Valve Claims Steam Machine Outperforms 70% of Current Gaming PCs
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3 meters away from a 55" TV gives you a very poor 23 degree viewing angle, let alone 4. The maximum SMPTE recommended viewing distance for that screen size in 16:9 is 2.3m.
In other words, for 4K to stop being perceivable, you have to make your experience worse in other ways.
Yeah, we sit about 2 meters from our 100" projector screen lol
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I saw a really good video from someone who seemed very well-informed do a bill of materials analysis and come to the conclusion that it will be priced between $449 and $599 depending on how aggressive Valve wants to be, with the caveat that the current tariffs and RAM pricing could throw that off. The BOM for it totaled $425, from what I recall. It seemed like quite a bit better analysis than the wild guesses some other people have been throwing out, like $1200, etc.
Here, I found it in my history - someone here on Lemmy had recommended it to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJI3qTb2ze8
I just ordered thebparts for a ~$900 gaming pc that boils down to Ryzen 7500F and Radeon 7600. I’ll believe “priced like a PC” to mean that.
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I have some of the same concerns with the Frame. It is a stabdalone headset, but also just runs Steam games; it’s not its own ecosystem like a Quest which has different versions for the headset vs what you stream from PC. But I haven’t seen much hands-on stuff other than a physical hardware breakdown; never anything running on it.
Like, how well would it run Half-Life Alyx vs how well it might run something like Gorn? How is it gonna handle informing users what games would actually run well in standalone vs PCVR streaming?
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I mean the Steam deck can’t max out most games, and it’s been wildly successful.
The difference is, is that the Steam Deck is a handheld and for what it can do as a handheld is actually impressive. Given how the handheld market is dominated by Nintendo.
The Steam Machine is marketing itself as a console and a PC, two things in where it can be outclassed in.
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You’re missing the point:
4090 with 7900x3d and 850w psu running games at max will generally use about 550w. The same build swapping in a rx 7900xtx is ever so slightly more economical at around 520w. Getting into pissing matches about brand loyalty (when they’re both companies that will ultimately fuck you over for another cent) is stupid, and doesn’t change that this box, if accurate to advertising, does 80% of the work they do at 140w under load (essentially 1/4 the power of your precious amd, which you’d still be using here btw).
It would matter more for the environment if tons of gamers actually had these GPUs but based on what valve is saying here (and the fact that as others have said they likely have very good statistics on the machines accessing steam) they likely don’t. Most fancy GPUs probably go to crypto farms and llm bullshit, which is dumb and means this doesn’t really matter I guess
It literally uses AMD, so you’re just being a fuckwit for saying there is no brand competition here…
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I’m rocking a 2060 with an astounding 6GB VRAM… And the only game that gave me trouble so far is Clair Obscur. I had to close everything else, and use a mod to optimize the graphics.
I’ll blame the shitty Nvidia drivers for Linux though, cause there is no shared RAM, unlike on Windows. 8GB with an AMD card should be fine -if a bit limiting- for a generation, except for high end AAA gaming I guess.
I just replaced that exact card in my machine last week in preparation for dual booting Linux for the first time (I needed a new NVME as a Linux drive and figured I’d future-proof my setup at the same time with an RX 9070 XT for the native AMD drivers), and the only games that I hadn’t been able to run on medium-high settings had been unoptimized games, bad ports, and early access stuff like Monster Hunter: Wilds and Cities Skylines 2.
IMO 8 gigs is plenty for the average person, all things considered.
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It’s fake upscaled 4k from 1080, though.
Fascinating. Is that how the ps5 and Xbox whatever work?
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Alan Wake 2, Indiana Jones, Doom TDA, Stalker 2 all have no fallback lighting option and won’t work on PCs less capable than a Series S or Nintendo Switch 2.
Which is totally fine. Not every game has to support older hardware. Games are allowed to use “newer” tech.
Worth noting that I played Indy at 1600p/60 on an RTX 2080, which is a card from 2018 that I bought used for 200 bucks two years ago. This card can still run every single game out there and most of them extremely well, despite only having 8 GB of VRAM.
The whole debate is way overblown. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t games that could run a whole lot better, but overall, PC gamers with old hardware are still eating good.
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4k is 4x the resolution of 1080p, so that’s not totally surprising. Good thing you did this too, because I was reading some comments just the other day about people’s gaming laptops failing because of repeated/prolongued overheating.
Gaming laptops are notorious for dying from overheating. These things need to be meticulously maintained if you want to use them for their intended purpose for long.
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Depends on Tarriffs. Unfortunately a $500 PC in 2024 can be like an $800 PC now due to Trumpflation.
