not sure this is true. The PS5 has 16gb of shared memory, an 8c/16t zen 2 cpu, and a 36CU RDNA2 gpu. The GabenCube has 16gb of system memory + 8gb of dedicated video memory, a 6c/12t zen 4 cpu, and a 28CU RDNA3 gpu. Essentially the PS5 is a beefed up APU where as the GabenCube is a "proper" (for lack of a better word) computer with a dedicated graphics card and I think it will outperform the PS5 all else being equal.
The zen 2 -> zen 4 generational improvements for the cpu probably outweigh the two extra cores (ex) but critically most games can only really use 6-8 threads due to boring computer science reasons so for actual gaming performance it is an even larger gap than it might seem. The gpu compute wise is probably a wash but given that GabenCube has a dedicated gpu with 8gb of GDDR6 vs. shared system memory I would expect the GabenCube gpu to come out ahead here as well. And while ps5 does have 16gb of memory being that it's shared the actual memory available to the system will be less.
Finally, as we've seen with the steam deck valve has put in a lot of effort into steam OS with focus on actual user experience rather than marketing numbers (like frame pacing vs. FPS). The hardware choices have the same wisdom again like the steam deck. Whereas the deck has a 720p screen vs. competitors with a 1080p screen, 1080p is a bigger number but at that screen size the difference is negligible except that rendering at 1080p uses/wastes way more power hampering battery life. In the same way the GabenCube has a cheaper 6c cpu that wouldn't change much vs. an 8c cpu and has instead used that savings to get dedicated gpu.
All that said you're right about the price. If this is $900 it's DOA. At retail a ryzen 7600, 16gb of ram, a 512gb ssd, and radeon rtx 7600 are about $575. That doesn't include the mobo/case/psu/fans/other bullshit but it's also the retail cost which valve is most certianly not paying. They are also probably okay selling it as a loss leader in order to sell games and get that sweet, sweet 30% cut. That's why I'm guessing around $550 for the cheaper version. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
I'll just say this machine isn't for me. I'm the guy on the Steam Hardware Survey with a 16 core cpu and a 4070 super. BUT. If you haven't upgraded for the better part of a decade, and want to get in on new shit like m.2 SSD's and Ray tracing at a (presumably) decent price, this is for you.
Just remember: SteamOS won't save you. Either move your ass and learn something new now or forever bitch and moan about how bad your Windows experience is while refusing to do anything about it.
You got a little MATI there but nah, you're right about this. Bazzite is literally right there and its pretty much the closest thing at this point to a SteamOS but for general PC builds. You literally install it and It Just Works for gaming right of the box. You can even have it start up in Steam Big Picture mode like SteamOS in the case of a living room PC. It's also an immutable distro so its extremely foolproof for normies. I used it when I first switched to Linux this year (beyond experimenting on a VM or beater PCs, anyhow) and liked my time with it, but eventually switched to base Fedora KDE because I dual booted Windows for a bit and it nuked my Bazzite install after an update. Also needed stuff that an immutable distro made more annoying.
Given the nature of SteamOS I highly doubt it will actually be available for normal PC configs officially. Might as well look into other avenues, and said other avenues have matured nicely.
Given the nature of SteamOS I highly doubt it will actually be available for normal PC configs officially. Might as well look into other avenues, and said other avenues have matured nicely.
People like to cling onto Valve mentioning the possibility of SteamOS becoming a general distro and how the original SteamOS was one, but it's all just wishful thinking when clashed against the reality that the original SteamOS from 10 years ago was a failure like all of Valve's initial hardware ventures, and now 10 years later they've learned their lessons and they find SteamOS to work best as their special in-house distro for a select few devices. People are of course ignorant and fail to realize just how much effort goes into making SteamOS so good on those devices and how badly it would fare the moment you'd take it out of that ecosystem. Like the instant clash with Nvidia drivers.
SteamOS will likely never leave the select few devices Valve develops it for but the average gamer is too ignorant, impatient and incapable of learning to realize that, so he will keep holding out for a myth that was built by anyone but Valve. Seriously, try tracking down everything Valve officially said about SteamOS and what people say about it and you'll see just how much of it is the result of people yapping too much about things they don't understand.
Can someone redpill me on the new steam controller and the trackpads specifically? Because i'm not seeing the value. I see the value in the TMR, the extra buttons on the back but what's the use case for trackpads outside of using them to navigate the steam menus?
I'm actually curious what the price of that thing will be.
With the current price hikes, they certainly won't be able to keep any previously envisioned price tag.
Can someone redpill me on the new steam controller and the trackpads specifically? Because i'm not seeing the value. I see the value in the TMR, the extra buttons on the back but what's the use case for trackpads outside of using them to navigate the steam menus?
