I have a SFF pc with an AMD GPU and AMD CPU both with better specs that the new Steam Machine just waiting for them to release a standalone installer for SteamOS :(
This isn't quite true. My GrapheneOS phone isn't lacking any "essential service." The only issue is that some apps distributed through the Play Store (or an alternative frontend like Aurora) that depend on proprietary Google libraries won't work. But this is a problem that rests with the developers of the apps, not AOSP per se.
Valve is even borrowing some of the work done for the Mac version of Linux to add support for Proton on ARM hardware.
> Gaming on Linux on M1 is here! We’re thrilled to release our Asahi game playing toolkit, which integrates our Vulkan 1.3 drivers with x86 emulation and Windows compatibility.
Apple gets the credit for designing a bootloader that allows you to run a third party unsigned OS without degrading device security when you do boot into MacOS.
Applying the security settings per partition instead of per device is much more flexible, and you don't have to worry about Microsoft controlling which OS signing keys are valid.
It's uncharacteristic of them and better than nothing. But simply not blocking the installation of a 3rd party OS should be the bare minimum required by law. Ideally Apple would publish documentation on the hardware so it didn't have to be reverse engineered.
That is not 100% correct. Apple is slowing closing in the walls on a general purpose computer and preventing the bypassing of Gatekeeper with the execution of unsigned applications to _protect the children._ [0] [1] [2] [3]
Apple allow this kind of thing only on Mac and while also ensuring it does not happen by providing 0 documentation and by not contributing to any outside project. FEX was not made as part of the Asahi Linux project btw. Please inform yourself before making statements
Bro. I played what I consider a basic game, Inscryption, on my MacBook Pro M4 Pro with 24Gb and that thing sounded like an aircraft taking off. ...meanwhile the weak sauce Steamdeck plays it flawlessly. Fan hardly even spins up. There is a lot of work to do IMO on the Mac front. I doubt Apple cares.
> Steam Frame is a PC, and runs SteamOS powered by a Snapdragon® 8 Series Processor. With 16GB of RAM, Steam Frame supports stand-alone play on a growing number of both VR and non-VR games without needing to stream from your PC.
So Steam + Proton works on aarch64? Is this something already available/supported, or is this an announcement?
I believe this work is a continuation of the work the asahi linux people did to get games working on M-series macs. It seems Alyssa Rosenzweig works at valve as a contractor. Super cool work. Some seriously talented folks.
What a jump, I'd be curious to hear first why anyone would prefer Intel above pretty much anything else, but also secondly how the actual experience difference between the two after working at both, must be a very strong contrast between them.
Maybe she was given a huge signing bonus to avoid her working on making X86 irrelevant? Combined with perhaps some interesting project to work on for real.
I'm sure most would stay at valve if they could. The just do so much contract work, and I'm sure a stable job at intel is better pay, benefits and stability.
This is fun, just found this issue from 2018 which was closed with this comment:
> Hello @setsunati, this is not a realistic objective for Proton. As @rkfg, mentions wine for ARM does not magically make x86 based games work on ARM cpus.
> Even if Steam were brought to ARM, and an x86 emulation layer was run underneath wine, the amount of games that could run fast and without hitting video driver quirks is small enough not to entertain this idea any time in the near future.
Pretty unlikely as long as Apple refuses to support Vulkan. Even if they did, the whole Proton project is about Valve controlling their own destiny rather than being chained to someone else's platform, and Apple is just another Microsoft in that regard.
Couldn't Apple spend their resources on that? Proton is open-source, and Apple's the one with the incentive to have more "prestige" AAA game devs to parade around during keynotes.
Apple could but they're not interested in non-native games, they want native ports or nothing. As I discussed a few posts over, Apple went to the trouble of developing a DirectX compatibility layer, but then told game developers they're not allowed to use it for anything besides evaluating whether their game would run well enough on Mac hardware. If they go ahead with a port then Apple still expects them to do it all the hard way.
It's textbook "perfect is the enemy of good" because yeah, compatibility layers have overhead, native is better, but if you insist on native everything but can't get devs on board then you just end up with no games.
That's great as long as it works, but D3DMetal is a proprietary, closed-source Apple library so you can and probably will get rug-pulled by Apple neglecting or deprecating it as their priorities change. They've only ever positioned it as an "evaluation environment" for developers to estimate how their game will run before going ahead with a native Mac port, not as something for end-users to play Windows games with, so if developers don't bite then they'll have no reason to keep working on it.
Right now, the user experience with Crossover is that you have to manage the whole thing of installing Windows Steam in a Wine bottle, then installing games within that second Steam installation, then dealing with the fact that Steam doesn't seem to like having two instances running on the same computer (my native Steam loses connectivity every time I start the Crossover instance).
Wanting Proton on Mac isn't about that specific fork of Wine, it's shorthand for wanting the user experience that Valve gives you on Linux.
I mean, theoretically they could backport the D3DMetal wine driver from the Game Porting Toolkit. Also I remember there was some early preliminary work done on stock wine a few years ago.
Honestly right now there is so much overlapping between all the wine "flavors" and forks available (Stock wine, Crossover, Proton/Proton-GE/Wine-GE, Game Porting Toolkit, winevdm, probably a few more I'm forgetting right now) I'm not entirely sure how many features have been independently implemented already multiple times.
Proton is just a fork of Wine that also translates from Microsoft's DirectX graphics API to the native graphics API of Linux (Vulcan) so you can run Windows games on Linux.
The new thing Proton is adding is translation from x86 to ARM.
Macs already have Wine, an x86 to ARM translation layer (Rosetta), and an Apple provided translation layer from Microsoft's DirectX to the Mac's native Metal graphics API (D3DMetal) which is integrated into upstream Wine.
It can, but it'll be a small subset of stuff. You'll probably be able to just hit install + play on most things, but it'll have a "Steam Frame Verified" program like the Steam Deck's.
Wow this looks great. Foveated streaming, great resolution, wireless, 144hz, looks much more comfortable... As much as I want this, I feel like it'll end up being a really cool thing that just sits on the shelf.
> Passthrough - Monochrome passthrough via outward facing cameras
This is an outright bone-headed move that I can't believe Valve is making. Only having monochrome cameras means augmented reality is basically a non-starter.
AR has a lot of potential. I literally bought a Meta Quest 3 just for PianoVision [0] when I already had a Valve Index. I would love to see some sort of AR-based game you could play outdoors. But with only monochrome vision, that's gonna be awful.
The videos I've seen about the Frame all call out the front expansion port, which "Valve says ... offers a dual 2.5Gbps MIPI camera interface and also supports a one-lane Gen 4 PCIe data port for other peripherals."[1]
That's plenty to support color passthrough as a physical addon, which in turn makes me think that, like with the OLED Deck, we'll see a Frame with built-in color-passthrough later as a different premium SKU when/if they justify it.
I tried VRChat once or twice but never seemed to have found any fun places/groups to hang out that weren't obsessing about anime/manga most of the time. Anyone here on HN have better suggestions of worlds/groups or where to even look?
There are groups that are more focused on music (DnB, dubstep, other festival-friendly genres), focused on dancing, focused on drinking games, focused on world-hopping, etc. I'm into the underground rave vibe, so for that there's VRC Party Hub, which is a guy who runs a discord who befriends as many clubs as he can find in that scene, and imports their schedules/announcements channels into a nightly report of all known events.