It would be funny if Steam sold it lower in other countries, and gave the US a special inflated tarrif cost.
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It literally uses AMD, so you’re just being a fuckwit for saying there is no brand competition here…
I think you just have poor reading comprehension bc I literally said it uses amd?
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Gaming laptops are notorious for dying from overheating. These things need to be meticulously maintained if you want to use them for their intended purpose for long.
Interesting, thanks for confirming!
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Valve has incentive on getting developers to make games that will play on lower speced hardware. Also, not everyone cares to pay premium prices for premium specs.
It will do just fine and it should accomplish Valves goals.
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I have some of the same concerns with the Frame. It is a stabdalone headset, but also just runs Steam games; it’s not its own ecosystem like a Quest which has different versions for the headset vs what you stream from PC. But I haven’t seen much hands-on stuff other than a physical hardware breakdown; never anything running on it.
Like, how well would it run Half-Life Alyx vs how well it might run something like Gorn? How is it gonna handle informing users what games would actually run well in standalone vs PCVR streaming?
They are expanding their “steam deck verified” system to cover the Steam Machine and Steam Frame. I have to assume that they will attempt to make that distinction, because I agree, there should be a Steam Frame Platinum (for streaming) and Steam Frame Silver (for on device) or something.
I do hope they take this into account.
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It’ll be a mistake if they just put the tag of 500 dollars on the steam store.
It’ll be much much better if they put a fake price like, 1500 dollars but it’s discounted to 500.
People are dumb enough to fall for that, lol
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Fascinating. Is that how the ps5 and Xbox whatever work?
The PS5 has 4K native support since it has better hardware to go along with its bigger size. It also support 4K AI upscaling from 1080, so in some cases it’s the same, although likely with more FPS. The XBox is probably more of the same.
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I’m sure it does, considering even my old busted laptop has hit the Steam hardware survey before, but it’s not one of my primary gaming PCs.
Another way of saying this is Steam Machine is slower than about 44 million gaming PCs (30% x 147 MAU, a very conservative number since that’s monthly and number of users instead of number of computers).
The fact that its GPU is slower than the 5 year old PS5’s, and it only has 8GB VRAM, makes me question Steam Machine’s longevity. And it apparently can’t do FSR4 cause it’s RDNA3.
It needs to be cheap.
Lol with multiple gaming PCs, you are far far removed from the target consumer. Im pretty sure it will be cheap. Unlike PC hardware manufacturers they can do what the console companies do and price at/below cost and make it up in game sales.
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True. But it doesn’t change the fact that it is still quite crap for a brand new gaming pc/console
Depends on the price point. Obviously, it’s not going to be competitive with a $2K gaming rig. But if the price is right, I might get GabeCubes for my kiddos as their first “desktop” computers. They should run CachyOS flawlessly, since it’s also Arch based, so it will work great as a desktop computer and a gaming rig.
My midrange computer from 3 years ago should outperform it, I would hope. If not, then it’ll be priced out from what I’d consider buying.
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I’m sure it does, considering even my old busted laptop has hit the Steam hardware survey before, but it’s not one of my primary gaming PCs.
Another way of saying this is Steam Machine is slower than about 44 million gaming PCs (30% x 147 MAU, a very conservative number since that’s monthly and number of users instead of number of computers).
The fact that its GPU is slower than the 5 year old PS5’s, and it only has 8GB VRAM, makes me question Steam Machine’s longevity. And it apparently can’t do FSR4 cause it’s RDNA3.
It needs to be cheap.
It needs to be cheap.
However, when comparing to the power of locked up device such as ps5, it never hurts reminds that the supposed GPU processing power of a ps5 doesn’t come for free… even if you’ve fully paid your console. Aside for demos or jailbreaked devices (piracy on console) the only way to run graphics at full potential on the locked ps5 is paying full AAA (which now is settling around 80$/€) for EACH product. There are alternatives in the spending (ie: the Netflix alike from Sony’s store)… but those are only options that Sony allow you to (you can’t run weekly free games from EGS, itch.io… or even web browser games!).
Whatever power you pay for any generic PC potentially cover you in any way: you can play arcade vector games as Asteroid at 4k (or even teorical 32K when the hardware will exists).
The difference Valve could make is showing the topical console gamer customer an easy to use access to it: once they’ll see the light… things may go different also for console-only customers (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo wouldn’t want to lose more customers to Valve’s better deal)
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I think the goal was 4K at 60 fps, but likely varying level of “detail” like you can probably do it with lower detailed settings rather than ultra or epic or what-have-you.
Also while employing FSR3, which requires cooperation from the game.
