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$499 Steam Machine from iBuyPower Revealed [Up: AMD CPU, Radeon 270 GPU]

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I know it won't have AAA games by EA at the very least because of precedence and status quo. Ubisoft and Activision are also extremely likely given they barely have enough time to port their games to Windows. Exactly how do YOU know it'll have AAA games?

I don't know it will and I never said so. Valve said it and we'll see if it's true or not. As for EA, don't be so sure. There seems to be movement on that front.
 

DeaviL

Banned
Correct, but it appears Valve will be the sole manufacturers of this controller and they are willing to take the hit in supplying it with all Steam Machines.

They apparently are not legally allowed to build them in their offices so have bought some other place to do that. If the Steam Machines are popular enough, they will look into larger manufacturing for the controllers. Basically, if its more popular than expected, the retail controller may not be easy to get

I was planning to get one of those controllers, but i don't like having to ship them from the US. Hope they'll be available locally, but with the small production they seem to be planning...
 

BPoole

Member
So will hardware running on SteamOS yield better performance compared to the same hardware running on Windows? Looking at benchmarks, there are several games that an R9 290 can't run comfortable at 60fps on high/very high settings
 

krizzx

Junior Member
Honestly, until I saw this, not other next gen console interested me beside the Wii U. This may very well warrant me purchasing a second console.

I'll have both the most fun console and the strongest console if I get this.
 

Kinthalis

Banned
Yes it is. The CTO of 4A Games said in an interview with Eurogamer a couple of months ago that it's at least factor 2 in favor of the consoles.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-inside-metro-last-light

That's nto really in full context. Certain functions can be done faster on a console vs a PC. Gaming engines are not made up solely of those functions, however, so in the rela world it's nothing liek that.

Not only that but modern API's can and do mitigate this considerably. Throw in mantle and Steam OS, an OS speciallized and optimized for gaming and you might as well be talking about another console.
 

Kinthalis

Banned
So will hardware running on SteamOS yield better performance compared to the same hardware running on Windows? Looking at benchmarks, there are several games that an R9 290 can't run comfortable at 60fps on high/very high settings

According to Valve yes. But we don't have benchmarks, at least I don't think so.
 

Durante

Member
So will hardware running on SteamOS yield better performance compared to the same hardware running on Windows? Looking at benchmarks, there are several games that an R9 290 can't run comfortable at 60fps on high/very high settings
I don't think anyone said anything about high / very high settings.
 
PC 12B
All home consoles combined 27B

lnNoETe.jpg


http://news.xbox.com/2013/05/x360-aaron-greenberg-industry-growth

I really don't see how this is bad for PC but maybe that's just me.

The biggest PC retailer (steam) is not a publicly owned company and therefore is not require to make public financial disclosures. I wouldn't exactly call that chart an accurate representation, seeing as it doesn't appear to include any steam sales.
 

Durante

Member
Timothy Lottes said pretty interesting things about the benefits of a console RTOS. I'm on a smart phone right now so maybe you want to quote it for me. ^_^
Let's first state for the record that your previous smug quote was completely wrong in the given context.

Moving on to your new point, none of the new consoles run a real-time operating system so I really do wonder about that.
 

Dario ff

Banned
Any idea if they're going to have any official support for xinput compatable devices, or if that will be on a game by game basis?
Xinput controller support is built natively into the Linux kernel, but I haven't tested it myself to confirm. I imagine you could probably test with the current Linux versions of the Source engine games to confirm that. If the game you want supports Xinput devices on Windows, supporting it on the Linux/SteamOS version should be easy.
 

RedSwirl

Junior Member
If more games on steam push local multiplayer I would probably jump in especially since consoles have lost focus of local play and majority of games are single player/online only Only exception to this is like Nintendo consoles

Man. If Valve patched four-player splitscreen into PC Left 4 Dead...
 
The machines themselves will not be available till approximately (not including dreaded valve time) mid 2014. They may be taking price drops into account now and willing to take a small short term hit in order to get some notoriety. I hadn't heard of them till today

That's still a HUGE drop in essentially 6 months. zomg, if you're listening, it would be amazing to get a price breakdown on this thing, because it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me.