Maybe they've cracked the code with the dongle? Usually, you either have to invest both time and money into setting up the perfect streaming network, deal with annoying cables or resign yourself to inferior on-device game versions. The ergonomics matter more than you'd think.
But if it's a very easy plug-n-play type deal to run SteamVR games (and on Linux!), that's a huge ergonomic improvement. Don't have to think too much about whether everything is running correctly or what-have-you.
If it's just plug and play and works well, it'd be brilliant. I have experimented a lot with a couple or wifi dongles I had lying around and setting up a hotspot, but honestly I could never get it to work well.
Streaming VR content is just so sensitive. I have a good cabled network but even a simple switch introduced noticeable lag spikes. In the end I have a separate router that I just connect straight to my PC, and then I share my wifi connection through my PC to that network. A whole silly setup just to minimize latency and packet loss. If that could be replaced with a simple USB dongle I'd be amazed.
My NVIDIA Shield is getting old and slow. I can see this as a good replacement, because it supports HDMI CEC, so you can control it with your remote control.
Install Plex, JellyFin, FreeTube et.al. to it and you have a nice open source TV box.
You also get 4k gaming from Steam, GOG, Epic etc. and you get emulators. I've been wanting to build a computer like this, but CEC is hard to find and the adapters that exist don't support full 4k resolution.
The specs for this steam machine say HDMI 2.0, in the past I used a pulse8 HDMI CEC USB dongle with a computer which was also HDMI 2.0 iirc. I was using a 1080p projector with it but their website claims 4k support: https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-adapter
I recently replaced a shield with an Ugoos Am6b+ running coreELEC, which works okay and supports some stuff the shield doesn't but I miss being able to run some android apps easily. I wonder if the new steam machine will support DV.
There are already headsets with decent text fidelity, but IMO the problem is now on the host side. I tried to get an XR desktop env running (Stardust https://stardustxr.org/) on Linux but ran into graphical issues. The Windows ecosystem is much better though.
I don't think there is foveated rendering. There is foveated encoding, when game streaming.
Looks like a very competent headset indeed though! Nice combo of fast streaming that can prioritize well with foveated encoding, and hopefully a pretty nice malleable capable standalone headset too.
I'm more confused that it's running SteamOS which is supposedly Arch based, but arch doesn't officially support ARM. You have to use the ArchLinuxARM distro for that, which is less maintained. They got to be doing something off label for that.
Arch has been working with Valve on various build system improvements for some time [0], which as I understand it are targeted at making it more feasible for them to eventually support more architectures [1]. This doesn't release for several months; I wonder if there'll be an official Arch Linux ARM by then?
Pretty much the only reason I boot to Windows anymore is to play games with my kids and family. The direction of this thing is dangerously close to being all I'd care about from a desktop computer.
If Valve pivoted into making a well-supported laptop with good hardware that ran Linux and played games...
one limitation for Bazzite for instance would be some titles that require anti-cheating won't work but just like OP, only use case I have for windows is gaming and running some banking app which won't work on non-Windows device
love to see more and more users realize they can game just fine on linux
It's time to stop buying such games and send game studios a signal that we won't tolerate rootkits and/or closed platforms. Anti-cheats should run server-side, or better yet, servers should be community-operated. I would probably bought BF6, but since I exclusively use Arch, EA lost a sale -- too bad for them there are thousands of other games that work flawlessly on Linux.
I want to echo a previous comment of mine on this topic:
With the rise of mainstream-compatible, as in a standard gamer can get them running and use them with a similar frustration level as Win11, Linux first systems like steam deck, steam machine and even steam frame, there is a real, even if currently low, pressure for big publisher to support Linux/SteamOS. I somewhat hope/fear there will be a blessed SteamOS version that supports anticheats enough for publishers like EA, Epic and Riot to accept the risk.
I was in the same shoes, then one day I decided to give a shot to Bazzite. To my surprise the installation was extremely smooth, and everything worked right away. Now I’m playing almost everything on it (Arc Raiders, EU V, HLL and Horizon FW recently). If you want to _try_ all you need is 15 minutes, some HDD space and an empty USB. You don’t have to give up Windows at all, dual booting is also pretty smooth.
Loved the concept, tried it out, didn't work, at least not for RDR2 which I was trying to play. But how would it work, there is Linux, Bazzite, then there is Steam, RDR2 needs the Rockstar launcher, it's such an intricate web of dependencies, I'm not surprised something isn't working.
When silly DRM or a game launcher is all that is keeping you from enjoying a game, that is when you get the pirated version without any of this bs and enjoy it without remorse.
I also bit the bullet and did a bazzite install and am blown away how seamless it has been for what I need. All the games I like run on Steam. Even Diablo 4 runs through the Blizzard launcher which does take some work to get installed, but nothing you can't find in a youtube video.
No issues using the system as my daily driver for personal things. I have dual monitors, one oriented vertically and one 144hz. All works great! I'd recommend it to anyone
The whole Universal Blue image ecosystem is so polished, consistent and coherent. Bazzite is their gaming image variant, I’ve also recently switched to Bluefin which is their Gnome variant on my workstation and everything works so nicely together, it’s the most joy I’ve had using a computer in a long time.
the limit last time was anything competitive or multiplayer that required a weird launcher or some low-level permissions or something. I just want to play CS2 and hunt showdown.
I used to also have a dedicated Windows machine just for gaming, but two years ago I formatted the Windows drive and put SteamOS (via ChimeraOS) instead. I can legitimately say that it has been more stable than running the same games on Windows. Just flawless.
Same, if they also released something like a Steam Machine Pro with more ram+vram and bit higher specs I would instantly purchase it. Nvidia and AMD have been rightly criticized for releasing 8GB video cards in the past year and valve shouldn't be immune to that criticism.
I do not believe that _you_ are trolling with this question, but answering this is just asking to be trolled.
That said. Fortnite. Yes, I still play it with friends and cannot play it on Mac or Linux. :(
I'm sure others have similar examples. Also there are just simple things like playing with friends and streaming on Discord. Anybody streaming from Windows always comes across smooth and HD to the other participants while anybody on Linux seems to consistently be received (I don't know where exactly in the chain the problem exists, so just "received", as it may not be a broadcasting or encoding problem, I'm not an expert in this) with a lot of artifacts and lower framerates.
A friend of mine, a Linux user, says he installed Windows for gaming. Apparently the main issue isn't actual compatibility for games, but that a lot of games require some kind of kernel level anticheat (rootkit?).
GTAVs online ecosystem with custom servers.
Rust hasn’t enabled Linux Battleye support.
Valorant
Some releases that are temporarily popular like BF6, playtest of Battleye games where Linux support isn’t enabled (Fellowship, Exoborne). All games in this paragraph also by Swedish developers. Kom igen, linuxstöd
Some intrusive ones (EA's anti cheat for recent Battlefields, Activision's anti cheat for Call of Duty, anything from Riot to name a few) do not work.
However, EAC - who is a major player in this field producing generic solutions - does support Linux. The involved publisher, however, needs to approve this and the developer need to turn on a feature flag. That's it.
However, some publishers simply deny this for... totally mental reasons ...and this means that the game is marked as borked in protondb even though the game could as easily be played on Linux thanks to EAC's Linux support.
"EAC supports Linux, but devs just won't turn it on" is the clickbait answer, but the details are more nuanced. EAC has multiple security levels that a title can set based on the threat model of the game, and most games with heavy MTX that use EAC shy away from it, largely because Fortnite doesn't do it. EAC is owned by Epic, and if Tim Sweeney says that you can't do MTX on Linux safely, then any AAA live services game with in-game MTX is going to shy away from it, regardless of how true the statement actually is.
