many, yes. a lot of “high end” Windows VR games were only high end as of 2019 or so. I think they can add enough driver level hacks with foveated rendering and whatnot to make Alyx barely work standalone. CPU requirements here are basically negligible and DLSS type features have come a long way since 2019
mounting the battery on the back for weight is a new innovation in vr? nobody thought to do that until now?? lol
7 Likes
was yelling this at my monitor, thank you, good lord
to think, arms dealing capital came from this sector
hardware does look decent, wish the steam controller stayed 40% more weird. love how it looks though. maxed utilitarian stat. capacitive gyro locks will be on every controller released ~1 gen after this puppy
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reffi, I was thinking just the other day about how you drove me to my first meetup.
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The 8gb of VRAM on the steam machine is the only concerning thing about the entire lineup. I’m guessing its to hit their ~$500 pricepoint for the base model without controller. It’s questionable how well even something like GTA6 will perform on 8gb at 1080p. I suspect by the time PS6 games start coming to PC using their expected 32gb of unified memory, valve will put out a Steam Machine Pro with 16+gb of VRAM. By then AMD will have an architecture that could just swap out the RDNA 3 GPU while keeping the same power profile so nothing else would need to change. This first offering is just to get as much market penetration with the cheapest box possible. CPU and GPU are both 1 generation behind, purchased at scale from the clearance bin. Probably the right move overall.
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Zen 4 is still being shipped by AMD in current and forthcoming SKUs (as are Zen 2 and 3; mobile offerings from both AMD and Intel are kind of a mess w/r/t archs being used) and not terribly much less performant than Zen 5 in gaming, the bottleneck is the GPU more often than not so that’s a good pick
There’s been no movement on a smaller RDNA4 die and every 3.5 part has been an iGPU (I mean, if you want to count the Strix Halo SoC as that, the fucking GPU on that chip dwarfs the CPU) and I think they’re still pushing 3 cards as filling in the lower-end and and low-mid range segments and they’re checking out until 5/UDNA. Valve is claiming the GPU is semi-custom and it remains to be seen if that means “we tuned the clocks” or if some of the 3.5/PS5 Pro juice made it in
Also 3 can run FSR4 (kind of, unofficially, don’t ask AMD for shit) without as big a performance hit as you would think and SteamOS has global FSR, so I think they’re working towards this (don’t tell me 3 and 4 are vector based and wouldn’t work for general upscaling, I can’t read, I’m illiterate and anything you write would go through my brain like so much water off a duck’s ass)
1 Like
computer hardware is bad
I recommend getting a sane hobby instead of paying attention to it
11 Likes
the main thing Valve has accomplished with the Steam Machine announcement is making me go back to lusting after ITX cases on Aliexpress
hey I need engineers to figure out how to make high end GPUs into short, low-profile cards
1 Like
this was the only actual low profile GPU I ever bought and it was quite affordable and long-lived largely because of how long the 8800 GT was on the market for
my other GPUs have just regular sized but in presposterously small cases
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currently the highest end low-profile cards are a 5060 or if I decide to go crazy and buy an Arc B50 Pro
thankfully I’m only a little crazy
1 Like
glad to report/say that this is the case (pun unintentional 
) and can be achieved nowadays with a bit of reading and HW swapping.
Like, seriously, it is so convenient to be able to stuff my small HTTTTPC into a bag, add cables (WiFi card tbqh, and HDMI for connecting quickly w/o dismantling half of the living room), throw an xbox controller in the mix, and bring it along to a friend to e.g. showing off Sonic ×worlds — so much so that we’ve reached a point in time where if i want to just show off a game quickly, I’d rather go for the PC than a console, since Windows 11 + Steam are more reliably patched/in less of a
oohhh i need to install this OS patch for “Performance Improvements
”
lottery that forces you to stare at download bars for half an hour before the Update takes another 10 minutes.
Part of the reason for that is that the PC loads faster (better HW), patches faster (2.5Gb ETH port), lets you defer OS updates (that can break things, true 
) and is (now) sizewise tinier than the USS PS5 Original, or the even-smaller, but way less performant XB4Pro (which has its own share of problems, namely game pricing/availability/XBLGoldUltimate-disaster). Maybe if i bought into the Switch2deck-universe, i would be less happy, but this mITX-box is atm fitting my gaming needs best, who’d have expected that two years ago when i started this project…
(edit:
size-wise, just to compare a standard PS5 game:
)
5 Likes
In Metroid Prime 4, Samus gets a chatty new sidekick
He looks a bit like if you crossed Tingle with Master Chief
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Woof every single thing they show about this game makes it seem worse and worse
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I wasn’t super hot on Metroid Prime when I finally got around to playing it (the initial “wow this really is Metroid in 3D, first person - they nailed it!” giving way to “fuck I gotta hunt down all these trinkets” and “goddamnit I gotta remember what weapon is what color so I can play Simon against these Metroids and space pirates this sucks”), and as I understand it that one is pretty much the best one, so that saves me potentially 3 games worth of time I can use elsewhere.
4 Likes
it’s telling that codblops7 is lousy with very obvious gen AI art in spite of there being a whole network of support studios in the cod mines and people seem to be vocally angrier about some dipshit nerd who follows Metroid for 20 minutes
either way, we’re in hell
3 Likes
They’re busy getting mad at the incredibly terrible campaign
I think it’s cool that Treyarch looked at how much Wolf Youngblood fumbled TNO/TNC and went “we want a piece of the lootershooter action”
video games fucking suck
9 Likes
when I worked on Vanguard I was actually tasked with putting in those kill cards, but the deadlines and amount of work was very intense and the entire time I was trying to frantically put as many cards as I could into the game i kept thinking how nobody was checking anything and it would be really easy to just put my own shit in there. Given how frantic the pipeline is I’m not really surprised they went with AI generated shit because nobody has time to think about anything.
5 Likes