- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.world
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Getting Shuttle PC vibes from the form factor.
I still don’t get why didn’t they just use an ITX motherboard with a Ryzen 7600 and a Rx 7600 in an ITX case and called it steam machine instead.
Less resources for engineering the thing that could’ve been sued for software development.
I imagine that’s because that’s what they tried back in 2015 with the Alienware steam machine.
Because they were forced to do the work of making a custom cpu for the handheld, now they have the contracts and relationships to tailor a CPU for their 2026 machine. But you can tell they still want it to be primarily a PC because they only “lightly modified” it.
Couldn’t they just make sure their software worked properly in the CPU/GPU combo of their choice?
After investigating various releases, I suspect that that) slightly modified likely mostly means ‘directly welded to the motherboard instead of socketed’ and it is otherwise probably mostly stock.
I imagine the direct welding is a cost-saving measure to make the product more competitive with consoles.
Given that they announced that the recovery image should now work with a wide variety of systems and that they have stated in multiple places that they plan to eventually release a general version of the OS, they’ve done the work of making it compatible with mostly all AMD stuff. My bet is they’re also working with Nvidia and and their driver support is the holdup.
Is it less resources though? At that level to buy consumer grade?
I mean you can literally build your own steam machine with that. You can install the os into any PC. That’s the ultimate goal I imagine.
I mean, they could’ve used all that engineering budget that was used in the design of the device for something like, enhancing proton
That’s not how engineering works.
Trust me I know. I am en engineer XD I just don’t remember most of what I learned in university, just the necessary stuff for work
Exactly, if you’re a hardware designer, no amount of money will turn you into a software developer within a month. A dollar of software development is not equal to a dollar of product design. That’s the mindset of shareholders. “Give me $12.99 engineering, and give it now”
Can’t they just hire overqualified people with multiple degrees?
And if farts were rocket fuel I could fly. We all have dreams.
Trust me they are improving proton all on their own. Proton let’s them sell games. That is how they make money - selling games not hardware.
They have said in interviews that the main reason they made it was to respond to the fact that the majority of steam deck owners keep it docked to a TV most of the time. It is meant to be a living room appliance with all the sound and heat dissipation issues related.
It’s smaller than an Xbox and barely larger than a GameCube. According to the reviewers that saw it, it is also much quieter and smaller than the smallest ITX case, while also being six times more powerful than the deck. It’s targeting a very specific audience that just wants a plug and play gaming experience and don’t want the hassle of PC building.
That looks really cool! I’ll likely pick up a couple of the new controllers, but I’ve currently got a few mini PCs scattered around the house for gaming so I won’t need a steam machine until one of these craps out on me. But I’m very excited for the folks who will be able to get and enjoy it!
This is the weirdest looking humidifier I have ever seen.
Let’s goooooo I just need to sell one kidney and I can complete the set
How much is it?
Around 700, if we follow previous trends and account for inflation.
The Steam Machine will not be $700 I’m certain. I’m betting around the $300-400 mark. I think most are assuming around $400 based on the fairly weak hardware (8GB of VRAM i+is of particular note), but they make money from sales on the market. I wouldn’t be surprised if they sell it as a loss, because anyone they move off of console to PC is an even larger profit in the long term than any profit they could make from hardware sales.
Consoles used to be sold at a loss when they were competing more on hardware rather than peer pressure and brand loyalty. Now they’re sold at a profit and they require a subscription to use the internet you’re already paying for, and they get a cut of sales. Valve would be stupid not to try to undercut them.
The 2015 steam machine was sold for 400-600, so I was basing it off that
It also failed. I don’t really think they’re going to be using it as a guideline to follow.
It’s expensive, but not that expensive.
I meant that I am that poor
Relatable
The kidney?
The GabeCube looks awesome! The GabeGoggles probably aren’t riddled with spyware. The controller fucks so hard it could be an aphrodisiac. Massive win for valve today.
Valve just casually changing the entire PC gaming landscape on a Wednesday…
They used to do it with their games, now it’s with their hardware
In one of their videos on the store page, they even show the face plate being changed. :O
Yeah, it seems that they have different color and graphics face plates, but what looked really cool to me was the actual live display front panel showing machine vitals. Someone in comments mentioned that it’s e-ink. Very interesting.
Looks cool, don’t think it is for me but hope they succeed this time. Same goes the VR headset.
I am interested in the controller though, but my 8bitdo’s are still working fine, so probably not buying in the short term.
I’m a bit concerned about the vram situation. 8Gb is not a lot nowadays, particularly if you start adding stuff like ai framegen and stuff which these types of machines tend to need further down the line.
An extra 8gb wouldn’t have killed the profit margins.
It seems to just be a 7600m laptop GPU which comes with 8Gb. I don’t think this is a custom chip like SONY uses but, just off the shelf stuff AMD sold for a discount.