Yes, this is broadly true. Just about everything that does not have Linux-disabling anticheat runs wonderfully on Linux these days. You can check https://protondb.com/ to see how any given game runs.
Yep anticheats are one of the big hurdles to 'porting' a lot of online focused shooters to linux. It's an unfortunate situation but I get it from the company's perspective, not having any anticheat leads to shitty situations for way more players than not having a linux version of their anticheat and a vast majority of players have Windows devices or are willing to dual boot.
EFT has a pretty ridiculous history with attempts at anticheat. Several years ago they set up their servers to kick anyone with virtualization enabled because cheaters had been using VMs to intercept network traffic (the network traffic wasn't encrypted for tarkov then). The response from cheaters was to use a seperate bare metal build to intercept the traffic. The devs "fixed" it right before windows 11 came out with virtualization on by default.
FWIW, PvE and modded Tarkov does actually run fine on Linux (Streets map doesn't, nor does Arena).
It's definitely not the same, but between Arc Raiders and PvE I get my extraction shooter fix. Online Tarkov is mostly populated by Gaming Wizards™ anyways.
The major anti-cheats do support Linux, but it's opt-in on the dev side because they're significantly easier to bypass than the Windows versions. It's not even close, getting around the Linux ACs is child's play. It sucks but nobody really has a good solution yet.
Alternatively it's still a pretty small slice of the market that's not willing to dual boot for the major games that do require windows only anticheats so it's just not worth their dev and support time to try to serve that small slice. Valve's work on Steam Machines/Decks is the thing needed to actually push developers to supporting it by providing a relatively consistent target OS and a large enough install base to justify spending the money to support.
I dont think I'm getting trolled, I know that loads of games still dont work. I just wanted to get an idea of which games are the current biggest ones holding people back.
If I could travel back in time and prevent my kids and nephews from ever learning about Fortnite, I might do it. Instead I'm out here trying to keep from getting sniped by a Simpson character.
Fortunately, it seems like the rest of the family is getting tired of COD's ceaseless churn, and might be willing to pick up something else.
Fortnite is a fun game though, it's the only game holding me back from fully switching to Linux. Cloud streaming just doesn't cut it, latency is way too high (+ more money for a single game)
For me it's only games the specifically don't support Linux, which are mostly competitive multiplayer games with anti-cheat software. Apex Legends used to work great on Linux, but they removed support as an attempt to combat cheaters (there are still tons of cheaters).
In addition to what others have said, a group of friends still plays enough League of Legends that I don't both dual booting. Also if you play RuneScape (RS3, not OSRS) the best 3rd party add-on, Alt1 Toolkit, only works on Windows.
For me the thing that pushed me to reinstall windows after I got a cheap $10 copy was Kerbal Space Program. Though, in my specific case I strongly suspect it was older hardware & driver issues than anything else, since I've not had any major problems on steam deck.
I do have more random crashes on certain games even on steam deck, but not as bad as Kerbal Space Program on my old (12 yr) desktop.
Factorio seems to work better on Linux. Which is both good and bad (since it's so addictive).
Apex is an EA game and actually ran great on Linux until they removed support. Unfortunate, but they said it was necessary to combat cheaters though that claim is somewhat dubious since cheaters is perfectly viable on Windows still.
What's the point of arguing like this? You're asking for experiences from people, then when people give you proper answers it glides off with "well no one I know plays those anyways". Isn't the discussion larger than your personal and private experiences, if you're discussing in public like this?
You seemed to have some initial claim that "all games actually work perfectly fine, prove me wrong" but then you don't seem to actually want to engage faithfully anyways.
Extremely hard pass on a laptop. They already have the steam deck, and now they have this. Whether you want it portable or not, there are options. Laptops always end up being just... so disappointing.
In this big hardware refresh, honestly most excited about finally getting a new steam controller [1], which feels like it might finally give us a better, more extensible standard than the extremely outdated XInput protocol (which still doesn't even support motion controls)
In my dream world, hardware enthusiasts would be constantly creating absolutely crazy game controllers with bizarre combinations of inputs that look nothing like an xbox 360 controller. There'd be a universal input protocol that would allow for self-describing gamepads with arbitrary numbers of digital buttons, analog sticks and triggers, touchpads, mouse inputs, haptics, gyro sensors, levers, sliders, wheels, etc. etc.
I realize this may not be practical, but it's kind of weird that PCs have been more or less stuck with a protocol designed for XBox 360 controllers for 2 decades now, while the locked-down console space is seeing much more experimentation and innovation around input. The original steam controller at least hinted at being sort of an open platform for this sort of thing, although it didn't really take off. Fingers crossed for the new version.
It's because the two-thumbstick, 8 face buttons, 2 shoulder and 2 trigger form factor covers so many games there's not been a real reason for super wacky controllers. They kind of hit it out of the park on the 360 design and the only real sticking point left is the exact ergonomics which mostly fall into the PS thumbstick position (both lower) vs XBox position (left high and right low).
One big reason would be that the 360 controller was when they first made it standard USB to connect, and introduced Xinput with the standard set of inputs for games to target. I expect most gamers wouldn't find it pleasant if they had to assign buttons and axis before the joypad would be active/useful, then hitting play and trying to remember what JOY_5 mapped to as used to be needed with directinput.
Gyro aiming being on all 3 console platforms would be such a huge boon, because then it could finally get implemented in every shooter. And they could start heavily nerfing the frankly ridiculous aim assist that controllers currently get.
Back buttons would be another nice one. Right now there's just 2-4 buttons too few on controllers, and it often leads to strange button mappings that either shift with context or require multi-button activations, which gets even more annoying if you have to do it during, say, a jump.
Is that something people are actually asking for? I don't think I've heard of anyone actually pushing for gyro aiming in major shooters like COD, Fortnite etc.
It's one of those things that people who haven't experienced simply wouldn't know to ask for. Wii had motion aiming but it was more of a gimmick, it wasn't until playing FPS games on the first Steam Controller that I, personally, realized how much more playable and comfortable gyro aiming made these games-- coming from mouse+keyboard, I found fine-aiming challenges on thumbsticks to be very uncomfortable.
Gyro aiming completely solves both fine aiming and tracking aim on a gamepad when paired with some kind of touch sensitive control for enabling the gyro (natural recentering).
In console FPSes they just automatically track the enemy if they're near your crosshair and call it a day-- giving everyone an aimbot instead of solving the UX issue.
USB HID actually works pretty much how you describe, for instance a Physical Descriptor can contain metadata about which body part a button/control is supposed to be used with.
It's extremely complicated however (like many things USB), which is probably why everything just emulates an XBox 360 controller like you said.
SInput recently released and got supported by SDL, which plenty of games, but also Steam Input uses. So you can already use SInput in Steam Input. Better than XInput for sure.
I don't think Steam has ever published specs for their protocol. And without Steam, their old controller would fallback to a mouse/keyboard mode. The Linux kernel drivers (that didn't require Steam) were reverse engineered. Hori released a Steam Controller recently. Even that still had an XInput fallback switch.
I love my OG steam controller still. I can't tell if this new one has the dual stage triggers like the og (like if there's an additional click on full trigger pull).
I used that to set things like boost in rocket League and it felt super intuitive.
