Valve has still not confirmed pricing or availability for the Steam Machine. In the meantime, the developer of EmuDeck is selling an alternative called Playnix, which should outperform the Steam Machine thanks to an AMD Radeon RX 9600 XT 16 GB GPU.
I mean, you will almost certainly be able to build machines that outperform the Steam Machine 2 in bang-for-buck if Valve isn’t subsidizing it, which they said that they won’t. If not at release, then a few years in, because a console-style periodic hardware release model will lag whatever’s at the bleeding edge.
The desktop I’m typing this on isn’t gonna be cheaper than the Steam Machine 2, but it is unquestionably going to be more powerful.
But that’s not gonna be what the Steam Machine is for — you could always build a DIY gaming PC, unlike with consoles. It’s an open platform. I had a media PC plugged into my TV with a TV interface card a quarter-century back. What Valve is gonna be aiming for is going to be ease of use, the “you plug it into your TV, plug it into power, turn on gamepad, play games that target Steam Machine 2” thing. That’s where consoles have been able to pick up users that haven’t done the PC.
Also the real goal with it, like with the Deck, is to set a standard for what hardware games should run well on for the next several years, and to give PC manufacturers a target for what to match or improve on.
And I definitely hope that wake from controller can get standardized as a result from this (Bluetooth LE 5.5 extension anyone?) because you’ll see other manufacturers try to build it into their machines too
Also just generally revamp Bluetooth HID profiles for latency
Also, I am pretty sure the steam machine is smaller than I was able to achieve in my efforts to make a tiny gaming PC for the living room. That kind of thing can only be done at great effort.
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I mean, you will almost certainly be able to build machines that outperform the Steam Machine 2 in bang-for-buck if Valve isn’t subsidizing it, which they said that they won’t. If not at release, then a few years in, because a console-style periodic hardware release model will lag whatever’s at the bleeding edge.
The desktop I’m typing this on isn’t gonna be cheaper than the Steam Machine 2, but it is unquestionably going to be more powerful.
But that’s not gonna be what the Steam Machine is for — you could always build a DIY gaming PC, unlike with consoles. It’s an open platform. I had a media PC plugged into my TV with a TV interface card a quarter-century back. What Valve is gonna be aiming for is going to be ease of use, the “you plug it into your TV, plug it into power, turn on gamepad, play games that target Steam Machine 2” thing. That’s where consoles have been able to pick up users that haven’t done the PC.
Also the real goal with it, like with the Deck, is to set a standard for what hardware games should run well on for the next several years, and to give PC manufacturers a target for what to match or improve on.
And I definitely hope that wake from controller can get standardized as a result from this (Bluetooth LE 5.5 extension anyone?) because you’ll see other manufacturers try to build it into their machines too
Also just generally revamp Bluetooth HID profiles for latency
Also, I am pretty sure the steam machine is smaller than I was able to achieve in my efforts to make a tiny gaming PC for the living room. That kind of thing can only be done at great effort.
I mostly wanna know how much power the steam machine will need. I’ve got to invert it from 12v DC.