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Steam Machine

store.steampowered.com

291–300 of 1001 posts

Re: Steam Machine

#291
post #29

Pretty much the only reason I boot to Windows anymore is to play games with my kids and family. The direction of this thing is dangerously close to being all I'd care about from a desktop computer. If Valve pivoted into making a well-supported laptop with good hardware that ran Linux and played games...

Like other commenters, I also recently made the switch. Figured I would dual-boot windows but have never needed to boot it back up again.

ProtonDB is a goldmine when a game doesn't work. Oh, and switching from Nvidia GPU to AMD GPU seems to have worked great to get games to "just work".

Re: Steam Machine

#292
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow this looks great. Foveated streaming, great resolution, wireless, 144hz, looks much more comfortable... As much as I want this, I feel like it'll end up being a really cool thing that just sits on the shelf. Edit: foveated streaming , not rendering

My NVIDIA Shield is getting old and slow. I can see this as a good replacement, because it supports HDMI CEC, so you can control it with your remote control. Install Plex, JellyFin, FreeTube et.al. to it and you have a nice open source TV box. You also get 4k gaming from Steam, GOG, Epic etc. and you get emulators. I've been wanting to build a computer like this, but CEC is hard to find and the adapters that exist do…

The specs for this steam machine say HDMI 2.0, in the past I used a pulse8 HDMI CEC USB dongle with a computer which was also HDMI 2.0 iirc. I was using a 1080p projector with it but their website claims 4k support: https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-adapter

I recently replaced a shield with an Ugoos Am6b+ running coreELEC, which works okay and supports some stuff the shield doesn't but I miss being able to run some android apps easily. I wonder if the new steam machine will support DV.

Re: Steam Machine

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, in the same way that a Quest 3 can run BeatSaber and other similar calibre games.

For more demanding games it's designed to stream from a PC.

Re: Steam Machine

#294
post #122

Being able to play PC-ish games without Windows (all on its own) makes this pretty interesting. Looking forward to seeing its real world performance. The fact that it doesn't take up the space of a household appliance is a plus too.

What exactly do you mean by "pc-ish"? Setting aside steam deck, are you aware that you can already install steam on linux and play many games [0]? Are you aware of Bazzite [1]? 0 - https://www.protondb.com/ 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazzite_(operating_system)

Long time veteran Linux user. I was not able to get anything to run on Steam. It's some sort of display driver issue/conflict, but if it takes me longer than an hour, I'm over it.

Re: Steam Machine

#295
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very low end Radeon 7000 series. It's absolutely incapable of the highest texture quality and rendering resolutions that need more than 8GB of VRAM. You'll likely never go above 1080p on this card (1440p is going to be rough based on benchmarks of the existing low end 7000 series). There's absolutely no reasonable way to use more than 8GB of VRAM on this card.

Even modern low-end GPUs should have more than enough fill rate for high-res textures. The texture quality setting in games is usually not affecting performance at all until VRAM runs out.

Part of that is that the texture detail scales to the point where on a low end card at low resolutions you aren’t seeing any difference between high and low detail textures.

Re: Steam Machine

#296
post #250
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve has been quietly working on integrating the FEX x86 emulator into Proton for a while, and it's official now. https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/gaming-headsets/han...

Have to wonder if there is a world where Proton comes to macOS.

Pretty unlikely as long as Apple refuses to support Vulkan. Even if they did, the whole Proton project is about Valve controlling their own destiny rather than being chained to someone else's platform, and Apple is just another Microsoft in that regard.

Re: Steam Machine

#297
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…

All my friends have moved on to PC, and I don't really want to build a $1000 minimum computer with crazy LEDs that takes up a ton of space with a monitor at this point in my life. And SteamDeck doesn't support KB+M well.

I have no qualms about couch gaming with a KB+M if I can do it with my friends and my already extensive Steam library. Unless they completely drop the ball on this, I'm in.

Re: Steam Machine

#298
post #212

Huh, I had just been trying to look into whether there existed a "mini PC but with a GPU in it that's at least as good as the ones in game consoles." (Or, to put that another way: fundamentally, I want a game console — a piece of well-integrated consumer electronics that lives unobtrusively in my entertainment center, hooked up to my TV, requiring no maintenance, controlled entirely with a Bluetooth gamepad. But I wa…

probably exactly what you need! :)

Re: Steam Machine

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Pop_OS, buggy as hell but steam games work great! Everything is kinda a dumpster fire, but they nailed steam games.

Pop_OS is pretty rough. Theyre running on a super outdated base while working on COSMIC

The pop shop app being single threaded is just embarrassing. Do a search, the entire UI freezes up until the search is complete.

Also updates regularly break my KDE session and I have to restart my display server.

Sometimes I have to switch to a tty and back to my graphical console to get my display back.

It is a mess all around.

I haven't managed to get my GPU working in Docker, ugh.

That said, it does work. Mostly.

Re: Steam Machine

#300
post #106

> you can wake your Steam Machine without leaving your couch. [using the built in steam controller wireless adapter]. This one simple thing is the only thing that makes my SteamDeck+Dock feel like a second class console. So far they only claim it's for the Steam Controller, but I'd be great if it worked with the handful of 8bitdo or Switch controllers I've been using.

Waking up the deck works for me with my xbox controller connected via bluetooth. Are you using those controllers via BT or USB? Edit: Now that I think about it, this might have been a feature added to the OLED model.

Yes, the OLED model has a different Bluetooth controller and iirc that's the main reason. Though Valve has been working on trying to backport it to the original models as well.
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