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.

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)

Also while employing FSR3, which requires cooperation from the game.

Well, if you are adding my 15yo Core2Quad in the percentage, of course those numbers come easy.

When I was a child and first saw a 3d game, I imagined the lighting to be done by ray-tracing (without the actual name of it, of course).
Until then, I only knew 2d games with no lighting mechanics and just a bunch of pixels for sprites.

It doesn’t read to me like they think it’s impressive. It reads to me like they they are clarifying their market.

A challenge will be how many laptop PC users who game on it because that’s all they have/can afford can be converted into steam machine buyers.

Exactly. The price needs to be roughly on par with consoles. A bit higher due to massively the reduced cost of games on PC, maybe.

I’d reckon anything above $700€ makes this whole thing dead in the water.

They should just sell at a loss the steam games bought will make up for it. Every consol does that, why not this mini pc.

Yeah you can hack it in but that’s not official, which results in what you see: performance is not so great. That video only shows a small performance loss because FSR4 is only outputting to 720p, but making FSR4 output to 4k (like a normal TV) is a much bigger demand. But maybe some specific optimizations can be made.

UE is a bane

54% of all steam users have 16GB RAM or less. 66% has 8GB VRAM or less. 80% of players have 8core CPU or less. 70% of people have a CPU with a 2.3 Ghz to 2.69 Ghz core or less.

70% is not so hard to beat.

Because since it’s unlocked hardware, corporations would buy them all as workstations, and they’d never buy any games. At the end of the day, corporations ruin everything.

Just wanted to post this video. If this tiny undervolted, underpowered, palm sized APU machine can run these games at these FPS, I am willing to bet that steam machines gonna run games without dropping a sweat at 4k.

Also, a portable Steam Deck can run BG3. Steam machines will be fine.

I wish dual CPU motherboards were mainstream.
I could then use the one I am keeping aside, during compilation/encoding tasks.

But my current computer definitely come above on everything other then the VRAM.

While people are a bit over the top. A 960 is a decade old and 3gigs literally wouldn’t be able to turn on with a large number of games released this year even on the lowest settings.

It’s objectively out of date. Hell lanythjng ess then 6 gigs frequently crashes or flat out refuses for the most part.

Your literal hard cut off is basically this year with unreal 5. Ue4 games, most proprietary engines like decima, frostbyte or dandelion all will do fine at 3gigs of vram. But they are last targeting last gen consoles as their low end. So your low end is looking back around 6-8 years.

2025 has been almost exclusively full of games that are finally dropping support entirely for that standard and the new standard is 6-8 gigs of vram minimums and 16-24 gigs of available ram not counting system utilization.

Going forward if you don’t have a 6gig card and 16 gigs of ram. You functionally don’t have a computer that can do new high end games. And fuck that’s not even a hard ask. We NEED to move the fuck on from 3gig cards and 8gigs of ram.

Hell a few games are even pushing for 8gig vram/20gig ram as the minimum. But I doubt that’s going to catch on.

Iv also come across a few Chinese games that flat out won’t install if you have a spinning hard drive in your system at all full stop. Not that you can’t install to one, it flat out won’t let you install it to any drive.

At some point we do need to just move the fuck on and accept hardware is out of date. And a full ten fucking years. Is a pretty damn good arbitrary line. Gaming is a very specific work load and it’s getting noticeable how problematic it is in multiplayer games between having allies with shit computers and good ones.

Having 10+ min wait times after your queue cause a random is working off a low end PC and a spinning drive to start a dungeon in an mmo. Is fucked.

At the moment the only noticeable problem in PC gaming is the existence of spinning drives. Least for multiplayer games.

In a lot of newer games it’s become absurdly noticeable. You have a 5 min queue then your stuck waiting 10 mins on top of that cause some dipshit is loading off a spinning drive.

It’s gotten to the point iv actually seen some Chinese games literally prevent you from installing the game at all. If you have ANY spinning drive in your system. And prevents if from booting the game if you have one in your system. Because it causes that much of a problem. Endless customer complaints of horrid queue and loading times cause your waiting on people with slow drives.

Hard drives no longer are in the just good enough group for new games. It’s been a slow transfer but we are finally starting to see a hard line being draw in the sand. And I don’t expect it to slow down at this point.

At most they have a PC and a work laptop!

That’s just waiting corporate and other entity buying powerful PC for cheap. And Valve won’t get any game sales from it.

Just like PS3 being used as supercomputer.

Most people as in the VAST majority get the cheapest thing they can find and then use it as long as possible.

You functionally are always 5 years ahead of the curve of you buy the best thing available and then use it for 5-7 years.

Yes, but mostly because most of the gaming PCs in Steam’s hardware survey are not really gaming PCs but just some piss poor spec laptops that can still run old games. Just having a dedicated GPU puts it in the top half.

The GPU in this is in the 7600 RX range of things. It’s marketed as a 1080p card. Can certainly hit 4K on older titles, and output 4K with upscaling.

Don’t expect miracles from it. It’s PS5 level hardware. But that’s good enough for most of us.