A way to play mouse-based games, and something more precise than a thumbstick. It sounds weird at first glance but trust me, try it with a Deck if you can or wait for this to come out. It will change your life.
A way to play mouse-based games, and something more precise than a thumbstick. It sounds weird at first glance but trust me, try it with a Deck if you can or wait for this to come out. It will change your life.
What games does it tend to be super useful for? If i'm playing shooters or crpgs it's gonna be mouse and keyboard, if elden ring or anything that's similar enough I go controller, so I guess I might not be the target demo for them based on the games I play. Admittedly though the controller does seem appealing in general assuming the price isn't terrible.
What games does it tend to be super useful for? If i'm playing shooters or crpgs it's gonna be mouse and keyboard, if elden ring or anything that's similar enough I go controller, so I guess I might not be the target demo for them based on the games I play. Admittedly though the controller does seem appealing in general assuming the price isn't terrible.
Adventure games, and some third person shooters that MUST use a keyboard and mouse in my case. Sure, shooters are better with pure keyboard and mouse, but if a game is extremely PC-centric it's not as jarring as you'd think.
Adventure games, and some third person shooters that MUST use a keyboard and mouse in my case. Sure, shooters are better with pure keyboard and mouse, but if a game is extremely PC-centric it's not as jarring as you'd think.
Can someone redpill me on the new steam controller and the trackpads specifically? Because i'm not seeing the value. I see the value in the TMR, the extra buttons on the back but what's the use case for trackpads outside of using them to navigate the steam menus?
Don't forget the motion controls, they're basically the missing link between the thumbstick and mouse. With this new iteration of Steam Controller, you could just touch a backside area of it to switch to motion controls to finetune your movements in a moment.
I just hope it's price will be somewhat within the ballpark of the XSX controller because I'm looking forward to seeing what the Steam Deck controller is like.
What's the consensus on the Frame? Did some cursory research and a bunch of people (if you consider pRedditors people) are ass mad that it's just a Quest competitor and not the Index 2
I was actually considering getting some upgrades to my relatively underpowered PC just a few days ago, so the announcement of the Steam Machine came just at the right time. If it's priced correctly, I might get one rather than buying a stronger GPU & CPU. I've been using Linux for years now, and my current setup is Arch with KDE, so I can expect a familiar experience with better hardware. The Steam Machine being small & portable is the cherry on top, as I spend my weekdays and my weekends at different places.
I think it's also worthwhile to note this is basically the most common build on the Steam Hardware Survey. 6 cores. 16 gigs of ram. 8 gigs of vram. And a card roughly equal to a 3060. They weren't collecting that data for nothing it seems
What's the consensus on the Frame? Did some cursory research and a bunch of people (if you consider pRedditors people) are ass mad that it's just a Quest competitor and not the Index 2
Depends on the price, its essentially just a quest 3 without the AR stuff and running a full desktop OS. That sounds pretty appealing but the price matters
I for one, are excited for the controller and the headset. I never got into VR and having a wireless VR headset for my blender work that isn't pozzed by meta will be excellent.
The Controller is an insta-buy. I know several friends who would instantly buy.
The steam machine I'm interested in, and will likely buy.
As someone who has played with the deck for literally hundreds of hours I can say that for 90% of the games that I play It's perfectly okay. My main gripe is the 16 gigs of RAM but if I'm being honest I've rarely had a game in recent memory that I run at 1440p that has maxed out 16 gigs of RAM on a Linux system. Hopefully it's upgradable.
Plus having the dedicated 8gb of VRAM will make a huge difference. I literally had a friend who tried to play WH3 on the deck whilst he was visiting a friend and couldn't because the 16gb of shared ram couldn't load the windows version because proton required a chunk.
If people are worried about AAA games I have to say I haven't played any in recent memory that are actually good aside from Battlefield 6 which I don't care to play on a controller. Most of the games I love, like MGSV, Witcher, final fantasy, hitman world, rachet & clank, God of War, halo anniversary and infinite... all played just fine on linux and lower end hardware and looked great.
Emulation on the deck was phenomenal, I only had trouble with sly 2 because of a strange software render bug in the emulator that would even bring my Desktop to it's knees.
Played everything from arcade to GameCube. No issues.
AUTISTIC BREAKDOWN SECTION OF STEAM MACHINE
@SCV beat me to the gist of the hardware/software chatter, but I want to hammer home the points on several factors.
Doing some napkin math the Steam Machines as promoted seem to be as powerful as the Original PS5 or the Xbox One X (the "pro" version of the Xbox One, Before series X), but with newer hardware options. I am not comparing it to the Xbox Series, because it is virtually the same hardware wise, Series X GPU is 12TFlops, Series S GPU is 4 Tflops.
