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Steam Machine

store.steampowered.com

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Re: Steam Machine

#261

Post by jorvi »

For this to truly become a console replacement, Steam needs to mint agreements with Netflix, Spotify and Discord.

Netflix and Spotify could live as a 'game' application in the store. Spotify also is fairly easy to plug into Steam's overlay music control (currently via Decky plugins).

Discord just needs integration with the Steam Friend List. I know Valve wants Steam Friends to compete with Discord, but that ship has sailed every since 2020 (and frankly, the entire decade before that when they let it languish).

Re: Steam Machine

#262

Post by eigenspace »

mcdow wrote: post #181

Why does Steam/Valve care so much about Linux? I know as devs we all would prefer to use Linux/Unix. But developer experience isn’t a good business justification.

It's because Valve's entire business model is currently reliant on Microsoft not being emboldened to try and lock down software downloads to only occur through the Microsoft Store.

15 or so years ago, Microsoft started making moves in that direction and Valve immediately started trying to build and sell Linux based gaming machines in order to try and protect themselves somewhat from Microsoft. Those Linux gaming machines (Steam Machines 1.0) were a massive failure because they were expensive, and had very very limited game support.

Valve then spent around a decade improving Wine, building Proton, and designing the SteamDeck, which was a great success for them and is now making lots of people take Linux seriously for gaming. Now they're moving up the value chain and trying to make Linux the go-to place for PC gaming.

They've still got a big battle ahead of them, but already Linux users are around 4% of active Steam users, and the Linux experience is rapidly improving. Meanwhile, Microsoft seems to be bleeding goodwill, and is actively pissing off a huge amount of their Windows audience while simultaneously giving up on Xbox, so this is really perfect timing for Valve now.

Re: Steam Machine

#263

Post by MurkyLabs »

artyom wrote: post #258

Oh, c'mon. I've been waiting for that machine for years. So much that I bought the Steam Deck out of frustration b/c it was so close . Two weeks ago I got tired and built a mini-ATX gaming PC with a RTX 5080. Way to go Steam nonetheless. I can get 100% behind a Windows-less gaming future. I may even buy this for a 2nd screen or for the kids.

I mean the specs seem okay but at least your computer will out-perform it. Just install steamOS: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/65B4-2AA3-5F37-42...

Re: Steam Machine

#264

Post by catlover76 »

paxys wrote: post #182

A bit too sparse on details. - No price - No indication for whether the CPU/GPU/RAM/SSD are upgradable or all soldered together on the board. - "4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR" but doesn't mention what kind of games it can run at that quality. - No performance benchmarks, or mention of what the equivalent retail CPU/GPU to their custom one is. At face value this seems like a $500-600 PC, and that's also the price it wo…

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Re: Steam Machine

#265

Post by mindcrash »

paxys wrote: post #182

A bit too sparse on details. - No price - No indication for whether the CPU/GPU/RAM/SSD are upgradable or all soldered together on the board. - "4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR" but doesn't mention what kind of games it can run at that quality. - No performance benchmarks, or mention of what the equivalent retail CPU/GPU to their custom one is. At face value this seems like a $500-600 PC, and that's also the price it wo…

> "No indication for whether the CPU/GPU/RAM/SSD are upgradable or all soldered together on the board"

With 99.9% certainty this box is carrying on the legacy of the Deck and the Deck OLED, which means that it has a 100% custom crafted SoC with soldered components. Which also means they also could perform some trickery not found in "normal" PCs, like UDMA and custom interface.

> "but doesn't mention what kind of games it can run at that quality."

According to the specs it has a custom RDNA 3 chip w/ 28 CUs and boost clock at 2.45Ghz. The Playstation 5 has a custom RDNA 2 chip w/ 36 CUs @ 2.23 GHz and the Xbox Series X has a custom RDNA2 2 chip w/ 52 CUs @ 1.83Ghz.

