When Valve introduced its Steam Machine cube gaming console/PC, the gaming community began questioning the hardware choices and Valve's performance claims. However, a Valve engineer stated that the Steam Machine is more powerful than 70% of gaming PCs on the market, based on Steam Survey data. It fe...
Yes, but mostly because most of the gaming PCs in Steam’s hardware survey are not really gaming PCs but just some piss poor spec laptops that can still run old games. Just having a dedicated GPU puts it in the top half.
The GPU in this is in the 7600 RX range of things. It’s marketed as a 1080p card. Can certainly hit 4K on older titles, and output 4K with upscaling.
Don’t expect miracles from it. It’s PS5 level hardware. But that’s good enough for most of us.
I get your point, but since people claim Steam is a monopoly, then by that logic they have a large swath of data on what counts as a gaming machine to the user base.
I get its not going to compete with a watercooled watt sucker, but that doesn’t seem to be the majority.
As a person that has gamed since 1983:
Up until recently I was gaming on a 2013 dell mobo converted to a Core V21 case (that’s a lot of rewiring conversion --thanks dell), and using a CAD GPU.
Then work bought us new laptops with RTX cards. So graphics have improved for me.
Both of those are not hardcore gaming PCs, and this steam machine will probably outperform them.
My point being these were valid systems for gaming by a gamer. Not everyone needs an F1 car to enjoy the ride to work😀
It’s PS5 level hardware that is still gonna have lower performance than a PS5 because it has too little VRAM, but hopefully we get PS5 level optimization for the hardware and for linux if it’s successful enough.
Just wanted to post this video. If this tiny undervolted, underpowered, palm sized APU machine can run these games at these FPS, I am willing to bet that steam machines gonna run games without dropping a sweat at 4k.
While people are a bit over the top. A 960 is a decade old and 3gigs literally wouldn’t be able to turn on with a large number of games released this year even on the lowest settings.
It’s objectively out of date. Hell lanythjng ess then 6 gigs frequently crashes or flat out refuses for the most part.
Your literal hard cut off is basically this year with unreal 5. Ue4 games, most proprietary engines like decima, frostbyte or dandelion all will do fine at 3gigs of vram. But they are last targeting last gen consoles as their low end. So your low end is looking back around 6-8 years.
2025 has been almost exclusively full of games that are finally dropping support entirely for that standard and the new standard is 6-8 gigs of vram minimums and 16-24 gigs of available ram not counting system utilization.
Going forward if you don’t have a 6gig card and 16 gigs of ram. You functionally don’t have a computer that can do new high end games. And fuck that’s not even a hard ask. We NEED to move the fuck on from 3gig cards and 8gigs of ram.
Hell a few games are even pushing for 8gig vram/20gig ram as the minimum. But I doubt that’s going to catch on.
Iv also come across a few Chinese games that flat out won’t install if you have a spinning hard drive in your system at all full stop. Not that you can’t install to one, it flat out won’t let you install it to any drive.
At some point we do need to just move the fuck on and accept hardware is out of date. And a full ten fucking years. Is a pretty damn good arbitrary line. Gaming is a very specific work load and it’s getting noticeable how problematic it is in multiplayer games between having allies with shit computers and good ones.
Having 10+ min wait times after your queue cause a random is working off a low end PC and a spinning drive to start a dungeon in an mmo. Is fucked.
When I was a child and first saw a 3d game, I imagined the lighting to be done by ray-tracing (without the actual name of it, of course).
Until then, I only knew 2d games with no lighting mechanics and just a bunch of pixels for sprites.
I remember playing a game, I think it was either Spiderman or Control with Ray Tracing on and I was like “wow, these are amazing!” Then I realized I didn’t actually turn it on. My dumb ass can’t tell the difference.
Exactly. One of the benefits of patient gaming (shoutout to [email protected]) is I don’t need top of the line hardware to enjoy my hobby. I’m sure the GabeCube will run multi-year old games very well.
Between working >40 hours a week and raising a kid I only really care if the game I spent 2 hours a week on is going to run and look good enough. If I have to play on high instead of ultra I’m not gonna have a meltdown.
People in this thread may be hardcore and spend a lot on their game consoles, but Valve’s statement is probably accurate, they’ve got the most data on computer hardware usage.
I’m still chugging along with a 1070 Ti. Then again, I don’t play many top-of-the-line AAA titles these days. For example, I know Doom Eternal and Dark Ages won’t run on this card unless I mess around with tweaking ini files or something, but I wouldn’t bother.
What games? the overpriced crap pushed by big companies, that massively fails on using UE5, that do look worse than 10yo games with worse performance? Sure popular, but I’d be happy when they fails.
Fuck ea, ubi, actiblizz and all their copy-paste year to year shit!
Alan Wake 2, Indiana Jones, Doom TDA, Stalker 2 all have no fallback lighting option and won’t work on PCs less capable than a Series S or Nintendo Switch 2.
Which is totally fine. Not every game has to support older hardware. Games are allowed to use “newer” tech.
Worth noting that I played Indy at 1600p/60 on an RTX 2080, which is a card from 2018 that I bought used for 200 bucks two years ago. This card can still run every single game out there and most of them extremely well, despite only having 8 GB of VRAM.
The whole debate is way overblown. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t games that could run a whole lot better, but overall, PC gamers with old hardware are still eating good.