Again, not saying it's impossible, but PC prices on CPUs and GPUs haven't dropped all that much recently, it's usually a greater bit of power and performance for the price. Again, a strong APU model for $499 makes sense. I just have trouble seeing how even in 6 months a third party supplier could pull off something with a 270 for that price and still make enough for it to be worthwhile. If I am missing something, or there are actual numbers that show this I am all for it, but until I see them I am going to remain a skeptic on the price point.
 

syko de4d

Member
Valve should pre install TF2, Dota2, L4D3 and
Half Life 3
on every Steam Box. That would help alot to sell them, even if they are all F2P. "Buy the box and get instant access to games, which over 20million Uniques Players play each Month!"
 

BPoole

Member
I don't think anyone said anything about high / very high settings.
I understand that, their only barometer for performance was "all games in 1080p at 60fps", but there are some games out now that a R9 270 can't handle at that unless you drop down to medium settings. How is it going to fair in 5 years from now?
 

Clawww

Member
Valve should pre install TF2, Dota2, L4D3 and
Half Life 3
on every Steam Box. That would help alot to sell them, even if they are all F2P. "Buy the box and get instant access to games, which over 20million Uniques Players play each Month!"

I bet they could garner some steam machine sales simply by including exclusive Dota 2 and TF2 hats lmao
 

Durante

Member
How do you know?
Because neither the FreeBSD nor the Windows NT kernel are hard real-time capable. Unless you mean to imply that they were changed to such a significant extent, at which point I would put the burden of proof on the one making the claim.

Honestly, I really do wonder why it's even relevant whether or not they are. The purported "OS overhead" advantages you want to argue for are completely orthogonal to whether or not the OS and its scheduler are real-time capable. In fact, if anything the constraints imposed by being required to fulfill hard real-time constraints probably induce additional overhead in general day-to-day performance. Since these consoles aren't running the brakes on a car or navigating a space shuttle, I don't see why you would use a real-time OS.

My assumption for why you brought it up is because you probably think "RTOS" sounds good.
 

Nozem

Member
This is pretty cool. I would like:

  • 100% hassle-free downloading and installing of games.
  • No necessary tinkering with settings to play games in 1080p60.
  • Good 3rd party support. Not just Valve and indie games, but also 3rd party AAA games.
  • If I don't like the controller I want to be able to use a traditional one (DS4 via USB?).

If those points are covered, I'm in. $500 is fine.
 
That's an absolutely fantastic price point for those specs with the controller included. I was in the market for a HTPC but I'm definitely going to wait for a Steam Machine now. Just waiting for Plex support now.
 
it's not something that kids seem to have an issue dealing with to play minecraft.

think about that, the most popular game with the elementary school age bracket is a PC game where you build entire worlds. all the while grown adults are complaining that PCs are too complicated for them as they ram QTEs in whatever agency free cinematic wankfest they just paid $60 for.

Aye, my nephews play fucking minecraft and roblox, they make their own levels and shit. When they want something a bit more shooty they fire up world of tanks...which frankly has a hell of a learning curve to it.
 

undu

Member
Xinput controller support is built natively into the Linux kernel, but I haven't tested it myself to confirm. I imagine you could probably test with the current Linux versions of the Source engine games to confirm that. If the game you want supports Xinput devices on Windows, supporting it on the Linux/SteamOS version should be easy.

It works just fine for me using a Horipad 2. I've played games such as fez and monaco and they work just fine, it's plug & play.
 
Good for you, but the prospect of the PC as a competitor in the living room through the Steam Machines brings many more advantages than better graphics. Remember free online multiplayer? Wasn't that great?

That is actually amazing. Plus:

Having a never ending library (No BC BS)
Mods will be there
Steam prices
SteamOS will have performance boost over Win
Flexibility, you can do with it what you want, install Linux, Win, whatever

I was sold on a PS4 and will probably still get one but way later as a SP machine for all the worthwhile exclusives. For now free MP with SteamMachine/Wii U

Now I need a techie. I think I have some interesting questions.

