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Comment by Ekaros | Hacker News Reader

>RAM 16GB DDR5 + 8GB GDDR6 VRAM

Hmm. Not that it is big deal, but I would be somewhat worried about true longevity with the VRAM. Not sure if SteamOS helps there, but on PC some new titles are going over the 8GB VRAM.

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Games publishers/developers are going to have to wind in their necks a little. Whilst memory is abundant it's also still quite expensive. We should still be aiming for efficiency and the chances are 16gb+ are in the minority here. Fact is, the more VRAM and compute you demand the smaller your customer-base becomes.

I've played many games with 8GB VRAM* and will do so for the forseeable. If that's not enough, I am not a customer. Simple as.

The truth is, there is going to be a massive motivation with the likes of Steam Deck/Machine to actually make titles that are optimised and perform well within their hardware parameters. It's money you won't want to ignore.

*One example was Silent Hill remake on PC, which used the unreal engine. It was optimised beautifully and ran without visual glitches and stutters even with the highest graphic demands on a 8GB RTX

I think it does also help that a big chunk of Steams userbase are playing smaller indie titles that don't need obscene amounts of vram. The steam deck audience for example has a lot of people playing both a mix of AAA and smaller games. Given this is advertised as 6x as powerful as the deck I'm sure they'll be fine. It's not meant to be a top of the line console thats for sure, and if it was people would be moaning that its too expensive.

Not using the highest settings obviously but i can run RD2 and CP2077 on the deck fine.

It will be a while before there is ps6 or new xbox.

oh 100% I've completed CP, RD2, Fallout 4, and god knows how many other games, it handles it all like a champ. Valves clearly following their own hardware survey results on their hardware plans as the modest specs are better than what most people active on steam are using right now so I think it'll be fine

Memory is also not that abundant anymore. Over the last month PC memory costs have more than doubled due to AI datacenter builds buying out all the manufacturing capacity.

This. Absolutely this. It is complete bonkers to suggest that game devs dictate consumer hardware, insane to run the asylum.

All game development should follow Nintendo model: there’s a fixed hardware and game devs should go out of their way to optimize to the spec, not consumer shelling out thousands every years because someone can’t be bothered to optimize their cashgrab.

One of the things I've noted for a while is that PC gaming as a platform seems to be polarizing between high and low spec, especially if you look outside of North America/Western Europe to places like South America or SE Asia. The steam deck and now this seem to be a reference/target platform for the low spec group. It might not be able to play the prestigious high spec titles well if at all, but so long as "your mileage may vary" is messaged well I can't see it being a problem, it hasn't so far.

There's a certain category of person who spends thousands of dollars seemingly just to see bigger numbers in benchmarks and to flex their consumerism on people. I've seen quite a lot of commenting about how certain games are "unplayable" on the steam deck, games which I have been playing just fine. I just turn the settings down to low and enjoy the game.

The main appeal of a console (for both consumers and developers) is that's it's a "stupid" and "fixed" device. Your game either runs well on it or it doesn't, but you can always count on this remaining consistent prior to shipping it.

If Steam Machine gains enough foothold, it will be treated like a console. It won't run the latest title in 4K@120, but the title will still run great on default settings.

Honestly I'm hoping the steam machine is gonna put some pressure on game devs to knock it off with the absurdly high spec requirements. There's plenty of modern titles that require a top of the line card that don't look any better than 10yr old games.

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.

No DisplayPort 2.0 is interesting because RDNA3 should support that.

More importantly, FSR4 (currently) doesn't support RDNA3, so you'll be limited on upscaling too.

Unofficially you can use FSR4 on RDNA3

it meets or exceeds the ps5 and xbox series x, so it might not be top tier, but it'll be fine. I have a plenty good time on my series x, cant think of any stutters.

Both consoles allow more than 8GB to be used for the integrated GPU.

Actually looks like its just _slightly_ less powerful than them.

You always have the option of streaming a game, though.

8 GB is good enough for most everything, and can you stream on an exception basis, if something truly demanding catches your eye.

It should be good enough for any game with a toggle on textures quality, which is pretty much every big title for the foreseeable future?

Not sure how heavy SteamOS is, but wouldn't modern games actually prefer a flipped memory configuration? So, 8 GB RAM and 16 GB VRAM would make this a more 'balanced' gaming appliance. But it is advertised as a general purpose PC, so 8 GB RAM wouldn't be enough.

The RAM's upgradable, it's standard DDR5 on a SODIMM module

8GB just isn't enough for modern AAA games. Battlefield 6, probably the most highly optimized AAA game to have come out in the past few years, still has a 16GB RAM minimum and Arc Raiders, which is also incredibly optimized, still has a 12GB minimum. Games are only going to become more resource hungry from here, so 8GB in early 2026 would be a terrible idea.

https://www.ea.com/en/games/battlefield/battlefield-6/system...

    Minimum PC System Requirements

    OS: Windows 10 (Proton, maybe, probably anti-cheat issues)
    Processor(AMD): AMD Ryzen 5 2600 (Yep √ )
    . . .
    Memory: 16GB (Yep, 16GB of system RAM √ )
    Graphics Card(AMD): AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT 6GB (8 GB of RAM √ )

I do agree 8GB of VRAM is a little low for a device to release in 2026 though. But it technically does meet all memory requirements for Battlefield 6.

I was replying to a comment saying it would be better if the Steam Machine had 8GB of RAM and 16GB of VRAM. My point being that 8GB of RAM, not VRAM, would not be sufficient.

> Games are only going to become more resource hungry from here, so 8GB in early 2026 would be a terrible idea.

Game developers better start preparing to optimize their shit, then.

> most highly optimized AAA game to have come out in the past few years, still has a 16GB RAM minimum.

Are you talking about VRAM or system RAM? Steam machine has 16GB of system RAM and is expandable. VRAM is limited to 8GB.

I'm talking about RAM. Otherwise I would've written VRAM. I was replying to a comment saying it would be better if the Steam Machine had 8GB of RAM and 16GB of VRAM.

Battlefield 6 being "highly optimized" is a joke.

Runs pretty poorly on a RTX 4080 with 5800X3D @ 1440p.

It also legitimately looks worse than the Battlefields that predate it, even up to Battlefield 1, which is over a decade old now.

A better example is Arc Raiders.

Sorry, no. You're wrong. It's extremely optimized. I get 60-100 FPS on a 3060. It's ridiculously optimized. If you're having issues, it's particular to your system for some reason.

I remember 2042 being significantly worse when it launched. I've also played almost every other AAA launch of recent years from Elden Ring to Borderlands 4. They all run worse than BF6, even now.

And it most definitely does NOT look worse than previous Battlefields. OP has a problem with his setup.

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