First thing I checked for! I feel like it's such a niche feature but also distinctive. It's actually a "necessity" for a proper Gamecube emulation experience, which has the two stage shoulder buttons.
Like you, I also used this for boost on Rocket League and it was surprisingly intuitive. You can map it to the triggers lowest threshold to emulate it but without the tactile bump to rest against it just won't work.
It looks way too chunky, just like the original Steam Controller, Steam Deck or original duke Xbox controller. Not everybody has Jack Reacher hands.
Microsoft really did it right with the XSX controller. They took the old X360 / Xone design (perfect for large and medium hands) shrunk it slightly and then added cut-outs and and angled button surfaces (perfect for medium and small hands). The Elite is similarly good, with the back buttons being elongated and thin, meaning everyone can reach them comfortably without them getting in the way.
I own a steam controller and have been using it for multiple years. It's actually really comfortable with the way it sits in my hand. Far more comfortable than whatever sony had going on with the PS4 dualsense stuff
My kids have been using the steam deck since they were 3 years old. Granted, their hands were a bit too small but the Deck is way more manageable than it appears.
Sure, but having a tactile bump in the travel makes it that much easier. I can see the argument that it might seem overcomplicated or confusing to typical users though.
If we get really lucky, some gamer dev will look at the Sony DualSense driver (yes, they wrote and upstreamed an official one) and figure out a way on how to shim / expose the adaptive triggers to Steam Input bindings.
Wow lol. I just posted the exact same comment, there are dozens of us! I literally cannot play rocket league without the steam controller for this reason.
Also set rotate left and right to the grip triggers (roll in aviation terms I guess).
Same here. The trackpads on the steam deck work great. Might get this for docked mode. Kinda wish a splittable controller was more common for ergonomics ( not great to be clenching your chest on a centered object like that for hours on end, similar to non-split keyboards ). Seems like split controllers are still reserved for VR and nintendo switch style systems for now…
> They should have put them just above the joysticks, like the PS5 controller
I don't understand how that would be in any way ergonomic. The new Steam Controller's layout has a proven track record with the Steam Deck, which is essentially identical. It allows you to play KB&M games like Alpha Centauri on the Steam Deck without any external peripherals. It would be utterly unplayable if the trackpads were in the same place as the PS5's pad, which is basically just used to open a menu or map or for gimmicky in-game gestures.
If you want to plug an external USB hard drive or SSD at full speed, you'll need to plug it at the front? Or use up the only USB-C port...
I suspect most joysticks sold today come with a USB-C to USB-C cable, so if you want to charge your controller you either need to plug on the back, use an adapter, or get a USB-A to USB-C cable?
Also the single USB-C port isn't Thunderbolt/USB4, and they're only including gigabit ethernet, which is disappointing but perhaps understandable if they're trying to keep it at a low price.
Valve / Steam presumably has good data on what controllers and peripherals people are using, so I'd imagine their port choices are based around that. Here's a June 2024 post talking about Steam Input and controller market share: https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail... . At the time of the post they say "59% of sessions are using Xbox controllers, 26% are using PlayStation controllers, 10% are on Steam Decks"
Steam input controller says nothing about the interface being used (USB A vs USB C). A single USB C (with DP support, I hope) port in 2026 sounds like a bad design.
For controllers you can use any cable you want. The Xbox controller will charge just fine on a C-C cable. I don't think they should have gone all in on USB-C like laptops have, but there should have been more than one USB-C and one should have been on the front. Pretty much the only thing you need USB-A for these days is mice/keyboard with non removable cables. Which are becoming increasingly rare.
You'd be wrong C to A is still pretty standard for controllers in my experience.
As for gigabit fewer and fewer people have ethernet routed to their office/TV area much less >1gig networking to take advantage of anything better than a 1 gig.
I agree that gigabit Ethernet is adequate for the type of product this is. But I do find it funny that the Wifi chip on this is very likely capable of 2Gbit. We somehow entered a world where WiFi is typically faster than Ethernet.
I wired my whole place with 10Gb - couldn't do it in the wall (as in, hidden) so I have flat cables around the door frame and wall corners. I was willing to accept the cables, just to get 10Gb.
Not sure what we're disagreeing about, I'm not saying it's not a useful thing to have just that most people don't have it and don't intend to have it so it's not a useful spec bump for Valve to spend money on.
I'm personally planning on going through the pain to get ethernet run (luckily I have both a basement and an attic so it should be fairly easy) in my house and if I ever build new there will be whatever is the best standard at the time in the walls (and maybe some dark fiber but I'm less sure on that) but I also know I'm a vast minority of users at the same time. I'm also in a pretty big minority having a >1 gig symmetrical pipe into my house to make a 10 gig connection to my devices actually worth while.
My setup is far from my ideal one so I'm on wifi for a lot of things but I was just pointing out the business reasons they probably went with the 1 gig port, there's just not that many people who are looking for or could take advantage of a 1 gig port.
The steam controller also revealed has a USB-C, as does Hori's official steam controller.
However, you can charge it from things that aren't USB ports. Charging bricks are cheap and most people have one for their phone now, except some unfortunate old iPhone users
Yes but the cord it comes with will likely be a C to A cable. A lot of controllers have come with USB-C ports on them now but ship with C to A cables. Microsoft, Sony, 8Bitdo; all controllers I've gotten that have a C port but came with the usb-a for the PC/charger end.
What do you expect to do with the steam machine that will take more than a gigabit? I mean, it's cool when things are faster, but if you can saturate the link, downloads are still bottlenecked by the drives. And even 4k streaming is under 100Mbit normally.
Are you talking "4k streaming" as the current streaming providers do it, with trash bitrate, or "4k streaming" as you would do it if you had ripped your own blu-ray disks and you want to stream it from a NAS somewhere else in your house to your living room?
"the average bitrate for a 4K Blu-ray DVD can range between 48Mbps to 75Mbps. Some discs can also carry around 100Mbps or even 128Mbps, but these are more rare."
I think the decision of usb2-a at the rear is for wireless keyboard and mouse adapters. Those ones can behave abnormally on usb3-a, plus it’s nice to have those ugly adapters out of sight.
Most controller/headphone dongles come with USB-A, so 2.0 in the back makes sense. Radio for new steam controller is integrated.
I have a Y-splitter for my PS5 controllers and if I didn't, I would have had some sort of controller dock. I assume I would do the same for this. Either way, TV is too far from my couch for a cable, so I wanted to keep playing and charging I'd use a powerbank from my coffee table.
Gigabit Ethernet...that's sad, I'd take 2.5G, so I can better stream my legally ripped Blu-rays. I assume most people don't care because they would use Wi-Fi or their switch only goes to 1G. Better than JBL making android TV sound bar with 100mpbs.
I think it purposely designed, so you don't try to build a NAS on it.
A lot of devices that you commonly plug and unplug like flash drives and passkeys still make sense as USB-A for a lot of people because of the specifics of the USB spec.
C to A converters for devices are technically verboten since they would allow an enduser to make a A to A cable, which can fry hosts if you plug them into eachother if they don't support USB OTG. You can lose certification if you try to ship a device with a C to A converter.
Because of that, USB-A devices with an optional A to C converter (or neater devices that have both plugs on them natively) are what makes a lot of sense for a lot of people for the kinds of devices that live on a key chain. So it makes sense for that to be the default on the front of a desktop, IMO.
