Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

igalia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 327 posts

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#241

Post by virtue3 »

rpdillon wrote: post #231
iinnPP wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget mystery boxes for real toys and things like mini brands. Though I am not outspoken about it, I think individuals need to come to terms with telling themselves no. Otherwise we need to outlaw everything bad and open to abuse to specific individuals. Things such as cake, donuts, coffee, etc.

> Though I am not outspoken about it, I think individuals need to come to terms with telling themselves no. This really resonates with me. I feel like self-control has gone out of fashion, but it has a lot of merit.

I think it's difficult to just call things "self control" when there have been entire college majors / studies / casinos dedicated to tricking us into making the choices they want.

Look at the Apple price ladder on ipads. Look at any tactic by a casino - go to Reno and see many retires at the beginning of the month drop their whole social security check in the casino. Look at why they label things $9.99 instead of $10.00 Look at why they put all the overpriced candy at the cash register in a super market. Look at how they create junk food to be "perfect" and addictive source: https://archive.globalpolicy.org/world-hunger/trade-and-food... I have a lot of friends that stopped playing gacha games because they would come home drunk - the game would incentivize you to login - and then blow more money than they truly wanted to.

At some level it's unfair to say we should just "have self control" when you have entire academic institutions and entire industries figuring out how to get you to "crack" and make a bad decision that favors their pocket book.

So yeah - I agree - we need more self control - but it's being purposefully assaulted every second of our day by EVERYTHING.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#242

Post by ndriscoll »

jakeec wrote: post #220
RobotToaster wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing that an always-on DRM company can become the "good guy" by staying the same level of asshole they've always been, while every other company became much worse assholes.

Because in practice that "always-on DRM" is actually just purely an advantage for the customer with zero downsides. It only sounds like you're making a good point when you frame "provides the best shopping and library experience in gaming" in the least charitable way possible. The Valve hate-boner is so weird.

There are disadvantages. e.g. if you don't want to update a program (maybe the new version breaks your modded setup), too bad. Or if you need Windows still for compatibility, it no longer supports Windows 7, so you have to go hunting for old versions of the client and fiddle with it to prevent updates (if that still even works), at which point you'd might as well just mod it to remove the DRM instead.

Basically, it creates a failure point for setups that should otherwise last and be stable several more decades.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#243

Post by teaearlgraycold »

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).

Why couldn’t they have an AMD GPU and an ARM CPU?

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#244

Post by jayd16 »

swiftcoder wrote: post #176
jcelerier wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But even the most powerful apple silicon GPU is terrible compared to an average Nvidia chip

While I agree with the general point, this statement is factually incorrect - apple's most powerful laptop GPU punches right about the same as the laptop SKU of the RTX 4070, and the desktop Ultra variant punches up with a 5070ti. I'd say on both fronts that is well above the average.

Are there real world game benchmarks for this or are these synthetic tests?

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#245

Post by TulliusCicero »

jakeec wrote: post #217
nolok wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with loot crates, and the reason why they're being slowly regulated against in several places, is that "sensible people don't buy them" has never stopped people to lose their life to gambling.

I hope everyone who is so outspoken about loot crates are also fighting for TCG packs to be banned/regulated because they are literally the same level of "gambling".

There's definitely a double standard in the gaming community where people don't treat TCG packs as ethically fraught in the same way, despite being the same thing.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#246

Post by TulliusCicero »

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.

On a personal level I just don't give a shit about the loot crates or cosmetic stuff because I don't buy them, they hold no interest for me, and they typically don't impact gameplay.

I acknowledge that there's a legitimate ethical concern there the same way there is for, say, Magic the Gathering or other card games. But much like MtG, I can't bring myself to be all that upset about it.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#247

Post by jayd16 »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #243
l11r wrote: post #71

Earlier 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).

Why couldn’t they have an AMD GPU and an ARM CPU?

Does something like that exist on the AMD side?

You're basically describing nVidia's Tegra line. The latest is in the Switch 2 I believe.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#248

Post by jayd16 »

sitharus wrote: post #131
madeofpalk wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can’t someone else make one?

Because it’s a proprietary design? You’d have to reverse-engineer the whole chip, which is really hard to do on that process node

Giving them some credit, I think they're asking "why isn't there a close competitor" and that takes a much more involved answer.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#249

Post by roody15 »

msy wrote: post #185
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…

The real secret sauce is that Valve is private and doesn't have external investors. As soon as you're owners are primarily interested in short term capital extraction everything else is inevitable.

I think you are correct here. If you want to look at the decline of the US ... this is perhaps a good place to start. Short term capital extraction little long term strategic planning. Maybe Cisco is a good example.. lets move all of our switch hardware production to China and still charge the consumer 3500$ per switch. Equals short term gain, makes lots of millinaires... and then just a few years later.. now Huawei makes excellent switches that are mostly on par with Cisco at a better price point.

Re: Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

#250

Post by jayd16 »

MindSpunk wrote: post #109
l11r wrote: post #71

Earlier 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…

What about the Switch 2 (nVidia's Tegra) line? The one in the Swich 2 is using Ampere architecture.

That should be feasible, no?

Post reply on HN