam ecosystem centered around just-works Linux emulation of windows games, not the box being an engineering and design marvel, so speeding so much time on perfecting the form for a first gen product, was pointless endeavour that cost them the product launch.

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