> I suspect most joysticks sold today come with a USB-C to USB-C cable
while things can be charged with USB-C cables, the only thing I've ever received A C-to-C cable is... a USB-C wall charger. Granted I haven't gotten a USB-C iPhhone yet and I gotta imagine that one is C-to-C.
Generally lots of pack-in cables I've seen in the wild for charging devices continue to be USB-A-to-C. Switch 2 ports are USB-A, PS5 front port is USB-A... we're still getting there.
I imagine this has decent Bluetooth support out of the box even if not mentioned? Its hard to find a WiFi chipset these days that doesn't have some kind of Bluetooth support.
Maybe proprietary headset dongles, but if its just bluetooth its probably not needed.
Could it be a synergy with the Steam Frame's dual band wireless dongle? I'm guessing they would really want users to plug that into the front of the device.
Having a single big fan cool a massive heatsink (that is hopefully very quiet) can legitimately a good reason to get this over building a typical SFF PC, which often runs hot and loud. It sorta reminds me of the trashcan Mac Pro. I myself have a sandwich style case with an RTX 5070 in it which is quite loud under load.
> "No indication for whether the CPU/GPU/RAM/SSD are upgradable or all soldered together on the board"
With 99.9% certainty this box is carrying on the legacy of the Deck and the Deck OLED, which means that it has a 100% custom crafted SoC with soldered components. Which also means they also could perform some trickery not found in "normal" PCs, like UDMA and custom interface.
> "but doesn't mention what kind of games it can run at that quality."
According to the specs it has a custom RDNA 3 chip w/ 28 CUs and boost clock at 2.45Ghz. The Playstation 5 has a custom RDNA 2 chip w/ 36 CUs @ 2.23 GHz and the Xbox Series X has a custom RDNA2 2 chip w/ 52 CUs @ 1.83Ghz.
Given the optimizations AMD made in RDNA 3 (the "budget" 9070XT can easily keep up with the prev gen "enthousiast" 9700XTX) I could make a safe bet it's on the same level of performance as a Playstation 5
> "No performance benchmarks, or mention of what the equivalent retail CPU/GPU to their custom one is."
~7600X, ~RX7700, but like I noted earlier that's meaningless because the overall architecture of the hardware in this box is likely completely incomparable with a generic PC (just like with XBX and PS5, by the way)
9070XT is RDNA4 not RDNA3 and steam machine has 28CU’s on RDNA3 which is same as RX7400 the bottom of the range RDNA3.
The 7900XTX has 84 and 24GB of VRAM.
This is a strictly entry level last gen GPU, don’t expect miracles.
The hardware is not good unless the price is very cheap.
As for the 7900XTX been enthusiast only in the sense it it was the top of the line from AMD it’s about 4080 in some areas and loses badly in others (ray tracing), price wise it wasn’t far of the 9070XT price wise at launch.
I have a 7900XTX I like it a great deal but the 4090/5080 and 5090 crush it and the 90’s are enthusiast both on price and perf.
I ended up with a 7900XTX because nvidia pissed me off on Linux one time too many otherwise I’d have gotten the 4090 but between kernel installs causing pain (nothing insurmountable) and them straight breaking power management for nearly a year on mature hardware, nah, AMD deserved the sale, they really do support Linux better.
Steam Deck has a RDNA 2 chip which supports ray tracing (since it happily runs Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which has a hard requirement for ray tracing) so I guess it will
.
There are some early previews where people ran some actual games at it[0].
Here are some of their results:
> In Cyberpunk 2077, running at 4K, it’s a surprisingly stable 60fps, albeit with the caveat of that using FSR 3 upscaling on Performance mode with Medium quality settings. But, also: basic ray tracing, something the Deck can’t even think about enabling outside of very specific games.
> The next game I tested, Black Myth: Wukong, is best run with its own RT effects switched off. Still, it also averaged around 60fps on otherwise similar settings: Performance-level FSR 3 upscaling to 4K, plus the Medium quality preset. And, in an almost unnerving repeat performance, Silent Hill f ran close enough to a solid 60fps (with most drops owed to Unreal Engine 5’s signature stuttering) on the Performance-level graphics settings and, once again, FSR 3 running on Performance mode.
> In Cyberpunk 2077, running at 4K, it’s a surprisingly stable 60fps, albeit with the caveat of that using FSR 3 upscaling on Performance mode with Medium quality settings
So it's not running at 4K nor 60fps. I wish people would stop calling 1080p upscale through some dogshit filter as "4K"...
I agree 100%. However, the upscaling is pretty good. You can tell it's not 4K, but it's also considerably better than simple bilinear resampling from 1080p.
It's basically a more powerful Steam Deck that's connected to a TV. The games will be "verified" and the settings pre-tuned for ideal performance just like the Steam Deck. They did a good job making the most of mediocre hardware in the Deck.
My initial thoughts were that this thing would cost considerably more, but I'm looking at the specs and it might not be too bad. Maybe it'll start at $499 or $599 and go up $749 or $849. I'm guessing SoC and not easily upgraded. It says Zen4 so it won't be Strix Point/Halo, but maybe some bastard variation with a Zen4 core and newer GPU than the Deck.
All my friends have moved on to PC, and I don't really want to build a $1000 minimum computer with crazy LEDs that takes up a ton of space with a monitor at this point in my life. And SteamDeck doesn't support KB+M well.
I have no qualms about couch gaming with a KB+M if I can do it with my friends and my already extensive Steam library. Unless they completely drop the ball on this, I'm in.
> and I don't really want to build a $1000 minimum computer with crazy LEDs that takes up a ton of space with a monitor at this point in my life.
The beauty of a PC is you can build whatever you want. It doesn't need to be large, and doesn't need to have LEDs. There are plenty of small form factor cases on the market with the same footprint as this one.
This is a fairly low spec device. You can comfortably fit all the hardware, case, PSU, cooling etc. in a $600-700 budget. If you want to go small form factor then it'll cost a bit extra, but not that much extra.
The Steam Machine is smaller than any case that would be considered mainstream in the small form factor community, at least to my knowledge. The FormD T1 is around 10L for example, and would look almost comically large compared to the Steam Machine.
And enthusiast cases like this are often quite expensive and not easy to get. Then you need to think about thermals, and find hardware that actually fits.
You can approach it form another angle and treat it more like a NUC and get a SoC but then you're probably not going to get close in terms of gaming performance.
So long story short: I disagree that it would be straight forward to build something like this on your own, at the same price point.
Yeah non-upgradable 8GB VRAM would make it a no-go for all but the most casual gamers. But then the casual gamers would rather buy a PS5 for the same price, so let's see where this one fits in.
Quite a lot of actual casual games, things you'd see in the indie or "cosy"/stardew valley-like genre only release on PC, or they take years to come to the Switch but nothing else. I see a lot of casual gamers getting the Steam Deck just because it's has the best selection of casual games.
For casual games even the steam deck can run most of them at 4k 60fps
It's essentially an RX 7600, roughly. It's not quite 'the most casual gamer', but it isn't super amazing. But... neither is the steam deck, and steam deck flies off the shelves.
> No indication for whether the CPU/GPU/RAM/SSD are upgradable or all soldered together on the board.
Almost certainly. This is the direction the industry is heading, and the perverse unavailability of high-end discrete graphics cards is the nail in the coffin.
I feel like these are the only things worth upgrading even in a desktop too. Unless you are the kind of person who buys the new CPU every year, upgrading anything in a desktop usually means replacing almost everything.
