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Steam Machine

store.steampowered.com

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Re: Steam Machine

#911

Post by bigfishrunning »

neya wrote: post #803
lazyfanatic42 wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve respects its customers. It is so insane that this isn't a norm; what a world we would be in if all companies did so.

Gamers are a passionate bunch. Screwing around with them is a losing game that no one has historically ever won. And also because a lot of their competitors fucked up to pave the road for them (Think Sony's PS fiasco, Microsoft's X-Box clusterfuck from which they're yet to recover from, a decade later). Valve has gotten alot of billion dollar lessons in here that Valve got for free.

The PlayStation seems pretty successful, not sure what "PS fiasco" you're referring to. The stock price is doing fine, at any rate

Re: Steam Machine

#912

Post by coconut08 »

koolala wrote: post #650
coconut08 wrote: post #483

the 8gb vram is very concerning to me. it claims to be 4k ready and 8gb of vram is nowhere near enough for 4k gaming natively. they say that this is offset by using fsr upscaling, which is fine, but then you need whatever amount of vram that is necessary for running the game at 1440p or 1080p and then additional vram for the fsr. this will be fine for casual games or even AA games, but I can't imagine AAA gaming on t…

Does FSR use less ram since it is upscaled? Same ram requirements as 1440p?

4k fsr uses less vram than native 4k but more vram than native 1440p

Re: Steam Machine

#913

Post by terribleperson »

0xWTF wrote: post #838

USB2-A ... what? Why? It's almost 2026. Apple hasn't shipped USB-A since 2017. But ok, apparently there's a bunch of PC folks still rocking USB-A. Cool, love that for them. But why not make them all USB3-A?

The answer to why not all USB3 A is probably PCIe lanes. AM4 and AM5 are absolutely starved for PCIe lanes.

It could also just be a cost issue.

Re: Steam Machine

#914

Post by surajrmal »

SmallDeadGuy wrote: post #804
surajrmal wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a heavy gamer in 2004 and never played HL2 or DOOM3. I know many such people. I think games like Mario party, smash, and Mario kart were far more ubiquitous.

That just sounds like all you had access to was a Nintendo console, not necessarily due to your own choice. I missed out on all the early zelda, metroid, and mario home console games because we were a playstation family until the wii.

I played plenty of PC games such as Warcraft, StarCraft, and random stuff on steam. I was just not much into FPS (although TF2 was an exception). I also had all 3 consoles (all of my teenage paychecks went into games), but I think it was really Nintendo games which were commonly played by everyone I knew. Even if you didn't have one you'd play them via local multiplayer at someone's house.

Re: Steam Machine

#915

Post by parineum »

tagyro wrote: post #407

[off-topic rant] Two companies, both (quasi) monopolies in their field. Company A built its fortune by exploiting people. Company B built its fortune by building (somewhat) decent products. Company A developed a very advanced approach to hiring: specific questions to assess a candidate’s psychometric profile, screens to weed out bad choices, and a laser focus on the "top 0.1%". Company B made it very public that hiri…

> Company A built its fortune by exploiting people.

> Company B built its fortune by building (somewhat) decent products.

It's the same thing.

Re: Steam Machine

#916

Post by amlib »

gorgoiler wrote: post #874
CupricTea wrote: post #847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still remember when Valve first showed an early alpha unreleased version of Steam running natively in Ubuntu for the first time in the early 2010s. It blew my mind that a major company, especially an entertainment company, was targeting Linux at this scale. Of course, Wine was very lackluster in those days, and for a while I was worried they'd eventually give up with the monumental effort that would be involved in…

Halflife2 ran perfectly under WINE. At the time I assumed that it was a win for WINE but with hindsight — and typing this out makes me feel so naive! — was HL2 optimized for WINE in order to make WINE more successful? Of course it must have been! It’s a shame the connotations are negative because this ironic comment otherwise works quite well: This large wooden horse is such an extravagant gift, it has to have some s…

It ran fine as in not crashing, but you were limited to dx8 or maybe dx9a feature set which limited many visual effects and there were significant performance issues originating from wine's reliance on translating dx to opengl, lack of offloading cpu grpahics "command lists" (or whatever it's called) to a deditacted thread and the disjointed state of linux graphics at the time... It took until about 2013 for wine staging to run hl2 properly with multi core rendering and with all bells and wistle, but performance was still inferior.

I think linux graphics were only good when paired with the right version of red hat and nvidia drivers on a supported workstation dedicated for running proprietary 3d/vfx software packages as an alternative to the aging SGI workstations. Every other use case was pretty rough... until about 2017 when things began to change massively, and finally now, where you can actually get better experiences than freaking windows on most use cases.

Re: Steam Machine

#917

Post by FloatArtifact »

One disappointment is that's not geared towards media playback or apps like netflix. In the interviews, they mention relying on the web-based versions of apps. Unfortunately, they often come with artificial limitations (limited streaming quality) by companies such as Netflix.

Re: Steam Machine

#918

Post by adorton »

FloatArtifact wrote: post #917

One disappointment is that's not geared towards media playback or apps like netflix. In the interviews, they mention relying on the web-based versions of apps. Unfortunately, they often come with artificial limitations (limited streaming quality) by companies such as Netflix.

It's a computer that runs Linux.

Re: Steam Machine

#919

Post by jack1243star »

spookie wrote: post #888
DiskoHexyl wrote: post #769

SteamOS has way more appeal to gamers in 2025 than it could have had in, say, 2004. On the surface the lack of popular multiplayer titles that require a kernel-level anti-cheat is a heavy downside, but gaming is extremely fragmented these days. In 2004 everyone, save for the casual players, at least tried DOOM3 and Half-Life 2. In 2025 Fortnight has an all-time peak of 12M players, but at the same time there are many…

Eh multiplayer games are doomed. Computer vision based cheats using an external machine that records the game's final rendered frames, process them with specialized YOLO models, and control "mices" and "controllers" to aim for you already exist. If the aim for kernel level anti-cheats was to combat cheating, they have failed and are completely worthless.

That's like saying online banking is doomed because rubber-hose cryptanalysis exists. The defense does not have to stop 100% of the exploits to be effective.

I hate kernel level anti-cheats but they do provide friction and reduce cheating.

Re: Steam Machine

#920

Post by tanaros »

happy-dude wrote: post #906
beAbU wrote: post #886

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this needs to be a theory. Valve regards Microsoft's flirtations with walled gardens (MS Store) as an existential threat. They see their investment into linux gaming as a hedge against future locked down windows OS, which is at this point probably inevitable.

Absolutely. This is a long term strategy stemming from the moment Microsoft spawned their app store. A lot of people are missing the fact that the Steam Frame is Valve's attempt at staking a position in the wide-open and malleable VR space. With Google, they identified that Microsoft developing their own search engine as an existential threat. Additionally, Internet Explorer being the only bottleneck for the web as a…

> A lot of people are missing the fact that the Steam Frame is Valve's attempt at staking a position in the wide-open and malleable VR space.

It is their third attempt.

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