Valve shows off 'game console' hardware at CES | Hacker News Reader

Valve shows off 'game console' hardware at CES

bbc.co.uk

95 pointswr147236 comments

Was there ever an actual statement from Valve on this? All I see is a company called Xi3 showing of their computer, while making some vague remarks about having received an investment from Valve - whatever that means. Not to doubt it, but if this is really "the thing", I'd like to hear some actual conformation.

Here's some sort of confirmation from a "Valve Official" http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/8/3850952/valve-meeting-with-h...

The PRWire article [1] is somewhat vague on that point, but it does clearly claim that Xi3 received funding from Valve, and that Valve would have a unit at their CES booth as well. [2]

[1] http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/xi3-and-valve-to-unv...

[2] Does Valve often have a booth CES?

It's called a Piston. That's not any sort of confirmation, but it makes it plausible to me that it will be the Steam box.

So you'd imagine it would be some sort of steam powered piston.

Oh, I see what they did there.

And "Valve" is the one letting the steam flow into the piston :)

"Gearbox" was the dev studio started to help them with HL expansion packs.

More pictures and info here: http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve-steam-b...

8 USB ports? Ha wow.

I also found this article interesting as well. It shows them arranged in a server configuration.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/12/2702994/xi3-modular-comput...

I got to see some intel test boards at one point. They tend to put the max number of ports possible during development to make sure the CPU and bus all behave properly. Adding ports after being in dev is really error prone. Removing ports tend to be easier.

Not just test boards - most motherboards nowadays have at least 12 USB ports in total, just people hardly use all the headers in their machines.

4 keyboards and 4 mice. Image projector not included.

possibly for controllers?

For comparison, latest versions of Xbox 360, PS3, Wii and Wii U have 5, 2, 2 and 4 USB ports respectively.

There's no mention in these articles about the most important thing; what kind of GPU is in these if any? If they rely on the HD4000 included in an i3/i5 CPU then they're going to make for really shitty gaming consoles.

Not really. Throughput specwise HD4000 a little better than a XBox 360 or PS3 and way out in front of the Wii. Those are the competing consoles. It's true that it's well behind the discrete GPUs (and frankly no integrated on-SoC solution will ever compete with a separate chip with its own memory bus!).

But it will compete in the existing console market just fine, technically. It's not really clear if extra 3D rendering performance in the console market is really needed; people who want that are already in the PC market anyway.

A PC video card with the same specs as a console video card will perform significantly slower. Console games are optimized on a very low, platform-specific level, which simply isn't feasible on PC. (Not to mention, console ports often have much poorer performance in general.) The HD4000 is actually pretty good for an integrated card and runs a lot of older games well, but it won't run many modern games even on low settings.

I speak from experience on this. For some reason, if your PC is underspecced in the gaphics department, even going down to 640x480 and setting all the graphics settings to low won't make most modern games playable. I don't know why this is the case.

The Steam "box" is unlikely to be treated as much like a true console by developers when it comes to hitting the metal because Valve is still very much committed to the PC market and their public statements about TV gaming suggest they see themselves as only one of many providers for the "Steam on TV" experience.

Unlike a "true" console, they are likely to define a chipset-neutral minimal spec for games, which means the development model will be more PC-like than console-like.

performance wise the hd4000 is actually nowhere near as fast as what's in the 360 or ps3. the intel chips run a lot of stuff in software very very slowly.

for example tf2 a rather non complex game can barely run 1280720 on minimal settings with a hd4000 (<20fps) yet the ati x1950 that i used to own (1ish gen better than the xbox controller from memory) was able to do it in medium quality and 19201080 and significantly more than 60 fps

Apples and Oranges. That X1950 card may be 5 years older than Ivy Bridge, but it's sitting on a DRAM bus with almost twice the bandwidth as the CPU. I suspect it actually will have trouble keeping up with the Intel GPU in shader compute power, but for "non complex games" you're probably fill limited anyway.

Basically you're measuring DRAM with your test. DRAM hasn't changed much over the last decade, and that extra circuit board with all those chips is still a big advantage for some tasks.

But consoles don't have external GPU buses either (sort of, the XBox has some kind of specialized framebuffer-only bus I think).

As long as games released for this console would be regular Linux games runnable on the PC as well, it wouldn't be too bad. But in general old beaten console vs PC gaming arguments stay in place. Console market degrades games quality (interfaces and performance wise), which backfires to PC gaming scene with crippled console versions being adapted for PC by developers with minimal changes, instead of creating normal and rich PC interfaces for games from the beginning.

It looks absolutely beautiful. It seems like it's going to be really expensive compared to regular consoles though.

I think the next set of consoles are going to be a little more expensive than the current generation. At launch, the PS3 was $499 in the US.

Sure, but this one costs $999 unless Valve subsidizes it massively according to this article: http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve-steam-b...

Xi3 also offers the entry level X5A, which is priced at $499

Most consoles sell at a loss, that is the price for a profit, including the cost of windows (while steambox will be linux), and at a manufacturing scale that is probably 1/500th or less of what Valve will be contracting.

Not to mention that may very well not be "the" steambox, as apparently Valve has said they will have multiple prototypes from multiple manufacturers.

And there were plenty of us who gladly paid $599 for the launch PS3 with the bigger hard drive that also included PS2 backward compatibility...

It looks a bit like a fancy cheese grater to me, but to each their own.

A fancy cheese grater sounds much more interesting than the insanely boring/tacky industrial design of the xbox and ps3...

Interesting they left 'Portal' off of Valves most noted games.

you can already have the Steam console experience in your living room if you hook up a computer to your tv. so buying this console wont even be a requirement, if it happens to be underpowered

http://store.steampowered.com/bigpicture/

So this thing is going to be really underpowered compared to a mid-range ($500 or so) gaming rig, right?

If that is true, it would only be like every console made for years...

It is a mid-range gaming rig... with Steam preinstalled.

I wonder how large the power brick will be compared to the size of the console.

"The Xi3 splits the core computer functions into three separate, replaceable components--one for the processor, one for external communications and one for video and power management."

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/220782#

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