Breaking it down, Steam Machine is good. It will be on par with current gen consoles, but with more extensions and dedicated VRAM, which no console has.
Platform
Steam Machine(Speculative)
PS5 Base/Slim
CPU:
AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T
up to 4.8 GHz, 30W TDP Newer architechure with better extensions. Faster Clocks.
Napkin Math indicates:
6x Steam Deck CPU performance of up to 448 GFLOPS (FP32),
which means...
CPU approx. 2,688 GFLOPS (FP32)
8-core AMD Zen 2
Variable frequency up to 3.5 GHz
7cores for games 1 dedicated to OS
No data on FLOPS
RAM
16GB DDR5
16 GB GDDR6 SDRAM Unified
512 MB DDR4 RAM (used as SSD controller cache)((How they achieved "Fast SSD Loading in Rachet and Clank)
VRAM
8GB GDDR6
See above
GPU
Semi-Custom AMD RDNA3 28CUs
2.45GHz max sustained clock, 110W TDP
Napkin Math Indicates:
6x Steam Deck GPU performance of up to 1.6 TFLOPS (FP32)
we get... Roughly...
9.6 TFLOPS for machine GPU (FP32)
AMD RDNA 2
36 CUs
Variable frequency up to 2.23 GHz
10.28 TFLOPS peak
Ray Tracing is only in Pro model. It's a weird RDNA2/RDNA4 hybrid.
SSD
Gen 5 SSD? Deck was Gen 4.
Gen 4 SSD
Power
140W approx
180W
Size
Gamecube equivalent, half Series X height.
OG XBOX sized
Able to access and post on Kiwifarms?
YES
No. No browser.
Right now there are dirty shit stained retards on 4chan /v/ shit posting about Switch 2 sales, "No real 4k/8k/Gaytracing", "last gen" hardware, 16GB RAM-8GB VRAM, Anti-Cheat, and "They tried steam Machines before, they will fail."
I will lay out why they are wrong, point by point.
Switch is Nintendo. Nintendo fans are babies/families/Fanboys. Of course Switch sells. It's Mario, smash, Zelda, Mario kart, mario party, and Pokemon. Most successful franchises ever. No secret there. Most games on XBOX and PS5 are now selling on steam and are better in every way. Sales reflect what people valued not whether console was actually good.
PS2 sold because it had DVD and good games, PS3 had Blu-Ray, XBOX OG and 360 Sold on good games and Microsoft's great Live platform before it got cucked. Nintendo has always done better in the handheld market, and switch is just an extension of that. Steam is in the PC gaming space, which is much more flexible, but also trickier to please. If you go by raw market share, Steam has more users than any of the consoles.
4K is a meme. 8K is an even bigger meme. No console has ever sold on purely it's specs. Raytracing is the future of graphics stacks, but it needs better tools and good optimizations to replace rasters.
All these stupid retards are talking about 4K gaming when all I care about is 1440p gaming because I as a person who works in the video industry, know that 4K is fucking worthless for gaming outside of very special cases, and most people won't be able to utilize it effectively.
It's fine for video, and is definitely the maximum resolution one will ever need(like ever).
But for gaming the benefits are purely if you are at the viewing distance necessary to see it.
FSR works, and for most content past 7-10ft of distance on a 4K 65in screen, you won't likely notice it.
4K is garbage. Most people game at 1080p or 1440p and prefer higher than 60 FPS and HDR over "more pixel density".
See that? 4K? 4.65%. Less than 5% of steam users.
More people have 2 monitors than 4K.
I myself love 1440p, and see no benefit to 4k unless I need a big monitor, think 42" at 3' viewing distance.
The hardware is on point to be equal to current gen systems, but cheaper. The Steam machine segregating VRAM is a big deal. Loads of the big pc games I play (Rimworld, WH3, etc) need lots (8+GB) of Ram, but only 6ishGB of VRAM, This includes 99% of AAA. Consoles had the benefit of special subsystems(exclusive deditated wam for OS on PS4/5) to segregate the OS from the game, leading to better performance. By doing this, they ensure games can actually run, as Deditated VeeWam won't be shared by Windows 11, and whatever other apps are running in the background.
Just to give a reality check, here is my current system usage, on windows 11 on my laptop.
The Ram usage is nearly half. Just running base system and some utility apps(Everything, Steam) windows uses a lot of memory.
Meanwhile my deck, just in desktop mode, uses 2.1 GB. total.
In Game mode it is less than 1 GB reserved for OS, but that is for Graphics mostly(Overlay).