SteamOS is based on linux, which will probably use OpenGL. PS4 uses a modification of OpenGL. Games on windows I think can use either DirectX or also OpenGL. Now knowing this

In theory and given the above games should be fairly easy to port to SteamOS?
Can devs just start using OpenGL from the start when creating their games on Win, then just make sure they run on SteamOS, this should be fairly easy?

If answers are Yes and Yes supporting SteamOS will be relatively straightforward for devs, this is critical as always, although you can just install Windows on this SteamMachines. Either way they are a no brainer for me. Will get one in the $700-$800 price range.
 
That's an absolutely fantastic price point for those specs with the controller included. I was in the market for a HTPC but I'm definitely going to wait for a Steam Machine now. Just waiting for Plex support now.

Plex Home Theater came out, and I'm pretty sure there's a linux branch somewhere for it - I think they reforked from XBMC not too long ago. If that's some sort of fail, you can always use PlexBMC which is just a plugin for XBMC to support PMS as a back end.
 

RedSwirl

Junior Member
When it comes to the biggest arguments: hardware manufacturers and AAA 3rd party support, none of that can really be discussed anymore here until CES.

It'll be interesting to see who actually backs Steam OS. Several big publishers already make all their PC games Steamworks: SEGA, Zenimax (Bethesda), Square Enix (Eidos), 2K, etc. I imagine those would be the most likely to make their AAA games support Steam OS. Getting the next Call of Duty on there (which is very possible since every COD since MW2 has shipped with Steam) would go a long way. Of course the big outliers are EA, Ubisoft, and Blizzard. I think the best Valve could hope for is that, in the long run, Steam OS becomes big enough for EA, Ubisoft, and Blizzard to release Linux versions of Origin, UPlay, and Battle.net respectively.
 

Bedlam

Member
Wow, that's a pretty competitive price point. If you wanted to buy an Xbone primarily to play Titanfall, why wouldn't you go for the Steam Machine now instead? Its game library is much better as well (unless you care about Halo or Forza).

You need to remember that this doesn't run all PC games. It runs the ones that are Linux compatible... which is very few (but will obviously grow over time). You won't be seeing TitanFall on SteamOS.

That said, I'll probably be looking at one of these in the next couple years as the tech pulls away from consoles a bit more.

Don't think there's gonna be a linux build of titanfall.

Oops. Should've read more than the headline. I totally didn't think of that. Well, let's hope Valve somehow turns Linux into a viable alternative for gamers in the long run.
 

Nzyme32

Member
So will hardware running on SteamOS yield better performance compared to the same hardware running on Windows? Looking at benchmarks, there are several games that an R9 290 can't run comfortable at 60fps on high/very high settings

Apparently there are "significant performance gains" over windows, although this has yet to be demonstrated. I'd expect this to be shown at CES in January or through Steam Dev Days. Either way it would have to be in the near future as the machines are due for mid 2014.

Interestingly, the Steam Controller's latency performance will be slightly handicapped by anything other than steam machines or their supplied dongle at first.

From: http://uk.ign.com/articles/2013/11/04/how-valve-engineered-the-perfect-controller?page=2

Valve is also working on the wireless protocols the controller will use, with Coomer telling us, “we’re pretty settled on the category of protocol. There’s a Nordic wireless chipset that we’ve been starting to use. It’s like Bluetooth, but it’s a custom stack that has lower latency than Bluetooth. The boxes do need to be able to speak to our controller through that wireless channel, so we’re working with all our partners to be able to make sure that they do.”

“One of the interesting things about going that route with Bluetooth is that we can use the low-latency Bluetooth channel when it’s available, and we can also flip over to the generic Bluetooth, vanilla Bluetooth,” Hope added. “Any device that has that kind of Bluetooth can still talk to the controller.”