Oblivion remastered too. Used a mod to turn off ray tracing outdoors only to make it playable on a 9070 xt. Frame rate still dropped to 20 fps if it rained. Never figured that one out. Gave up after one playthrough. It’s embarassing how many bugged quests there still are.
granted but i feel like the expectation there ought to be on the dev to not rely on resource intensive post processing gimmicks to make their game not look like trash
Depends on the price point. Obviously, it’s not going to be competitive with a $2K gaming rig. But if the price is right, I might get GabeCubes for my kiddos as their first “desktop” computers. They should run CachyOS flawlessly, since it’s also Arch based, so it will work great as a desktop computer and a gaming rig.
My midrange computer from 3 years ago should outperform it, I would hope. If not, then it’ll be priced out from what I’d consider buying.
Looks like many do forgot, this is mid-cheap intended machine, not top tier tech race.
Still some depends on price, but I’m hyped for 500€ upgrade of whole 6yo rig, all in one, well build (not like most supermarket prebuild crap). I see flaws in Cube, may need to spend some 100€ extra for missing things (sdd to usb adapters, audio extractor from hdmi to 3.5jacks, extra sdcard for less intense data), still hyped.
Like this is cheap family car talks, Koenigsegg is 2 links to the left.
I’m sure it does, considering even my old busted laptop has hit the Steam hardware survey before, but it’s not one of my primary gaming PCs.
Another way of saying this is Steam Machine is slower than about 44 million gaming PCs (30% x 147 MAU, a very conservative number since that’s monthly and number of users instead of number of computers).
The fact that its GPU is slower than the 5 year old PS5’s, and it only has 8GB VRAM, makes me question Steam Machine’s longevity. And it apparently can’t do FSR4 cause it’s RDNA3.
Lol with multiple gaming PCs, you are far far removed from the target consumer.
Im pretty sure it will be cheap. Unlike PC hardware manufacturers they can do what the console companies do and price at/below cost and make it up in game sales.
However, when comparing to the power of locked up device such as ps5, it never hurts reminds that the supposed GPU processing power of a ps5 doesn’t come for free… even if you’ve fully paid your console. Aside for demos or jailbreaked devices (piracy on console) the only way to run graphics at full potential on the locked ps5 is paying full AAA (which now is settling around 80$/€) for EACH product. There are alternatives in the spending (ie: the Netflix alike from Sony’s store)… but those are only options that Sony allow you to (you can’t run weekly free games from EGS, itch.io… or even web browser games!).
Whatever power you pay for any generic PC potentially cover you in any way: you can play arcade vector games as Asteroid at 4k (or even teorical 32K when the hardware will exists).
The difference Valve could make is showing the topical console gamer customer an easy to use access to it: once they’ll see the light… things may go different also for console-only customers (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo wouldn’t want to lose more customers to Valve’s better deal)
I’m rocking a 2060 with an astounding 6GB VRAM… And the only game that gave me trouble so far is Clair Obscur. I had to close everything else, and use a mod to optimize the graphics.
I’ll blame the shitty Nvidia drivers for Linux though, cause there is no shared RAM, unlike on Windows. 8GB with an AMD card should be fine -if a bit limiting- for a generation, except for high end AAA gaming I guess.
I just replaced that exact card in my machine last week in preparation for dual booting Linux for the first time (I needed a new NVME as a Linux drive and figured I’d future-proof my setup at the same time with an RX 9070 XT for the native AMD drivers), and the only games that I hadn’t been able to run on medium-high settings had been unoptimized games, bad ports, and early access stuff like Monster Hunter: Wilds and Cities Skylines 2.
IMO 8 gigs is plenty for the average person, all things considered.
This thing has 1/6th the ongoing utility cost of a spec’d out gaming pc (assuming 850w psu and something like 4090 and 7900x3d). Granted it’s not much to run a pc like that, like 15-20 a month, but running this thing will cost like $2-3 at most. Its power supply is 43% smaller than a ps5s.
Not gonna be the deciding factor for most people but something to consider. Does 4k120 really matter vs 4k60? Do you really need to turn every slider to ultra? In a world that is boiling with energy costs that are ever increasing?
It kind of makes sense on consoles with fixed hardware when the devs design specifically to hit that target.
On a PC, I think high framerate 1440p is a much more reasonable goal, but frame generation and upscaling are sold to consumers like some magical solution to poor performance instead.
4k is 4x the resolution of 1080p, so that’s not totally surprising. Good thing you did this too, because I was reading some comments just the other day about people’s gaming laptops failing because of repeated/prolongued overheating.
Gaming laptops are notorious for dying from overheating. These things need to be meticulously maintained if you want to use them for their intended purpose for long.
Power optimization of chips has long been good enough to make that a completely moot point. Unless you’re doing something 100% of the time like crypto mining, or extremely pressed on the price of power, it doesn’t matter.
Even top of the line CPUs and GPUs idle at extremely low wattage.
You’re getting a direct use out of that power, then. It’s also dependant on the hardware in it. I can run 4k gaming all day and never break 1kw, because I don’t use nVidia that just throws more and more power at their problems instead of engineering them away.
(even they still do not idle at crazy power usage, too)
4090 with 7900x3d and 850w psu running games at max will generally use about 550w. The same build swapping in a rx 7900xtx is ever so slightly more economical at around 520w. Getting into pissing matches about brand loyalty (when they’re both companies that will ultimately fuck you over for another cent) is stupid, and doesn’t change that this box, if accurate to advertising, does 80% of the work they do at 140w under load (essentially 1/4 the power of your precious amd, which you’d still be using here btw).
It would matter more for the environment if tons of gamers actually had these GPUs but based on what valve is saying here (and the fact that as others have said they likely have very good statistics on the machines accessing steam) they likely don’t. Most fancy GPUs probably go to crypto farms and llm bullshit, which is dumb and means this doesn’t really matter I guess
uses the hardware-accelerated feature of the AMD RDNA™ 4 architecture
AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution 4 upscaling requires an AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series GPU or better and can only be used on appropriate hardware.
