Most Steam Machines are Nvidia based, which makes sense, they have the best drivers, and they're generally 1:1 as performant as their windows drivers. I have a GTX970 in my Ubuntu machine and it rocks, supports my gsync monitor and everything; trumping console performance is pretty much a no-brainer with modern nvidia maxwell stuff...
I hope you are joking, because branding-wise the Steam Machines are a clear mess and completely confusing for people who don't know how to read PC specs. Hell, you have Steam Machines planned with only Intel HD graphics and also called "Steam Machines" just like the Alienware Alpha and the Syber ones, while power-wise they fall in totally different categories. That's the best way to kill your brand, at least 3DO never did that kind of mistake.
> they're generally 1:1 as performant as their windows drivers.
No, this is clearly false. I don't know where you get this impression, check almost every benchmark out therefore for Borderlands 2, CS:GO, Witcher 2, Bioshock Infinite and almost every other AAA game out there, you will see that the Linux performance is clearly behind. I'm a Linux gamer as well but at least I don't pretend we are at the same level as Windows, because that's a clear lie at this point.
> trumping console performance is pretty much a no-brainer with modern nvidia maxwell stuff...
It should be, but many ports on Linux are far from being optimized (some rely on OpenGL 3.x to maintain compatibility with AMD while it's clearly less efficient than OpenGL 4.x calls) while console ports are much more likely to be tested thoroughly on a single hardware based and optimized for it.
Replace "Steam Machines" with "Andriod" and you could make the exact same arguments. And the thing is people have, and they have been to an extent completely correct. But, I don't think you would say Android hasn't been a very successful bet for Google, despite the fragmentation and huge range of quality for different mobile devices, and the problems with branding they have. What I'm seeing is Valve trying to make the exact same play in the console world, where Microsoft and Sony have it locked down very much the same way Apple did (or was on the way to doing) with the smartphones. They want to break people out of those walled gardens and bring them into their ecosystem, and they're going to provide an open platform for any hardware maker to do it, just like Android did.
Of course mobile phones and consoles are two different industries, it might play out in a similar way or it might play out completely differently. But I think it's a bit premature to write it off as ridiculous or even a bad idea from the start when there is precedent for this sort of strategy working in other industries. It certainly has a chance of playing out well for Valve, branding and fragmentation be damned, as long as it opens up a much larger audience to Steam.
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/
And every time I've looked at that list, Intel integrated graphics have been fairly prominent.
Some of the arguments against the steam machines make me feel like I've fallen into some weird "console vs pc" propaganda war, rather than a factual discussion about business strategies.
For consoles, the choice is already very clear out there and the well known brands are Xbox, Nintendo and Sony, period. You can see how nVidia is struggling to establish their Shield brand in the market by the way, as a good indication of how hard it is to enter the market. There is nobody who "needs" Steam Machines out there right now, because they already either have a console, a PC or both if they actually care.
And additionally, Valve is too risk-averse to actually build and sell hardware by themselves (or even take a NEXUS approach like Google), which makes me think they don't even believe in the Steam Machines themselves. We will see.
I just about understand nvidia cards and the numbering system, but how they interact with i5/i7 and different memory?
(cue 1,000 geeks who will try and educate me)
I just want to buy a box that is better than XBoxOne at the same price. At this rate I think a used XBoxOne off ebay is a better option. Let steam machines bake for a year or so.
The worst thing that can happen for steam machines is when 99 people buy the budget version and 1 person buys the dream machine, the 99 people see the dream machine beat their budget machines and now you've got 99 disappointed customers and 1 happy customer.
This doesn't happen with playstation, wiiU or xbox. Steam machines are going to fail and I'm pretty gutted about that.
Give me a solid number so I can compare machines quickly. How much Steam does my SteamMachine have?
Even if you include a date - "Steam 2016 grade 1" you're going to need some kind of comparison table to work out if your game ("runs on 'steam 2017 grade 3'") will work on your machine or not.
After a recent review of low-end (well, compared to an i7) AMD apus paired with high-end gpus[1], I'm not even sure most "professionals" can get anything meaningful out of specs alone. Sure an i7 with ddr4 is "better" than a dual-core AMD APU -- but if your target is 1080p gaming, it might not be much of a difference -- given the same GPU.
So it shouldn't be that hard make the statement "runs on Steambox rated 24 or higher" be true for all generations of steamboxes. Even when that'll have to be changed from 24 to 24000.
[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/9307/the-kaveri-refresh-godava...
Honestly the XboxOne has more value, right now, than the Steam Machines in terms of how well games will run on it. But you can say that the Steam Machines may have more games (but not as many that you can play with a joypad - since some PC games require a keyboard anyway). It's not a straightforward comparison, and it depends a lot on what games you want to play in the end. If you want AAA games, right now it looks like the Xbox one is a better option, but maybe that will change later in 2016. Who knows...
> now you've got 99 disappointed customers and 1 happy customer.
Which is precisely why they should have setup minimum specs for their Steam Machines, or at least have a Valve Steam Machine that sets the standard. But Valve did not do that, and I am also concerned they will fail precisely because of that.
Apparently the steam controller is designed to be a suitable replacement for a keyboard/mouse, and will include a system for sharing controller mappings for games over steam.