Every time I've looked at upgrading a part in my PC it's been the case where the CPU socket has changed, memory has changed to the next number of DDR, etc so it's basically just buying a new one of everything but the storage, psu, and case.
There are absolutely cases where I've wished I could upgrade the storage in devices though.
Yeah, gemini gives $649 - $699 for BOM, $749+ if they want some margin from the hardware.
Which is cheaper than most "Gaming PC", but still more expensive than Switch/PS5, and lack the expandability of PC.
I wish they could sell at $300-$500, that's really going to make this a must have for this year.
Using the deck prices seems like a good place to start unless they're using the opportunity to change strategy. It's an updated SoC, but minus a screen, battery, separate dock, built-in controller, and less pressure to pack it in a handheld chassis. They mention a built in wireless adapter for the controller, so I assume there will be bundles with and without a controller.
If that's the case I think it's a hugely positive thing, and has gone away for newly bought hardware for a variety of reasons over the past decade. Having a basic PC and then upgrading it with a GPU used to be a realistic route to a respectable gaming PC, but I think that's largely gone away now (partially due to the death of the general "home PC" or many being on laptops. There are bargains to be had in the used market, but that comes with a lot of asterisks.
If they can get this to a large market I think it's great value, not just as a console-model PC but because a full featured desktop without lockdown is so near. It's a reverse of where I've thought MS missed a trick with the xbox, add a keyboard and mouse and let users have turn on a sandboxed lightweight desktop mode then funnel users to get software through their store, which would have been a great way to get xbox hardware installed in houses (especially the cheap S models) during covid when there was a sudden rush to buy PCs for home working that previously didn't need it.
This is targeted at the living room, but I'd love to see non-gaming uses highlighted and get the equivalent of 'deck certified' whether that's linux native or efforts into working well under wine.
Excited for Steam/PC games on ARM to get better as a side effect of the Frame running using a Snapdragon CPU.
Running x86 PC games on higher end Android devices already works better than you might expect via gamehub/gamehub lite/winlator, but it requires much random trying of different driver and runtime versions for every game and even then a lot don't work or have issues.
I do like this about Valve. They understand the 'Chicken and egg' scenario and thus try to push hardware or software ideas forward in the hopes that it encourages others to work to that.
Like Steamdeck with Proton, developers have a tangible target and can ensure their stuff works on it.
Very interesting! The one killer issue that jumps to mind is anti-cheat. I switched away from gaming on Linux via Proton to gaming on Windows because Battlefield 6's anti-cheat won't work under Proton. Many games are like this, particularly some of the most popular (Rainbow 6 Siege for instance). And BF6 made this decision only recently despite the growing number of Steam Deck players (and other players on linux - in fairness I don't think there would have been that many BF6 players on a handheld).
Edit: I specifically use a gaming-only PC. The hardware is used for nothing else. Hence, discussions of rootkits don't really bother me personally much and on balance I'd really rather see fewer cheaters in my games. I think it would be the same with any of these machines - anything Steam-branded is likely to be a 99% gaming machine and their users will only care that their games work, not about the mechanisms of the anti-cheat software.
I view it as Valve is doing me a favor by adding friction towards me installing a rootkit to play video games.
There's also been numerous userspace ACs that work well and also run in userspace (EAC, Battleye, etc.) that have been enabled for Linux/Proton users (including by EA with Apex Legends at one point). A lot of the support for Linux mostly comes down to the developer/publishers not wanting to and not because of technical reasons.
on the other hand you can't play any of the older battlefields due to cheating (not like "is he cheating?" more like blatant "this guy is speedhacking and heashotting everyone" cheating that the server could easily detect if they cared about it)
I have to wonder if it's possible to ever even guarantee something that can't be trivially bypassed on Linux - Windows, sure, it's possible with DMA, but it's damn hard. On Linux you could just compile a spoofed kernel or a DKMS module or something.
It looks like Valve wants to avoid going down the road of an extremely locked down system like that. They even view the ability to load alternate OS's as a feature of their products.
Perhaps a trusted execution environment based anti-cheat system could be possible.
I think Valve said something about working with anti-cheat developers to find a solution for the Steam Deck, but nothing happened. Perhaps they will do something this time.
With a TEE, you could scan the system or even completely isolate your game, preventing even the OS from manipulating it. As a last resort, you could simply blacklist the machine if cheats are detected.
There would probably still be some cheaters, but the numbers would be so low as to not be a problem.
It's worse than that, BF6's anticheat is kernel level and requires the Windows-only version secure boot to be enabled, at least on my motherboard. There is no way I'm going to faff about with my BIOS when rebooting just to play this game.
Looking at the specs and marketing copy, it sounds to me like you could secure boot windows 11 on this machine.
> ... a discrete semi-custom AMD desktop class CPU and GPU.
> Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
Do we know what kernel SteamOS uses? Is it built on linux, or could it be some sort of kiosk'd mode Windows where this will be a non-issue? One could hope but I truly don't know.
SteamOS on the Deck is just a standard (tuned) Linux distribution under the hood. It would be very surprising to me if Valve shifted to an entirely different OS for the Cube.
All Valve has to do is say “Your software cannot deliberately exclude linux support including kernel anti-cheat to be listed on Steam.” And that would be that, the few devs big enough to make it on their own would leave, and everyone else would adapt.
Worth noting: Valve’s own first party tournaments for their own game require kernel level anti-cheat (from a third party vendor). Valve themselves have given up on allowing players in their own title play competitively in a Valve sponsored event with a kernel level anti-cheat. I can’t imagine they’d ever be this brash.
There is no adapting without a proper solution for securing game integrity.
The big publishers already have their own launcher and platforms and are increasingly moving back onto Steam because they see higher PC player counts and sales when their games are there
That's not the trend that we're observing. As much as publishers and developers want to control their sales channels, the current trend is for them to move towards Steam, not away from it.
The more likely outcome is that developers would segment matchmaking into people with kernel-level anti-cheat, and people without it. This seems fair to me.
Several big publishers did move away from Steam until Valve conceded some of their revenue, reducing their cut from 30% to 25/20% at certain revenue thresholds. That convinced the publishers to return to Steam, but it showed that Valve isn't immune to being flexed on by the bigger players.
When it comes to anti-cheat on Linux, it's basically an elephant in the room that nobody wants to address.
Anti-cheat on Linux would need root access to have any effectiveness. Alternatively, you'd need to be running a custom kernel with anti-cheat built into it.
This is the part of the conversation where someone says anti-cheat needs to be server-side, but that's an incredibly naive and poorly thought out idea. You can't prevent aim-bots server-side. You can't even detect aim-bots server-side. At best, you could come up with heuristics to determine if someone's possibly cheating, but you'd probably have a very hard time distinguishing between a cheater and a highly skilled player.
Something I think the anti-anti-cheat people fail to recognize is that cheaters don't care about their cheats requiring root/admin, which makes it trivial to evade anti-cheat that only runs with user-level permissions.
When it comes to cheating in games, there are two options:
1. Anti-cheat runs as admin/root/rootkit/SYSTEM/etc.
2. The games you play have tons of cheaters.
You can't have it both ways: No cheaters and anti-cheat runs with user-level permissions.
Rootkit anti-cheats can still often be bypassed using DMA and external hardware cheats, which are becoming much cheaper and increasingly common. There's still cheaters in Valorant and in Cs2 on faceit, both of which have extremely intrusive ACs that only run on Windows.