Requirements
[FSR 4 Upscaling] AMD Radeon™ RX 9000 Series and above
It’s possible they add compatibility at a later time (with reduced performance and/or quality due to lack of hardware acceleration), but they haven’t announced anything like that currently
Yeah you can hack it in but that’s not official, which results in what you see: performance is not so great. That video only shows a small performance loss because FSR4 is only outputting to 720p, but making FSR4 output to 4k (like a normal TV) is a much bigger demand. But maybe some specific optimizations can be made.
The majority of gamers game at 1080p. Both on PCs, and especially on consoles. Most people’s TVs aren’t even big enough for people with average eyesight to see a difference between 1080p and 2160p.
So the question to ask is if the steam deck is too slow, because the steam machine at 1080p will solidly beat the steam deck at 800p.
If you want something faster for desktop, just build a matx mid tower with a 9070xt. It’ll cost double, but you’ll be able to game in 2160p.
It really depends on your viewing distance and the size of the display. If you’re sitting 15 feet away fom a 55 inch TV, the difference between 1440p and 4k is going to be a lot less noticable than when you’re 2 feet from a 32 inch monitor.
Usually when people post a source, the numbers say that at median screen sizes and distances from the screen, 4K isn’t perceptibly better than 1440p, and the person writing it up as an article has misunderstood the conclusion as saying 4K isn’t better than 1080p rather than that it isn’t better than 1440p. TVs tend not to be made with 1440p resolution, so upgrading from 1080p gets you right to 4K, skipping the sweet spot.
If you have 20/20 vision, you need to sit 2 meters away from a 55" to be able to tell the pixels apart. You might see some improvement from 4K but it wont be that significant. If you are 3-4 meters away, you need a bigger TV if you want to start thinking about gaming in 4K.
3 meters away from a 55" TV gives you a very poor 23 degree viewing angle, let alone 4. The maximum SMPTE recommended viewing distance for that screen size in 16:9 is 2.3m.
In other words, for 4K to stop being perceivable, you have to make your experience worse in other ways.
Oh definitely. I have a large TV because I understand that. I don’t know anyone else with a TV that actually sits that close though. Most people are gaming like 4-5 meters away.
The PS5 has 4K native support since it has better hardware to go along with its bigger size. It also support 4K AI upscaling from 1080, so in some cases it’s the same, although likely with more FPS. The XBox is probably more of the same.
I rarely play the latest games, so that machine would be a good upgrade for me. Especially with the ability to load a different OS that I could use for both productivity and gaming.
Bump it to a bigger SSD and 64GB of RAM and I’ll be happy with it.
“Outperforms 70% of Gaming PCs” is the sort of statistic you’d only quote if you thought it sounded more impressive than it actually was, and it already doesn’t sound impressive.
(edit: genuinely surprised how controversial a statement that turned out to be?)
Because since it’s unlocked hardware, corporations would buy them all as workstations, and they’d never buy any games. At the end of the day, corporations ruin everything.
8 GB of VRAM and 16 GB of RAM … those are the specs of my almost 15 years old legacy machine. I doubt that the Steam Machine outperforms anything made in the last 5-10 years.
This is the moment where you realize that you are either uncommonly wealthy, or spend significantly more of your money on gaming pcs than most people do.
In the whole ~30 years I’m using computers now I probably owned 2-3 computers in total. I wouldn’t say I’m wealthy or spend too much money on PCs, I just get the best hardware available and use it as long as possible.
Thats more expensive than me, right now, getting a 9070 (non xt), those are down to under $600, or not too far off of that, at this very moment.
Meanwhile, most AMD, budget conscious people are probably still gonna find that too pricey, and go for a 9060 XT, 16 gb version, as they’re closer to $350.
Either your specs are wrong, your recollectiom is wrong, or you’re spending a good deal more money on your pc builds than the average person.
A person who is able to save up and buy some.e pretty solid hardware, only occasionally?
That’s a sign of relative wealth, having the ability to save up and plan. Most people don’t have that, at least 25% of the US right now has more debt than wealth, ie negative equity, ie, theyre essentially debt slaves.
Most people are constantly needing to buy new, shitty shoes, that wear out, because they never have the budget margins to have any real savings, but they gotta keep walkin.
Like, I also am a person who will save up a good chunk of change, get a new solid machine that’ll last a while.
These figures just haven‘t gone up all that much over the last decade. Sure, you can get 128GB of RAM and 24GB of VRAM if you‘re willing to pay for it. But if you don‘t want to spend upwards of $5000 for your PC and you‘re maybe not that experienced, you might just look for a gaming rig from a vendor you‘ve heard of before and get 16GB RAM and 8GB VRAM even in 2025 with current-gen hardware.
I agree, I think it’s all about affordability and ease of use. If they can sell them for a nice price (somewhere around the price of a PS5 pro) and they’re easy to use I don’t see a reason why they wouldn’t sell. Hell, I might even buy one myself. I have a very old gaming pc (close to 10 years old now) and even though I’ve replaced some parts over the years (ram, GPU, storage), the core of it is still very outdated and it might almost be cheaper to switch to something like this then to upgrade my existing pc.
I’m always amazed how much you get taxed for prebuilts. This thing is at least $1k more than what I spent (with a similar config), and the CPU is still worse than the one I got lol.
I agree with you, but, I also realize that I’ve been building my own PCs and keeping up with the ins and outs of hardware/software design/developments since roughly the age of 14.
Most people don’t do that.
Most people (in the US) read write and think at a 5th or 6th grade level.
They just want box that make play video game go whee!