An extra 8gb wouldn’t have killed the profit margins.
I see you haven’t checked ram prices lately…
Given that they’d have locked in the supply at least half a year ago, though, it would be funny (though unrealistic) to find out they contributed to the price hike 😂
Bulk pricings has increased sure, but not to the extent consumer price did. Capitalism, ho!
Would it be safe to assume their processor/gpu magic that brought us the deck has advanced enough since then to compensate?
I’m no hardware guru, but wouldn’t it be possible to use a swap file or other methods to simulate extra ram if optimized and efficient enough?
As a deck owner, it’s not that powerful, you’re never going to drive it at full settings on most modern games, so the size of the vram does not matter all that much.
Also, the GPU already does the cache work itself if the vram is full anyway, and GDDR is much faster than regular DDR, which is why you see stuttering on 8gb GPUs when texture resolution is pushing the limits.
With the spot price if GDDR6 modules it’s frankly disappointing to only see 8gb.
Plus, add in the fact that FSR/DLSS models take up valuable vram size to work for framegen and stuff, it reduces even more the availability for actual data.
Ooh that’s completely unnecessary to my use but looks amazing and if I had a big enough place it would be something I’d seriously consider
Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it’s still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
I wonder if this means it’s less locked down the Deck? Like is it kind of an iPad vs Mac situation? When I got the Deck and it was my only CPU travelling around at one point, I tried installing some general tools so I could get some actual work done on the road. Things were fairly heavily sandboxed, though nothing was a total deal-breaker I guess?
You do know you can boot up to a full-ass Linux on the deck?
Afaik that side has zero sandboxes
Yeah but that lock down is just there to protect most users. Afaik it doesn’t require any heavy workarounds?
yeah you can just dualboot another non-atomic distro and call it a day
Curious about this too. I love my Steam Deck, but Desktop Mode is horrible. You can’t install apps from the command line because they just get deleted on every update, including CUPS which made printing a huge hassle. You have to jump through hoops to get it to mount an external hard drive automatically. I could never get Discord voice or video chats to actually work. But if you install a separate distro, you lose out on the performance settings that are locked to Game Mode.
Now that Valve is actually doing a desktop, I’d love to use this as my daily driver so my old ThinkPad can finally rest. I’m hoping Valve will finally fine-tune Desktop Mode so people can actually use it. Or at least not throttle performance if people want to install a different OS. Maybe they could even let us boot directly into Desktop Mode this time?
FYI the way to get around updates deleting everything is to build a flatpak with the things you want, and then install that.
That would all work when using a regular Linux distro like mint or ubuntu
This thing has pretty interesting hardware:
The chip almost looks like a cut down AMD Ryzen AI Max 385, but with fewer CPU cores and GPU CUs, but the GPU gets its own dedicated VRAM, rather than sharing it, like it does in something like a Framework Desktop.
It also seems like it gets a decent amount of power, so likely at higher clock speeds, performance should be pretty good for not that much money. If this is supposed to be a console then it can’t be much more than a PS5 at $550 or PS5 Pro at $750.
I suspect the CPU is probably some Ryzen 7640u and the GPU is a 7600m equivalent.
This doesn’t seem to be an APU
Moore’s Law is Dead is estimating a $425 cost to produce, sale price between $450 to $600, depending on how hard they want to fuck Microsoft out of gaming.
Retro Game Corps was estimating $500-$600 and they are defintely out to lunch with that
Depends on tariffs.
I was going to build a gaming pc for the first time in years on Black Friday
This news put it on hold immediately. I’ll just get the Steam Machine instead, it’s exactly what I’ve wished for: a more powerful Steam Deck without a screen or controller built in.
AND it’ll run 4k games so I don’t need to downscale to my monitor.
I’m perfectly fine with it being FSR and only 60fps, as 99% of the stuff I play are single player games anyway.
With 8GB of VRAM, 4K gaming will suffer some.
4k FSR, so it’s not rendered at 4k, but upscaled on the GPU
Which I’m perfectly fine with
Then it’s not actually running games at 4K, now, is it?
Nope, and I’m perfectly fine with it. It’s still better than 1080p
I’m not the best at gauging this but it seems it’s meant to be carried around and plugged into a 4K TV and operate okay at 60fps for most games that multiple people would play while in the same room. The specs seem to align with that. What would the GPU be comparable to? A 6700 (non XT)?
GamersNexus estimates a 7600.
You call pretty interesting hardware what looks like non-replaceable parts?
I’m wondering how much horsepower this stationary device have compared to a PS5 or Series X.
Is it an APU, or is it a “desktop” CPU and GPU on one board? CPU specs are close to the 7600x but downlocked. And with dedicated vram I’d assume the GPU is it’s own separate thing.
GPU looks like it’s probably a tweaked RX 7400 based on the specs.
