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.

Not an issue limited to the Steam Machine, but yeah…

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.

It’s all about PPI. Pixels per inch.

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.

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.

That’s HROT on max settings and it’s fucking amazing!

They need to price this properly and all will be fine.

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.

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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:

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.

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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.

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.

I saw a really good video from someone who seemed very well-informed do a bill of materials analysis and come to the conclusion that it will be priced between $449 and $599 depending on how aggressive Valve wants to be, with the caveat that the current tariffs and RAM pricing could throw that off. The BOM for it totaled $425, from what I recall. It seemed like quite a bit better analysis than the wild guesses some other people have been throwing out, like $1200, etc.

Here, I found it in my history - someone here on Lemmy had recommended it to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJI3qTb2ze8

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.

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

Would FP8 be exposed as the VK_KHR_shader_float8 vulkan extension?

Yeah, we sit about 2 meters from our 100" projector screen lol

I just ordered thebparts for a ~$900 gaming pc that boils down to Ryzen 7500F and Radeon 7600. I’ll believe “priced like a PC” to mean that.

I have some of the same concerns with the Frame. It is a stabdalone headset, but also just runs Steam games; it’s not its own ecosystem like a Quest which has different versions for the headset vs what you stream from PC. But I haven’t seen much hands-on stuff other than a physical hardware breakdown; never anything running on it.

Like, how well would it run Half-Life Alyx vs how well it might run something like Gorn? How is it gonna handle informing users what games would actually run well in standalone vs PCVR streaming?

The difference is, is that the Steam Deck is a handheld and for what it can do as a handheld is actually impressive. Given how the handheld market is dominated by Nintendo.

The Steam Machine is marketing itself as a console and a PC, two things in where it can be outclassed in.