IMO if you “just want box that make play video game go whee,” you should just buy a console (the Steam Machine, for example). That’s literally their purpose.
Anyway, if you, for instance, just buy parts using recommended parts lists (some of the review sites have good enough builds, or you can just use the brain dead “build with AI” option on Newegg), you could probably just pay a computer store to build it for you for a lot cheaper than $1k.
Or you could just read the manuals and build it yourself since the manuals are usually pretty straightforward with pictures showing you what to do. It’s basically just an expensive LEGO set lol. Really, as long as you can read a manual with pictures and use a screwdriver you’re pretty much good.
Sure, doesn’t really take that long to research and build it though, and in my experience if you get a prebuilt, most people aren’t gonna like get it serviced or troubleshoot it with CS unless there’s something seriously wrong with it. They’ll likely just live with minor annoyances.
The only significant benefit IMO is if you really end up needing to RMA something (like if the motherboard is shot), you can just RMA the entire thing instead of figuring out which part is messed up. However, I’ve had mixed experiences RMAing laptops before, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just as bad for desktops.
It’s definitely not worth $1k+ IMO. If I spent $1k more, I could’ve gotten a 5090.
Must be nice to have such awesome 15yo machine, as my 6yo still have only 4gb vram (1650s).
If You had enough coins to buy top top tier 2010 rig with 8gb vram back then, You surely had much to upgrade it in 2015, 2020, and also did nice 5090 upgrade this year too! Who cares single 5090rtx do cost 4-6x than whole Gabecube is expected to cost.
Having industry market is awesome, You can find something ultra powered for Yourself, and I can do find some budget for myself too.
Ngl, I’m slightly jealous You’re in the top 30%, even top of the top of it these 30%, that article is NOT about.
Many modern games can run on a 780m integrated AMD GPU(APU) with FSR and other bells and whistles enabled. One can run some games on a em680 - a palm-sized PC with underpowered 680m GPU. It is not gonna be 4k@60 of course. Could probably be 1080p@30 depending on release year, requirements and settings. But that is a super tiny computer with a built-in GPU that has more power over your typical GPU from 2015!
Now, Steam Machine is going to have a dedicated GPU that is around as powerful as 7600. With FMF and FSR it could probabaly do many games from 2020 to today at 4k@60. Hardware is not as bad as many think here. There are not so many games that require more than 8gb of VRAM. Maybe they also design SteamOS to work better with custom PCs that are more powerful than Steam Machines. Who knows? But so far, hardware is not so outdated and will be sufficient for a few years.
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Yes, but mostly because most of the gaming PCs in Steam’s hardware survey are not really gaming PCs but just some piss poor spec laptops that can still run old games. Just having a dedicated GPU puts it in the top half.
The GPU in this is in the 7600 RX range of things. It’s marketed as a 1080p card. Can certainly hit 4K on older titles, and output 4K with upscaling.
Don’t expect miracles from it. It’s PS5 level hardware. But that’s good enough for most of us.
I get your point, but since people claim Steam is a monopoly, then by that logic they have a large swath of data on what counts as a gaming machine to the user base.
I get its not going to compete with a watercooled watt sucker, but that doesn’t seem to be the majority.
As a person that has gamed since 1983: Up until recently I was gaming on a 2013 dell mobo converted to a Core V21 case (that’s a lot of rewiring conversion --thanks dell), and using a CAD GPU.
Then work bought us new laptops with RTX cards. So graphics have improved for me.
Both of those are not hardcore gaming PCs, and this steam machine will probably outperform them.
My point being these were valid systems for gaming by a gamer. Not everyone needs an F1 car to enjoy the ride to work😀
Agreed, the best selling dedicated gaming system of the last few years is the Switch, which has less power than many phones.
It’s PS5 level hardware that is still gonna have lower performance than a PS5 because it has too little VRAM, but hopefully we get PS5 level optimization for the hardware and for linux if it’s successful enough.
12GB seems to be the sweet spot for VRAM, but I suspect the real issue is PC devs not really giving a fuck how hit runs on less than their dev kit.
But then a lot of PC gamers seem to think a game should always run at ultra, no matter how good their rig is.
And I will die on this hill: raytracing has been a colossal waste of everybody’s time and money.
Just wanted to post this video. If this tiny undervolted, underpowered, palm sized APU machine can run these games at these FPS, I am willing to bet that steam machines gonna run games without dropping a sweat at 4k.
Also, a portable Steam Deck can run BG3. Steam machines will be fine.
Well, if you are adding my 15yo Core2Quad in the percentage, of course those numbers come easy.
E8400 for the win! Q6600 is soo out!
54% of all steam users have 16GB RAM or less. 66% has 8GB VRAM or less. 80% of players have 8core CPU or less. 70% of people have a CPU with a 2.3 Ghz to 2.69 Ghz core or less.
70% is not so hard to beat.
I wish dual CPU motherboards were mainstream.
I could then use the one I am keeping aside, during compilation/encoding tasks.
But my current computer definitely come above on everything other then the VRAM.
They need to price this properly and all will be fine.
itt gamers act like anything that doesn’t do ray tracing is literally a commodore 64.
yall got some spoiled child ass ideas about hardware longevity, im over here on a 3gb 960 running most things just fine on lowered settings.
While people are a bit over the top. A 960 is a decade old and 3gigs literally wouldn’t be able to turn on with a large number of games released this year even on the lowest settings.
It’s objectively out of date. Hell lanythjng ess then 6 gigs frequently crashes or flat out refuses for the most part.
