not to mention the joy of emulation, which older hardware does very well these days

True. But it doesn’t change the fact that it is still quite crap for a brand new gaming pc/console

“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?)

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.

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.

So the engineer state that it can run ‘all games of the market’. Okay, cool, but at what kind of settings?

Like, it undermines the expectations of what one has when it comes to approaching the idea of having a PC to run games they want to see run flawlessly. I have been there before where I was not satisfied running games at Medium, hell, I wasn’t satisfied when I ran some games at even High. My targeted goal of building a machine, is if it can run at least 90% of games that I throw at it, with optimum performance. Suffice to say, I think I’ve achieved that.

If someone gets a Steam Machine and find that it cannot run that particular game someone buys the Steam Machine for at their preference, you’re going to see refunds flying around.

The Steam Machine development should’ve never went in with the concept of “just run games”, they should’ve went in with the concept of “run games and run them well”.

It has to be $400 or $500. If they, Valve, really think they’re sitting on a $800 or even a $1,000 machine then they’re lying to themselves.

I think the goal was 4K at 60 fps, but likely varying level of “detail” like you can probably do it with lower detailed settings rather than ultra or epic or what-have-you.

Please do tell which games force ray tracing?

4K is just another dumb marketing jargon to make people think something is better than what we currently have.

I always bring up the argument of transitioning from VHS to DVD, there were vast improvements there in terms of quality. DVD is still around, why? Because it just does good enough and that’s what all anyone can ask for. Blu-Ray is incredibly old now and eventually will take DVD’s spot someday as the ‘good enough’ standard because really streaming is dependent on internet connection speed which can vary the quality which exits itself out of the argument.

And with every gaming generation that comes and goes, it has become harder and harder to notice any groundbreaking differences. It began to get harder when we went from PS3 - PS4 for example. It is now all about just resolutions and nothing else.

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.

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.

I’m amazed they went for 4k.

Exactly. One of the benefits of patient gaming (shoutout to !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works) 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.

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.

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

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, The Last Caretaker, Squad, anything using UE5 and Lumen.

Most people’s TVs aren’t even big enough for people with average eyesight to see a difference between 1080p and 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’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.

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.

It’s fake upscaled 4k from 1080, though.