This seems to blur the lines between desktop and mobile APU’s, but I would bet that’s it’s closer to a higher clocked mobile chip, than it is to desktop. The only reason I think this is the case is due to the similarity spec wise with the Max 385, and that it’s semi-custom.
If it was just a 7600x CPU + 7600 GPU I think they would have just said so. It could be separate CPU+GPU, but I think it might be possible that it is built more like a SOC, where the GPU is just given its own dedicated VRAM.
Looking at the hardware of say a PS5, it has 16 GB of GDRR6, the same as the Steam Machine’s VRAM.
If everything is soldered anyway, there is no reason to have separate chips for CPU+GPU, especially if that hardware already exists like the AMD Ryzen AI Max line.
If everything is soldered anyway, there is no reason to have separate chips for CPU+GPU, especially if that hardware already exists like the AMD Ryzen AI Max line.
Cost is a factor because just as with Steam Deck the two SKUs will only differ in storage space, not in performance. Using last gen RDNA3 is 100% a cost driven choice.
There was the story recently that AMD demanded a very high minimum order (10 million or so?) for semi-custom versions of the lasest Ryzen and RDNA iterations for some Xbox handheld which is unlikely that handheld would sell.
By going this route, Valve avoided this. Surely there is spare manufacturing capacity for RDNA3 by now.
According to Dave2D’s review, RAM is upgradeable, and GPU has dedicated VRAM.
Well I’m probably wrong then, framework said they couldn’t get good performance and maintain signal integrity with upgradable memory for the Ryzen Max cpus, so this is likely discrete Cpu and GPU. Probably all soldered in the same mainboard though.
Well I’m probably wrong then, framework said they couldn’t get good performance and maintain signal integrity with upgradable memory for the Ryzen Max cpus
On the other hand, Framework is run by far right sympathizers and are a few billion short of what Valve’s R&D might have access too.
Is it an APU, or is it a “desktop” CPU and GPU on one board?
2 separate chips, both soldered to the board
I would have thought unified memory would pay off, otherwise you spend your time shuffling stuff between system memory and vram. Isn’t the deck unified memory?
What you lose shuffling between CPU and GPU you gain by not having your GPU and CPU sharing the same bandwidth.
Apple gets away with it by having an ungodly massive memory bus. I don’t think valve is getting a 512 bit memory bus on what’s probably a RX 7400/Ryzen 7600 tier CPU. Both of those combined would be like half that?
Apple gets away with it by having an ungodly massive memory bus.
It’s kind of impressive how effective Apple’s marketing team was towards developers when they started that push towards ARM PCs. A lot of people can remember that having shared memory benefits from not having to copy memory between the CPU and GPU, but barely any of them remember that the only reason it’s feasible is because Apple gave their devices insanely high memory bandwidth.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, look no further than the original Nintendo Switch. With an incredible 64-bit memory bus and 1600MHz memory clock speed, it was already being bottlenecked by its memory bandwidth 2 years into its lifespan. And that’s counting first/second-party titles like the Link’s Awakening remaster, not even shitty ports of games made for other consoles.
To keep the package small, they might still have laptop type discreet GPU, just integrated on the same board.
Dave2D mentioned that Valve said it isn’t aiming to directly compete with consoles, but rather sff PCs. So the price will likely be in the $700-900 range(?)
I can see this going for around $750 personally
Below this price it will literally “evaporate” in seconds after release.
It probably will anyway.
Index and Steam Deck both sold like crazy on release, Valve has already proven itself with their hardware.
Last time they’ve locked the sell on account base. Hopefully they’ll do the same this times too.
You’re not fitting a 6 core processor and a **60esque card in a ssf case for less than $1k I don’t think, so even $900 is competitive
I believe that Valve can afford to sell hardware at cost or even a little in the red. Getting people in the steam store ecosystem makes it back and then some in the long term.
They said they wanted to sell it at PC prices not console prices. Probably because this thing is literally a PC that can be used without ever downloading a single game. If it were too cheap companies could buy it as cheap office PCs.
Normally that only works if you have DRM that locks the games to your platform, so that people don’t get the hardware at a discount then use it to run someone else’s software.
But, in Valve’s case, it really has no competitors in the PC gaming space. That might not last forever, but it almost certainly will last as long as this PC / console is around.
Well, they already did that with the Deck, they earn very little from the hardware. Chances are they’ll do the same.
I think you can. The Ryzen 7600 and Rx 7600 are kinda cheap nowadays, even better if you use a 7500f.
You use a Chinese b650 ITX motherboard around 150 dollars and boom. You don’t need to buy expensive stuff to make a passable small PC.
I sort of gave up on upgrading my under TV Steam machine so this actually looks like a nice way back in.
I’m excited to see what it can do at idle power draw along with the price. This can end up being a really good miniPC if it’s priced as competitively as the Deck was when that launched
Prreciousssss…
We wants it!