Your literal hard cut off is basically this year with unreal 5. Ue4 games, most proprietary engines like decima, frostbyte or dandelion all will do fine at 3gigs of vram. But they are last targeting last gen consoles as their low end. So your low end is looking back around 6-8 years.
2025 has been almost exclusively full of games that are finally dropping support entirely for that standard and the new standard is 6-8 gigs of vram minimums and 16-24 gigs of available ram not counting system utilization.
Going forward if you don’t have a 6gig card and 16 gigs of ram. You functionally don’t have a computer that can do new high end games. And fuck that’s not even a hard ask. We NEED to move the fuck on from 3gig cards and 8gigs of ram.
Hell a few games are even pushing for 8gig vram/20gig ram as the minimum. But I doubt that’s going to catch on.
Iv also come across a few Chinese games that flat out won’t install if you have a spinning hard drive in your system at all full stop. Not that you can’t install to one, it flat out won’t let you install it to any drive.
At some point we do need to just move the fuck on and accept hardware is out of date. And a full ten fucking years. Is a pretty damn good arbitrary line. Gaming is a very specific work load and it’s getting noticeable how problematic it is in multiplayer games between having allies with shit computers and good ones.
Having 10+ min wait times after your queue cause a random is working off a low end PC and a spinning drive to start a dungeon in an mmo. Is fucked.
When I was a child and first saw a 3d game, I imagined the lighting to be done by ray-tracing (without the actual name of it, of course).
Until then, I only knew 2d games with no lighting mechanics and just a bunch of pixels for sprites.
I remember playing a game, I think it was either Spiderman or Control with Ray Tracing on and I was like “wow, these are amazing!” Then I realized I didn’t actually turn it on. My dumb ass can’t tell the difference.
Exactly. One of the benefits of patient gaming (shoutout to [email protected]) is I don’t need top of the line hardware to enjoy my hobby. I’m sure the GabeCube will run multi-year old games very well.
Between working >40 hours a week and raising a kid I only really care if the game I spent 2 hours a week on is going to run and look good enough. If I have to play on high instead of ultra I’m not gonna have a meltdown.
People in this thread may be hardcore and spend a lot on their game consoles, but Valve’s statement is probably accurate, they’ve got the most data on computer hardware usage.
I’m still chugging along with a 1070 Ti. Then again, I don’t play many top-of-the-line AAA titles these days. For example, I know Doom Eternal and Dark Ages won’t run on this card unless I mess around with tweaking ini files or something, but I wouldn’t bother.
not to mention the joy of emulation, which older hardware does very well these days
Do you blame them? So many games these days force ray tracing. If your card can’t do that very well, then that game runs like crap.
What games? the overpriced crap pushed by big companies, that massively fails on using UE5, that do look worse than 10yo games with worse performance? Sure popular, but I’d be happy when they fails.
Fuck ea, ubi, actiblizz and all their copy-paste year to year shit!
Indies, too. Not just big publishers/developers using UE5.
UE is a bane
Please do tell which games force ray tracing?
Alan Wake 2, Indiana Jones, Doom TDA, Stalker 2 all have no fallback lighting option and won’t work on PCs less capable than a Series S or Nintendo Switch 2.
Which is totally fine. Not every game has to support older hardware. Games are allowed to use “newer” tech.
Worth noting that I played Indy at 1600p/60 on an RTX 2080, which is a card from 2018 that I bought used for 200 bucks two years ago. This card can still run every single game out there and most of them extremely well, despite only having 8 GB of VRAM.
The whole debate is way overblown. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t games that could run a whole lot better, but overall, PC gamers with old hardware are still eating good.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, The Last Caretaker, Squad, anything using UE5 and Lumen.
Oblivion remastered too. Used a mod to turn off ray tracing outdoors only to make it playable on a 9070 xt. Frame rate still dropped to 20 fps if it rained. Never figured that one out. Gave up after one playthrough. It’s embarassing how many bugged quests there still are.
Some modern games look like absolute dirty brown water trash when you lower the settings a ton
That’s HROT on max settings and it’s fucking amazing!
Yeah when it’s done well and part of the aesthetic, it’s different.
Labyrinth of the Demon King is another one that comes to mind.
granted but i feel like the expectation there ought to be on the dev to not rely on resource intensive post processing gimmicks to make their game not look like trash
True. But it doesn’t change the fact that it is still quite crap for a brand new gaming pc/console
Depends on the price point. Obviously, it’s not going to be competitive with a $2K gaming rig. But if the price is right, I might get GabeCubes for my kiddos as their first “desktop” computers. They should run CachyOS flawlessly, since it’s also Arch based, so it will work great as a desktop computer and a gaming rig.
My midrange computer from 3 years ago should outperform it, I would hope. If not, then it’ll be priced out from what I’d consider buying.
Looks like many do forgot, this is mid-cheap intended machine, not top tier tech race.
Still some depends on price, but I’m hyped for 500€ upgrade of whole 6yo rig, all in one, well build (not like most supermarket prebuild crap). I see flaws in Cube, may need to spend some 100€ extra for missing things (sdd to usb adapters, audio extractor from hdmi to 3.5jacks, extra sdcard for less intense data), still hyped.
Like this is cheap family car talks, Koenigsegg is 2 links to the left.
+1 for Koenigsegg. always have been some of the coolest cars around.
I’m sure it does, considering even my old busted laptop has hit the Steam hardware survey before, but it’s not one of my primary gaming PCs.
Another way of saying this is Steam Machine is slower than about 44 million gaming PCs (30% x 147 MAU, a very conservative number since that’s monthly and number of users instead of number of computers).
The fact that its GPU is slower than the 5 year old PS5’s, and it only has 8GB VRAM, makes me question Steam Machine’s longevity. And it apparently can’t do FSR4 cause it’s RDNA3.