“Just with a latency penalty, a small one,” Coomer clarified. “Part of why that’s important is because you can use this controller with a PC. It doesn’t have to be a Steam machine box. So with other PCs, you could just communicate via regular Bluetooth and have it be a tiny bit slower.” Every controller shipped separately will also include a dongle “so that you can get the high speed Bluetooth protocol,” Hope said.
 

Reg

Banned
Wow, that's a pretty competitive price point. If you wanted to buy an Xbone primarily to play Titanfall, why wouldn't you go for the Steam Machine now instead? Its game library is much better as well (unless you care about Halo or Forza).

Don't think there's gonna be a linux build of titanfall.
 
I just googled and couldn't find anything by Timothy Lottes about "RTOS".

he removed it after Xbox fans started attacking him (he likened it to a DVR), but there was a thread on here

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=510076

The real reason to get excited about a PS4 is what Sony as a company does with the OS and system libraries as a platform, and what this enables 1st party studios to do, when they make PS4-only games. If PS4 has a real-time OS, with a libGCM style low level access to the GPU, then the PS4 1st party games will be years ahead of the PC simply because it opens up what is possible on the GPU. Note this won't happen right away on launch, but once developers tool up for the platform, this will be the case. As a PC guy who knows hardware to the metal, I spend most of my days in frustration knowing damn well what I could do with the hardware, but what I cannot do because Microsoft and IHVs wont provide low-level GPU access in PC APIs. One simple example, drawcalls on PC have easily 10x to 100x the overhead of a console with a libGCM style API....

I could continue here, but I'm not, by now you get the picture, launch titles will likely be DX11 ports, so perhaps not much better than what could be done on PC. However if Sony provides the real-time OS with libGCM v2 for GCN, one or two years out, 1st party devs and Sony's internal teams like the ICE team, will have had long enough to build up tech to really leverage the platform.

keyword being if
 

Timeaisis

Member
And, while the company wouldn't tell us about the boxes' internals, it did confirm that the hardware will run all Steam titles in 1080p resolution at 60fps.

Not going to happen...unless you count "Low" graphic setting. This is going to be a weird console/PC hybrid and I'm still not sold on it yet. With PCs, no matter what, you have to tinker with settings. It's how it works. And since literally every game is trying to be able to run on every PC within the realm of it's system requirements, there's really no way they can guarantee an optimal experience for every game on a Steambox...unless of courses developers start developing for a particular model of Steambox, which isn't going to happen. Ever.

Let's say I'm still skeptical, but interested.
 

PG2G

Member
Wow, that's a pretty competitive price point. If you wanted to buy an Xbone primarily to play Titanfall, why wouldn't you go for the Steam Machine now instead? Its game library is much better as well (unless you care about Halo or Forza).

You need to remember that this doesn't run all PC games. It runs the ones that are Linux compatible... which is very few (but will obviously grow over time). You won't be seeing TitanFall on SteamOS.

That said, I'll probably be looking at one of these in the next couple years as the tech pulls away from consoles a bit more.
 

Kinthalis

Banned
I think this is great news for EVERYONE. I'm not sure why the console gamer sont his thread heap ont he hate on ANYTHING PC related. Specially something like this.

Competition is a good thing. Imagine if SteamOS and Steam machines take off. Ok, you're in love with Sony or Microsoft and dont' want to touch icky PC's. We got it. But if it DOES do well, you now have a paltform offering things like mods and low prices in the living room. Guess what Sony and Microsoft might want to make damn sure happnes on THEIR platforms?

Competition is good for ALL gamers. Stop being so short-sighted.
 
Was not expecting $500. That's awesome. How does a R9 270 graphics card stack up against a Radeon HD5870? That's what I have in my laptop and I don't think it's going to be able to run stuff well starting very soon.

I'd like to see other Steam Machines, but $500 seems reasonable. You can upgrade the graphics cards right? I'd think about dropping $500 on one and then maybe upgrading to a better graphics card a couple of months later or a year later.

My only gripe is that it's only going to play Linux-based games right? Can I install Windows on it and play my non-Linux Steam games on it?
 
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