Given the optimizations AMD made in RDNA 3 (the "budget" 9070XT can easily keep up with the prev gen "enthousiast" 9700XTX) I could make a safe bet it's on the same level of performance as a Playstation 5

> "No performance benchmarks, or mention of what the equivalent retail CPU/GPU to their custom one is."

~7600X, ~RX7700, but like I noted earlier that's meaningless because the overall architecture of the hardware in this box is likely completely incomparable with a generic PC (just like with XBX and PS5, by the way)

Re: Steam Machine

#266

Post by esskay »

legitster wrote: post #242
paxys wrote: post #182

A bit too sparse on details. - No price - No indication for whether the CPU/GPU/RAM/SSD are upgradable or all soldered together on the board. - "4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR" but doesn't mention what kind of games it can run at that quality. - No performance benchmarks, or mention of what the equivalent retail CPU/GPU to their custom one is. At face value this seems like a $500-600 PC, and that's also the price it wo…

> No indication for whether the CPU/GPU/RAM/SSD are upgradable or all soldered together on the board. Almost certainly. This is the direction the industry is heading, and the perverse unavailability of high-end discrete graphics cards is the nail in the coffin. See also the Framework PC.

We do have an indication. The RAM and SSD are both upgradable. The RAM is SODIMM, and storage is NVME

Re: Steam Machine

#267

Post by SpaceNoodled »

stetrain wrote: post #127
teroshan wrote: post #3

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steamframe [1] > Steam Frame is a PC, and runs SteamOS powered by a Snapdragon® 8 Series Processor. With 16GB of RAM, Steam Frame supports stand-alone play on a growing number of both VR and non-VR games without needing to stream from your PC. So Steam + Proton works on aarch64? Is this something already available/supported, or is this an announcement? [1] Steam Frame, which is the…

Just to clarify that's for the Steam Frame VR Headset. The Steam Machine PC uses an AMD Zen 4 x86 CPU.

The headset isn't natively running games, right?

Re: Steam Machine

#268

Post by catlover76 »

mojoe wrote: post #2

Steam is the only reason I have a Windows desktop, I'll probably just get one of these next time I want a hardware refresh (which admittedly will probably be many years). Interesting that it uses KDE Plasma for the desktop

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Re: Steam Machine

#269

Post by rtkwe »

tagyro wrote: post #178
rtkwe wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be wrong C to A is still pretty standard for controllers in my experience. As for gigabit fewer and fewer people have ethernet routed to their office/TV area much less >1gig networking to take advantage of anything better than a 1 gig.

mmm ...let's agree to disagree I wired my whole place with 10Gb - couldn't do it in the wall (as in, hidden) so I have flat cables around the door frame and wall corners. I was willing to accept the cables, just to get 10Gb. And, IMHO, it's worth it.

Not sure what we're disagreeing about, I'm not saying it's not a useful thing to have just that most people don't have it and don't intend to have it so it's not a useful spec bump for Valve to spend money on.

I'm personally planning on going through the pain to get ethernet run (luckily I have both a basement and an attic so it should be fairly easy) in my house and if I ever build new there will be whatever is the best standard at the time in the walls (and maybe some dark fiber but I'm less sure on that) but I also know I'm a vast minority of users at the same time. I'm also in a pretty big minority having a >1 gig symmetrical pipe into my house to make a 10 gig connection to my devices actually worth while.

Re: Steam Machine

#270

Post by esskay »

WXLCKNO wrote: post #110
12_throw_away wrote: post #31

In this big hardware refresh, honestly most excited about finally getting a new steam controller [1], which feels like it might finally give us a better, more extensible standard than the extremely outdated XInput protocol (which still doesn't even support motion controls) [1] https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steamcontroller

I love my OG steam controller still. I can't tell if this new one has the dual stage triggers like the og (like if there's an additional click on full trigger pull). I used that to set things like boost in rocket League and it felt super intuitive.

According to digital foundry it does have dual stage triggers
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