It needs to be cheap.
Lol with multiple gaming PCs, you are far far removed from the target consumer. Im pretty sure it will be cheap. Unlike PC hardware manufacturers they can do what the console companies do and price at/below cost and make it up in game sales.
It needs to be cheap.
However, when comparing to the power of locked up device such as ps5, it never hurts reminds that the supposed GPU processing power of a ps5 doesn’t come for free… even if you’ve fully paid your console. Aside for demos or jailbreaked devices (piracy on console) the only way to run graphics at full potential on the locked ps5 is paying full AAA (which now is settling around 80$/€) for EACH product. There are alternatives in the spending (ie: the Netflix alike from Sony’s store)… but those are only options that Sony allow you to (you can’t run weekly free games from EGS, itch.io… or even web browser games!).
Whatever power you pay for any generic PC potentially cover you in any way: you can play arcade vector games as Asteroid at 4k (or even teorical 32K when the hardware will exists).
The difference Valve could make is showing the topical console gamer customer an easy to use access to it: once they’ll see the light… things may go different also for console-only customers (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo wouldn’t want to lose more customers to Valve’s better deal)
I’m rocking a 2060 with an astounding 6GB VRAM… And the only game that gave me trouble so far is Clair Obscur. I had to close everything else, and use a mod to optimize the graphics.
I’ll blame the shitty Nvidia drivers for Linux though, cause there is no shared RAM, unlike on Windows. 8GB with an AMD card should be fine -if a bit limiting- for a generation, except for high end AAA gaming I guess.
I just replaced that exact card in my machine last week in preparation for dual booting Linux for the first time (I needed a new NVME as a Linux drive and figured I’d future-proof my setup at the same time with an RX 9070 XT for the native AMD drivers), and the only games that I hadn’t been able to run on medium-high settings had been unoptimized games, bad ports, and early access stuff like Monster Hunter: Wilds and Cities Skylines 2.
IMO 8 gigs is plenty for the average person, all things considered.
This thing has 1/6th the ongoing utility cost of a spec’d out gaming pc (assuming 850w psu and something like 4090 and 7900x3d). Granted it’s not much to run a pc like that, like 15-20 a month, but running this thing will cost like $2-3 at most. Its power supply is 43% smaller than a ps5s.
Not gonna be the deciding factor for most people but something to consider. Does 4k120 really matter vs 4k60? Do you really need to turn every slider to ultra? In a world that is boiling with energy costs that are ever increasing?
In my humble opinion, 4k is a bit of a joke. I pick a high as possible frame rate over 4k any day of the week.
With AAA game graphics, 4K is kind of silly.
It kind of makes sense on consoles with fixed hardware when the devs design specifically to hit that target.
On a PC, I think high framerate 1440p is a much more reasonable goal, but frame generation and upscaling are sold to consumers like some magical solution to poor performance instead.
Yeah I tried playing Dispatch on my TV in 4k, and it sounded and felt like my laptop was going to catch on fire.
Lowered the TVs resolution to 1080p, and the game looks exactly the same and the fans barely even turn on.
That could be an optimization issue though I guess.
4k is 4x the resolution of 1080p, so that’s not totally surprising. Good thing you did this too, because I was reading some comments just the other day about people’s gaming laptops failing because of repeated/prolongued overheating.
Gaming laptops are notorious for dying from overheating. These things need to be meticulously maintained if you want to use them for their intended purpose for long.
Interesting, thanks for confirming!
Power optimization of chips has long been good enough to make that a completely moot point. Unless you’re doing something 100% of the time like crypto mining, or extremely pressed on the price of power, it doesn’t matter.
Even top of the line CPUs and GPUs idle at extremely low wattage.
Like running a video game at 4k120 with ray tracing for 4-6 hours straight? Bc that’s the use case, not idle
You’re getting a direct use out of that power, then. It’s also dependant on the hardware in it. I can run 4k gaming all day and never break 1kw, because I don’t use nVidia that just throws more and more power at their problems instead of engineering them away.
(even they still do not idle at crazy power usage, too)
You’re missing the point:
4090 with 7900x3d and 850w psu running games at max will generally use about 550w. The same build swapping in a rx 7900xtx is ever so slightly more economical at around 520w. Getting into pissing matches about brand loyalty (when they’re both companies that will ultimately fuck you over for another cent) is stupid, and doesn’t change that this box, if accurate to advertising, does 80% of the work they do at 140w under load (essentially 1/4 the power of your precious amd, which you’d still be using here btw).
It would matter more for the environment if tons of gamers actually had these GPUs but based on what valve is saying here (and the fact that as others have said they likely have very good statistics on the machines accessing steam) they likely don’t. Most fancy GPUs probably go to crypto farms and llm bullshit, which is dumb and means this doesn’t really matter I guess
It literally uses AMD, so you’re just being a fuckwit for saying there is no brand competition here…
I think you just have poor reading comprehension bc I literally said it uses amd?
Steam survey is monthly too and most people don’t have two computers
At most they have a PC and a work laptop!
Source on RDNA3 on Linux not doing FSR4? Linux drivers are far ahead of Windows drivers.
Source is RDNA3 not being able to handle FP8 on any OS. It just can’t do FSR4.
There is an unofficial INT8 version of FSR4 that was leaked from AMD that works on RDNA3, but it’s a lot slower, and FSR4 is already pretty heavy.
https://gpuopen.com/fidelityfx-super-resolution-4/
It’s possible they add compatibility at a later time (with reduced performance and/or quality due to lack of hardware acceleration), but they haven’t announced anything like that currently
It’s not a hard requirement. Gamers have used the SDK to get FSR4 working on Steam Deck. Here’s a video of it in action.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95N6-2U5YQo
TL;DW – It’s good to have as an option but not necessarily better than FSR3 on Deck due to tradeoffs. Depends on the game.