The difference is substantial. My BIG laptop is expensive-expensive and has extremely good hardware, but is bottlenecked by the OS.
Sitting idle my CPU is using 3-6% on nothing important but windows chatter.
The integrated GPU is slurping up 1.3 GB VRAM just for the desktop and apps.
The dedicated GPU is using 512MB just to show a desktop screen on my second monitor.
Same on my big PC. Windows 11 is bloated.
The only reason I don't use Linux now, is that I have certain apps I cannot easily use on it. Plus my hardware is wonky RN with it.
But I run my own Linux Servers, and ran Desktop Linux for 10+ years, It works better and crashes less.
This is not going to make a huge difference on 99% of games. All consoles run with 16GB of Ram. Total. Shared.
Anticheat is largely a non issue. For me at least, I play mostly single player. Here is every openly hostile anticheat. Most of these games are slop.
Most of the best games work. Most of the best games work on the deck, and their anti cheat works. The broken games are broken because many are old or are just slop games. See for yourself
"They tried steam Machines before, they will fail."
This is the big one. The market and the circumstances are radically different than 2015.
OG attempt of valve was to try to bow to the PC manufacturers. This failed, because one of the big things Valve forgot was that more choices make people confused, and more likely to have bad experiences. Most steam machines were non existent, and most sucked.
Valve also attempted to target Stadia style gaming with streaming via the steam Link, no body bit.
People want dedicated, portable, easy to understand, retard proof hardware from a trustworthy source.
Steam OS is way way better than when it first came out. Valve learned a lot from big picture mode, and from Linux steam clients. Modern SteamOS is Arch with KDE5 in desktop mode, and a custom fast near bare metal interface for the game mode. Way easier to play games, OS doesn't bloat the memory. just the overlay, compositor, kernel, and game.
Deck provided an excellent experience and got better and better. I play more games on the deck than on my Desktop or Laptop. Mainly due to the fact I can play during commute. They improved the steam controller and added even more features. It was successful.
Proton works with most games out of the box. I have only run into a handful of games that don't run on Proton, and they are mostly slop or garbage no one plays.
Most of the "unverified" run beautifully, and many have native linux support. Play unity? It ports to linux. Play unreal? It has native ports. Play GameMaker? Again native. Play Godot? Native.
Most games are made in Unity or Unreal or GameMaker or Godot. Most run just fine in proton or better than windows native. I don't count RenPy or Pygame, as those are mostly Visual Novels, which are not games. RPGMaker is usually Slop.
If you build it, they will come. Adding Deck verification has already made game companies and indie devs comply, as it opens up console like guarantees to the customer, whilst giving a minimum standard for devs to shoot at.
You have to have at least 100+ IQ to understand that targeting the steam hardware survey median gives good results in sales. By setting an easy minimum target like the deck, you make it way easier to target masses. The deck makes up less than 1% of the userbase, but they play and buy more games. One can easily see why Valve is pushing more hardware out. It builds momentum in an otherwise static userbase. It's real gamers, whereas probably most of the steam users are either dead, limited players, or bots.
TLDR;
I will be probably getting all 3. I am excited for the Steam Machine, mainly for the impact it can have on Valve's userbase expanding, and Linux desktop users finally having a real leading industry company making the Linux desktop platforms more appealing to port to.
Controller is a easy buy, Headset is a buy for me.
GabeCube is a sure win for Valve in my books, but we will see when they release it.
Ever since the few games I cared about came to pc my ps5 have been a bluray player only. This will finally get me back to playing on my tv, which I upgraded to 4K just for gaming.
Ever since the few games I cared about came to pc my ps5 have been a bluray player only. This will finally get me back to playing on my tv, which I upgraded to 4K just for gaming.
You just reminded me. Steam Remote Play.
If people mald about windows exclusive games(anticheat), you can literally stream them locally via Steam. Which means you can still utilize the good PC hardware for the ultra heavy or windows picky games, whilst still using the Steam Machine for everything else.
You just reminded me. Steam Remote Play.
If people mald about windows exclusive games(anticheat), you can literally stream them locally via Steam. Which means you can still utilize the good PC hardware for the ultra heavy or windows picky games, whilst still using the Steam Machine for everything else.
for gaming right of the box. You can even have it start up in Steam Big Picture mode like SteamOS in the case of a living room PC. It's also an immutable distro so its extremely foolproof for normies. I used it when I first switched to Linux this year (beyond experimenting on a VM or beater PCs, anyhow) and liked my time with it, but eventually switched to base Fedora KDE because I dual booted Windows for a bit and it nuked my Bazzite install after an update. Also needed stuff that an immutable distro made more annoying. 