At the level of privilege you're granting to play a video game, you'd need to have a dedicated gaming PC that is isolated from the rest of your home network, lest that another crowdstrike level issue takes place from a bad update to the ring 0 code these systems are running
Even kernel anti-cheat can be defeated, this is a similar fight to what captchas have.
I can just have my screen recorded and have a fake input signal as my mouse/keyboard.. or just simply hire a pro player to play in my name, and it's absolutely impossible to detect any of these.
The point is to just make it more expensive to cheat, culling out the majority of people who would do so.
I don't fully agree with the 1 and 2 dichotomy. For example, before matchmaking-based games became so popular a lot of our competitive games were on dedicated servers.
On dedicated servers we had a self-policing community with a smaller pool of more regular players and cheaters were less of an issue. Sure, some innocents got banned and less blatant cheaters slipped through but the main issue of cheaters is when they destroy fun for everyone else.
So, for example, with the modern matchmaking systems they could do person verification instead of machine verification. Such as how some South Korean games require a resident registration number to play.
Then when people get banned (or probably better, shadowbanned/low priority queued) by player reports or weaker anti-cheat they can't easily ban evade. But of course then there is the issue of incentivizing identity theft.
And I don't think giving a gaming company my PII is any better than giving them root on my machine. But that seems more like an implementation issue.
Except most anti-cheats started on dedicated servers because it turns out most people are not interested in policing other players.
Punkbuster was developed for Team Fortress Classic, even getting officially added to Quake 3 Arena. BattleEye for Battlefield games. EasyAntiCheat for Counter-Strike. I even remember Starcraft 1 ICCUP 3rd party servers having an anti-cheat they called 'anti-hack'.
You can still see this today with modern dedicated servers in CS2: Face-It and ESEA have additional anti-cheat, not less. Even modded 3rd party server FiveM for GTAV has their own anti-cheat called adhesive.
> For example, before matchmaking-based games became so popular a lot of our competitive games were on dedicated servers.
I still had a lot of problems with cheaters during this time. And when the admins aren't on you're still then at the whims of cheaters until you go find some other playground to play in.
And then on top of that you have the challenge of actually finding good servers to go join a game with similarly skilled players, especially when trying to play with a group of friends together. Trying to get all your friends on to the same team just for the server to auto-balance you again because the server has no concept of parties sucked. Finding a good server with the right mods or maps you're looking for, trying to join right when a round started, etc was always quite a mess.
Matchmaking services have a lot of extremely desirable features for a lot of gamers.
> So, for example, with the modern matchmaking systems they could do person verification instead of machine verification. Such as how some South Korean games require a resident registration number to play.
If you think the hate for anti-cheat is bad, just wait until you see the hate for identity verification.
I'm actually rather blown away that you would even suggest it.
As someone who grew up amazed at Reaper bot for Quake, I'm surprised we don't see a rennaisance of making 'multiplayer' fun by more expressive, fallible, unpredictable bots. We're in an AI bubble and I don't hear of anyone chasing the holy grail of believable 'AI' opponents.
This also has the secondary benefit of having your multiplayer game remain enjoyable even when people's short attention spans move on to the next hot live service. Heck this could kill live service games.
Then again, what people get out of multiplayer is, on some unspoken and sad level, making some other person hurt.
But isn't all client-side anti-cheat bypassable by doing image recognition on the rendered image? (either remote desktop or a hardware-based display cable proxy)
Modern cheats are far more advanced than this. Using a DMA cheat, you basically just read the game's memory from a different computer and there's no way for the game to know unless the PCI device ID is known: https://intl.anticheatexpert.com/resource-center/content-68....
Nowadays if memory access is needed, you are looking at having to find a way to load a custom BIOS or UEFI module in a way that doesn't mess with secure boot. Even then, certain anti-cheats use frequently firing interrupts to find any unknown code executing on any system threads.
Something that is "frivolous" to you is a passion or even a profession for others. Competitive gaming is a massive market worldwide, and it wouldn't exist without the ability to enforce a level playing field. Not everything has to be a holy FOSS war.
Today, no. Very simplified but the broad goal of those tools is to prevent manipulation and monitoring of the in-process state of the game. Consoles and PCs require this to varying degrees by requiring a signed boot chain at minimum. Consoles require a fully signed chain for every program, so you can't deploy a hacking tool anyway; no anti-cheat is needed. PCs can run unsigned and signed programs -- so instead they require the kernel at minimum to be signed & trusted, and then you put the anti-cheat system inside it so it cannot be interfered with. If you do not do this then there is basically no way to actually trust any claim the computer makes about its state. For PCs, the problem is you have to basically trust the anti-cheat isn't a piece of shit and thus have to trust both Microsoft and also random corporations. Also PCs are generally insecure anyway at the hardware level due to a number of factors, so it only does so much.
You could make a Linux distro with a signed boot chain and a kernel anti-cheat, then you'd mostly need to get developers on board with trusting that solution. Nobody is doing that today, even Valve.
Funny enough, macOS of all things is maybe "best" theoretical platform for all this because it does not require you to trust anyone beyond Apple. All major macOS programs are signed by their developers, so macOS as an OS knows exactly where each program came from. macOS can also attest that it is running in secure mode, and it can run a process at user-mode level such that it can't be interfered with by another process. So you could enforce a policy like this: if Battlefield6.app is launched, it cannot be examined by any other process, but likewise it may run in a full sandbox. Next, Battlefield6.app needs to login online, so it can ask macOS to provide an attestation saying it is running on genuine Apple hardware in secure mode, and then it could submit that attestation to EA which can validate it as genuine. Then the program launch is trusted. This setup requires you to only trust Apple security and that macOS is functioning correctly, not EA or whatever nor does it require actual anti-cheat mechanisms.
Hmm. Not that it is big deal, but I would be somewhat worried about true longevity with the VRAM. Not sure if SteamOS helps there, but on PC some new titles are going over the 8GB VRAM.
One of the things I've noted for a while is that PC gaming as a platform seems to be polarizing between high and low spec, especially if you look outside of North America/Western Europe to places like South America or SE Asia. The steam deck and now this seem to be a reference/target platform for the low spec group. It might not be able to play the prestigious high spec titles well if at all, but so long as "your mileage may vary" is messaged well I can't see it being a problem, it hasn't so far.
It's a very low end Radeon 7000 series. It's absolutely incapable of the highest texture quality and rendering resolutions that need more than 8GB of VRAM. You'll likely never go above 1080p on this card (1440p is going to be rough based on benchmarks of the existing low end 7000 series).
There's absolutely no reasonable way to use more than 8GB of VRAM on this card.
Even modern low-end GPUs should have more than enough fill rate for high-res textures. The texture quality setting in games is usually not affecting performance at all until VRAM runs out.
Part of that is that the texture detail scales to the point where on a low end card at low resolutions you aren’t seeing any difference between high and low detail textures.
Games publishers/developers are going to have to wind in their necks a little. Whilst memory is abundant it's also still quite expensive. We should still be aiming for efficiency and the chances are 16gb+ are in the minority here. Fact is, the more VRAM and compute you demand the smaller your customer-base becomes.
I've played many games with 8GB VRAM* and will do so for the forseeable. If that's not enough, I am not a customer. Simple as.
The truth is, there is going to be a massive motivation with the likes of Steam Deck/Machine to actually make titles that are optimised and perform well within their hardware parameters. It's money you won't want to ignore.