Yeah you can hack it in but that’s not official, which results in what you see: performance is not so great. That video only shows a small performance loss because FSR4 is only outputting to 720p, but making FSR4 output to 4k (like a normal TV) is a much bigger demand. But maybe some specific optimizations can be made.
The majority of gamers game at 1080p. Both on PCs, and especially on consoles. Most people’s TVs aren’t even big enough for people with average eyesight to see a difference between 1080p and 2160p.
So the question to ask is if the steam deck is too slow, because the steam machine at 1080p will solidly beat the steam deck at 800p.
If you want something faster for desktop, just build a matx mid tower with a 9070xt. It’ll cost double, but you’ll be able to game in 2160p.
Why do people keep repeating something so easily disprovable? You can tell 1080p and 1440p apart on a laptop, let alone 1080p to 4k on a TV.
It really depends on your viewing distance and the size of the display. If you’re sitting 15 feet away fom a 55 inch TV, the difference between 1440p and 4k is going to be a lot less noticable than when you’re 2 feet from a 32 inch monitor.
they did the maths
It depends how far away you sit. And size (inches) of the TV. You sit closer to a laptop than a TV.
It’s all about PPI. Pixels per inch.
Usually when people post a source, the numbers say that at median screen sizes and distances from the screen, 4K isn’t perceptibly better than 1440p, and the person writing it up as an article has misunderstood the conclusion as saying 4K isn’t better than 1080p rather than that it isn’t better than 1440p. TVs tend not to be made with 1440p resolution, so upgrading from 1080p gets you right to 4K, skipping the sweet spot.
If you have 20/20 vision, you need to sit 2 meters away from a 55" to be able to tell the pixels apart. You might see some improvement from 4K but it wont be that significant. If you are 3-4 meters away, you need a bigger TV if you want to start thinking about gaming in 4K.
3 meters away from a 55" TV gives you a very poor 23 degree viewing angle, let alone 4. The maximum SMPTE recommended viewing distance for that screen size in 16:9 is 2.3m.
In other words, for 4K to stop being perceivable, you have to make your experience worse in other ways.
Yeah, we sit about 2 meters from our 100" projector screen lol
Oh definitely. I have a large TV because I understand that. I don’t know anyone else with a TV that actually sits that close though. Most people are gaming like 4-5 meters away.
I’m amazed they went for 4k.
It’s fake upscaled 4k from 1080, though.
Fascinating. Is that how the ps5 and Xbox whatever work?
The PS5 has 4K native support since it has better hardware to go along with its bigger size. It also support 4K AI upscaling from 1080, so in some cases it’s the same, although likely with more FPS. The XBox is probably more of the same.
I rarely play the latest games, so that machine would be a good upgrade for me. Especially with the ability to load a different OS that I could use for both productivity and gaming.
Bump it to a bigger SSD and 64GB of RAM and I’ll be happy with it.
SteamOS in desktop mode is still pretty great for productivity, im pretty sure you can set it to automatically boot into desktop mode too.
I believe I saw that both were user upgradeable in YouTube videos, though I am curious what options they will have for purchase.
if you can find any RAM at a decent price at all
Not an issue limited to the Steam Machine, but yeah…
steeeeeeeam machiiiiiiiiiiine
I knew it. I still clicked but I knew it. The sound in my head. It has never stopped.
Around the wuuuurld around nhe wuuurrrld
“Outperforms 70% of Gaming PCs” is the sort of statistic you’d only quote if you thought it sounded more impressive than it actually was, and it already doesn’t sound impressive.
(edit: genuinely surprised how controversial a statement that turned out to be?)
It doesn’t read to me like they think it’s impressive. It reads to me like they they are clarifying their market.
A challenge will be how many laptop PC users who game on it because that’s all they have/can afford can be converted into steam machine buyers.
They should just sell at a loss the steam games bought will make up for it. Every consol does that, why not this mini pc.
Every console does that and it’s kinda anti-competitive behavior isn’t it?
Definitely makes it harder for new companies to release enticing hardware, so i’d say so…
That’s just waiting corporate and other entity buying powerful PC for cheap. And Valve won’t get any game sales from it.
Just like PS3 being used as supercomputer.
Because since it’s unlocked hardware, corporations would buy them all as workstations, and they’d never buy any games. At the end of the day, corporations ruin everything.
8 GB of VRAM and 16 GB of RAM … those are the specs of my almost 15 years old legacy machine. I doubt that the Steam Machine outperforms anything made in the last 5-10 years.
This is the moment where you realize that you are either uncommonly wealthy, or spend significantly more of your money on gaming pcs than most people do.
In the whole ~30 years I’m using computers now I probably owned 2-3 computers in total. I wouldn’t say I’m wealthy or spend too much money on PCs, I just get the best hardware available and use it as long as possible.
Most people as in the VAST majority get the cheapest thing they can find and then use it as long as possible.
You functionally are always 5 years ahead of the curve of you buy the best thing available and then use it for 5-7 years.
Hey I’m not saying too much money, I’m saying significantly more than what most people spend.
The first is a value/ethical/moral judgement, the second is just numbers, just objective reality.
8 gigs VRAM, 16 system RAM, 15 years ago?
Most GPUs 15 years ago had one or two gigs of VRAM.
As far as I can tell, no consumer grade, 8 gb VRAM gpus even existed in 2010.
(tho, i guess SLI and Crossfire were things people did back then… maybe you had a dual or even quad gpu system?)