I have tried the Steam controller (the beta version from a while ago) and it is certainly not as easy to use at they make it look like. It certainly takes a while to get used to it.
So it might require practise, but according to this anecdotal evidence, it has the potential (if your dedicated enough) to form a suitable replacement.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/38jcel/introducing_th...
[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/38jcel/introducing_th...
The entire point of Steam Machines is not to deal with this, just buy the cheapest Alienware, done. If you care about that sort of thing, you buy a different one.
> check almost every benchmark out therefore for Borderlands 2, CS:GO, Witcher 2, Bioshock Infinite and almost every other AAA game out there.
Doesn't matter. I have an Alienware Alpha and I can get 60 fps on every one of these games in SteamOS, as least as good as the modern consoles, Windows performance it depends; some are better, some are not; all TVs and projectors are 60hz, so unless someone is coming out with 144hz gsync TVs, then it's more than fine.
Sure, we get boned by games like Dying Light, but that's just software, totally fixable.
> t should be, but many ports on Linux are far from being optimized
You could make that argument about any crossplatform game.
Except that obviously won't work. In the console world I really don't have to deal with this. I buy a PS4 at launch and I can play every PS4 game that comes out from now until they stop making PS4 games. That is obviously not with Steam Machines. Will the cheapest Steam Machine play every SteamOS game that comes out in 2 years time without problem? If the answer is 'no' then it is something that I have to be aware of and deal with.
The other option is that Valve steps in and says that if you want your game to be SteamOS certified it must be optimized to run well on the slowest Steam Machine we've ever released, but I wonder if they're willing to that. Can you imagine telling game developers in 2017 that they must make their games work fine on 2015 era Intel graphics cards?
This is totally fine for loads of indie games already. And If you replace 2015 with 2013, of course you could do this. PC technology has slowed down a lot compared to 10 years ago, and it's not the constant upgrading it used to be.
You know that VR is coming right?
You can play 2017 games on lower graphics quality (the same quality you get in 2015 games now) just like the consoles. Even if the games they get on the PS4 in 2017 are new, they are bound to remain the same quality in graphics.
Decades? Decade, maybe. But then again they where still releasing PS2 games a decade after the PS2 came out and they'll almost certainly be releasing PS3 and Xbox360 games a decade after those consoles came out too.
No doubt that there will be lots of games coming out in both 2017 and 2020 that will run just fine on a 2015 steam machine, but unless it is ever single game they release for SteamOS, then we're right back to the classic PC gaming problem and you've lost the only real competitive advantage that consoles have.
Where? Good luck playing something on a 2014 Steam Machine in 2024. If there is still one game 10 years later working on such a configuration that will be a miracle. PC gaming moves very fast, that's the point of PC gaming usually : you upgrade often.
No. That hasn't been the case for years, now. I built a machine in 2010, and gave it its first upgrade a couple of months ago.
And to tell the truth, I could've gone on a couple years more before I really needed to upgrade. The biggest bottleneck was the GPU (an nVidia GTX 460). However, I splurged on a few upgrades (GTX 960, up to 16GB of RAM (from 8), and an SSD). It's once again a beast, even with the same CPU from 2010 (AMD Phenom II X6 1090T).
And that extra money that I've put into this system? I've made most of it back in the way of cheaper games.
Yeah, and then complain that the newest games in 2016 don't run well on your hardware, while you thought it was just like a console! What a surprise!
> I can get 60 fps on every one of these games in SteamOS
Put in ultra details, with anti aliasing maxed up, and I'll be very surprised if you still get steady 60 fps, in all honesty. And oh, it's been benchmarked that anti-aliasing makes the performance go down significantly, I'll get numbers for you if you don't believe me.
> Sure, we get boned by games like Dying Light, but that's just software, totally fixable.
Yeah, except that it has taken them 3 months to fix to an acceptable level. Please explain that to consumers buying it on Day 1. Oh, and remember, they are "console gamers" since you said so, so I hope you enjoy the fun communication with people who don't care about specs or optimization or drivers.
> You could make that argument about any crossplatform game.
Yes, except that the requirements for Linux ports are usually higher than for Windows. Source: Steam requirements. Again, please go explain that to console gamers.
I imagine that steamOS can update drivers transparently to have always best configuration for gaming. The support team will only need to answer clients when a fix will arrive automatically.
That's not really a good benchmark, if drivers is the thing you want to compare.
And additionally, Witcher 2 is not really using a wrapper, at least not in the WINE sense of the word. Witcher 2 uses eON which basically does conversion of DirectX calls to OpenGL calls at compile time, not execution time. So it's arguably pretty close to native.
Yeah, when your graphics cards costs mores than the entire console (Groupon has a deal right now for a $304 Xbox One without Kinect, and the cheapest GTX970 on PCPartpicker is a Zotac at $310.95), that tends to happen.
> Steam Machines don't compete with Windows, they're complementary to existing Windows machines (game streaming)
Sure they do. If anything, they compete against Windows much more than they do against consoles. There are reasons to own both a console and gaming PC. There's no reason to have a Windows gaming PC and a Steam Machine. Windows is a superset of a Steam Machine's gaming capabilities. The main reason for people owning a gaming console along with a gaming PC are the exclusive games, people will buy an entire Xbone for Halo or Destiny. There are no Steam Machine or Linux exclusive games.