The first 8 gig VRAM GPU was, I think, the Radeon 290X VAPOR-X, this thing:
https://videocardz.com/49757/sapphire-launch-radeon-r9-290x-vapor-x-8gb-ram
Launch MSRP of $650.
In 2014 dollars.
That’s roughly $880 in todays dollars.
Thats more expensive than me, right now, getting a 9070 (non xt), those are down to under $600, or not too far off of that, at this very moment.
Meanwhile, most AMD, budget conscious people are probably still gonna find that too pricey, and go for a 9060 XT, 16 gb version, as they’re closer to $350.
Either your specs are wrong, your recollectiom is wrong, or you’re spending a good deal more money on your pc builds than the average person.
A person who is able to save up and buy some.e pretty solid hardware, only occasionally?
That’s a sign of relative wealth, having the ability to save up and plan. Most people don’t have that, at least 25% of the US right now has more debt than wealth, ie negative equity, ie, theyre essentially debt slaves.
Most people are constantly needing to buy new, shitty shoes, that wear out, because they never have the budget margins to have any real savings, but they gotta keep walkin.
Like, I also am a person who will save up a good chunk of change, get a new solid machine that’ll last a while.
But I realize that that is far from common.
These figures just haven‘t gone up all that much over the last decade. Sure, you can get 128GB of RAM and 24GB of VRAM if you‘re willing to pay for it. But if you don‘t want to spend upwards of $5000 for your PC and you‘re maybe not that experienced, you might just look for a gaming rig from a vendor you‘ve heard of before and get 16GB RAM and 8GB VRAM even in 2025 with current-gen hardware.
I agree, I think it’s all about affordability and ease of use. If they can sell them for a nice price (somewhere around the price of a PS5 pro) and they’re easy to use I don’t see a reason why they wouldn’t sell. Hell, I might even buy one myself. I have a very old gaming pc (close to 10 years old now) and even though I’ve replaced some parts over the years (ram, GPU, storage), the core of it is still very outdated and it might almost be cheaper to switch to something like this then to upgrade my existing pc.
I’m always amazed how much you get taxed for prebuilts. This thing is at least $1k more than what I spent (with a similar config), and the CPU is still worse than the one I got lol.
I agree with you, but, I also realize that I’ve been building my own PCs and keeping up with the ins and outs of hardware/software design/developments since roughly the age of 14.
Most people don’t do that.
Most people (in the US) read write and think at a 5th or 6th grade level.
They just want box that make play video game go whee!
IMO if you “just want box that make play video game go whee,” you should just buy a console (the Steam Machine, for example). That’s literally their purpose.
Anyway, if you, for instance, just buy parts using recommended parts lists (some of the review sites have good enough builds, or you can just use the brain dead “build with AI” option on Newegg), you could probably just pay a computer store to build it for you for a lot cheaper than $1k.
Or you could just read the manuals and build it yourself since the manuals are usually pretty straightforward with pictures showing you what to do. It’s basically just an expensive LEGO set lol. Really, as long as you can read a manual with pictures and use a screwdriver you’re pretty much good.
Your own time to research, build, debug, service, and troubleshoot your own build is a tax as well.
Sure, doesn’t really take that long to research and build it though, and in my experience if you get a prebuilt, most people aren’t gonna like get it serviced or troubleshoot it with CS unless there’s something seriously wrong with it. They’ll likely just live with minor annoyances.
The only significant benefit IMO is if you really end up needing to RMA something (like if the motherboard is shot), you can just RMA the entire thing instead of figuring out which part is messed up. However, I’ve had mixed experiences RMAing laptops before, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just as bad for desktops.
It’s definitely not worth $1k+ IMO. If I spent $1k more, I could’ve gotten a 5090.
Are we looking at the same link? The one I see is listed for $1099, so I’m not sure how you managed to spend $1k less.
Though anything with an Intel Ultra CPU should go right in the garbage, but that’s a different issue.
It’s configurable. The base model is $1k. Upgrading it goes upwards of $3k (dunno what the max is).
It’s all about the price… and the very recent years weren’t exactly kind in relation for price per performance
Must be nice to have such awesome 15yo machine, as my 6yo still have only 4gb vram (1650s).
If You had enough coins to buy top top tier 2010 rig with 8gb vram back then, You surely had much to upgrade it in 2015, 2020, and also did nice 5090 upgrade this year too! Who cares single 5090rtx do cost 4-6x than whole Gabecube is expected to cost.
Having industry market is awesome, You can find something ultra powered for Yourself, and I can do find some budget for myself too.
Ngl, I’m slightly jealous You’re in the top 30%, even top of the top of it these 30%, that article is NOT about.
Yeah, I admit, it was quite expensive. I never updated one single bit of it, except switching to a 1080 one or two years after buying it, though.
Do you think RAM is the only thing that factors into performance?..
Many modern games can run on a 780m integrated AMD GPU(APU) with FSR and other bells and whistles enabled. One can run some games on a em680 - a palm-sized PC with underpowered 680m GPU. It is not gonna be 4k@60 of course. Could probably be 1080p@30 depending on release year, requirements and settings. But that is a super tiny computer with a built-in GPU that has more power over your typical GPU from 2015!
Now, Steam Machine is going to have a dedicated GPU that is around as powerful as 7600. With FMF and FSR it could probabaly do many games from 2020 to today at 4k@60. Hardware is not as bad as many think here. There are not so many games that require more than 8gb of VRAM. Maybe they also design SteamOS to work better with custom PCs that are more powerful than Steam Machines. Who knows? But so far, hardware is not so outdated and will be sufficient for a few years.