*One example was Silent Hill remake on PC, which used the unreal engine. It was optimised beautifully and ran without visual glitches and stutters even with the highest graphic demands on a 8GB RTX
I think it does also help that a big chunk of Steams userbase are playing smaller indie titles that don't need obscene amounts of vram. The steam deck audience for example has a lot of people playing both a mix of AAA and smaller games. Given this is advertised as 6x as powerful as the deck I'm sure they'll be fine. It's not meant to be a top of the line console thats for sure, and if it was people would be moaning that its too expensive.
Not sure how heavy SteamOS is, but wouldn't modern games actually prefer a flipped memory configuration? So, 8 GB RAM and 16 GB VRAM would make this a more 'balanced' gaming appliance. But it is advertised as a general purpose PC, so 8 GB RAM wouldn't be enough.
8GB just isn't enough for modern AAA games. Battlefield 6, probably the most highly optimized AAA game to have come out in the past few years, still has a 16GB RAM minimum and Arc Raiders, which is also incredibly optimized, still has a 12GB minimum. Games are only going to become more resource hungry from here, so 8GB in early 2026 would be a terrible idea.
it meets or exceeds the ps5 and xbox series x, so it might not be top tier, but it'll be fine. I have a plenty good time on my series x, cant think of any stutters.
Steam is the only reason I have a Windows desktop, I'll probably just get one of these next time I want a hardware refresh (which admittedly will probably be many years).
Interesting that it uses KDE Plasma for the desktop
It doesn't boot into the desktop by default — it uses its own session with the Gamescope compositor. The desktop is easily accessible through the power menu though.
I like SteamOS a great deal, though it's not my daily driver (yet). I'm curious if people will begin to use it as a daily driver and thus expect Valve to be an OS developer on top of creating software for their gaming hardware. That's a different set of expectations and I wonder how they'll navigate it.
> thus expect Valve to be an OS developer on top of creating software for their gaming hardware. That's a different set of expectations and I wonder how they'll navigate it.
They've been doing it since Steam Deck launched, or even since they started to contribute to Proton/Wine (depending on exactly what you see "OS" to be). They seem to have grips on it more or less already, Deck upgrades are a breeze and the machine and software itself is open enough for a Linux hacker like me to be very comfortable on it, and also closed down enough for my nieces to not be able to brick theirs by just tapping around.
They seem to have worked it out well by limiting SteamOS to their hardware, so they don't have to handle all the varieties a regular distro has to. There's a significant number of people who want an 'official' release as a regular installable distro but I doubt it'll happen and Valve are happy to delegate that to others
Indeed, even much earlier. With Steam Deck they achieved wider adoption but the first generation of Steam Machines came out in 2015 and they have been committed to the SteamOS linux distro since then.
Yeah, I'm sure you're right overall, they've been at it for a long time. I think it's worth keeping in mind that all of the SteamOS'es before Steam Deck were pretty much nothing like the current (3.0) iteration. If I recall correctly, I think they were based on Ubuntu or Debian, compared to the current Arch Linux distribution.
I've used SteamOS as a daily driver for half a year. Immutable distros have limitations and my distrobox images failed to work after a SteamOS update.
If you're ok with running work stuff in a separate VM within SteamOS, that works great. Using Geekbench I saw only a 5% cpu performance penalty. Io takes a bigger hit, but that wasn't a blocker for me as I was intending to run VMs with encrypted storage anyway (which adds even more latency) but still a good experience for my work.
A reason to get this instead of Playstation/Xbox is that games on Steam are significantly cheaper through keys sites like g2a.com or just waiting for discounts.
Playstation/Xbox know you're locked in because you've already sunk money into the console, and they use this pricing power against you.
A big thing here is that you can always buy another or build another PC that can run this stuff if you don't like the Steam Machine. You cannot build a PS5/Xbox to do the same.
Please don't buy games from g2a and the likes. In the best case, g2a make money and the developer don't. in the worst case you're buying bogus keys or stolen accounts. Please, just pirate games instead.
Arch-based? KDE Plasma? There might happen a real "year of desktop Linux", in a way. That is, a Linux desktop that sneaks in as a side dish, but maybe gains some non-zero traction, and bringing FOSS to more people who are not engineers.
AI + Games is the killer app for Linux on the <everything>. You can make a beast of a gaming PC that also happens to be a beast of a local inference system, and that local inference system can manage the system for you, so grandma won't have to worry about the shell ever again.
"I’m on the record saying, that maybe Valve will actually save the Linux desktop. And it’s actually not because I think games are important! I don't care, I don't play games. I think some people do, so games maybe important. But the really important issue is I guarantee you Valve will not make 15 different binaries. And I also guarantee you that every single desktop distribution will care about Valve binaries." – Linus Torvalds in 2014
Huh, I had just been trying to look into whether there existed a "mini PC but with a GPU in it that's at least as good as the ones in game consoles."
(Or, to put that another way: fundamentally, I want a game console — a piece of well-integrated consumer electronics that lives unobtrusively in my entertainment center, hooked up to my TV, requiring no maintenance, controlled entirely with a Bluetooth gamepad. But I want it to enable me to run both 1. current-gen games at at-least-equivalent fidelity to the console ports of those games; and also 2. "all the games a Windows PC can run." So, anything on Steam, yes; but also, all the weird little indie games on itch.io that never make it to Steam; and old DOS/Win31/Win95 games (either as polished ports from GOG, or through various forms of virtualization/emulation I'd set up myself); and even the little freeware games floating about on the "old internet", that someone made in Game Maker or RPG Maker 2000 or even as a standalone Flash projector executable, way back when.)
The closest thing I had found to that description so far, that even might work for the use-case, was the ROG NUC.
I wonder if Steam will finally implement multi-user sign on for local multiplayer games (like all true consoles).
It's something that doesn't get headlines, but a real barrier for enjoyment for a console-like PC. Hate being stuck with 'guest 1' and 'guest 2' or whatever. Many games want each player to progress and without true multi sign on, it just doesn't work. Hence games dropping local multiplayer on PC.
Valve reports that the Steam Machine will support inputs from up to 4 Steam Controllers [1], so presumably they are updating SteamInput to handle that.
Being able to play PC-ish games without Windows (all on its own) makes this pretty interesting. Looking forward to seeing its real world performance. The fact that it doesn't take up the space of a household appliance is a plus too.
What exactly do you mean by "pc-ish"? Setting aside steam deck, are you aware that you can already install steam on linux and play many games [0]? Are you aware of Bazzite [1]?
Long time veteran Linux user. I was not able to get anything to run on Steam. It's some sort of display driver issue/conflict, but if it takes me longer than an hour, I'm over it.
You can do that today with a Steam Deck + a dock. The performance is surprisingly good and most higher end games you buy on Steam will come with pre-configured steam deck settings to downgrade video settings if needed.
I'm going to be buying the box though for the faster AMD chip, as I wasn't able to play some like Resident Evil 2 remake. While the Silent Hill 2 Remake played decent enough.
> you can wake your Steam Machine without leaving your couch. [using the built in steam controller wireless adapter].
This one simple thing is the only thing that makes my SteamDeck+Dock feel like a second class console. So far they only claim it's for the Steam Controller, but I'd be great if it worked with the handful of 8bitdo or Switch controllers I've been using.
Earlier this month SteamOS had a release: "Temporarily re-disabled experimental wake-on-bluetooth support for Steam Deck LCD while issues with spurious wake-ups are investigated"
Same issue with Switch 2. You can only wake it with a Switch 2 controller. Nintendo's own Pro Controller for switch, which used to wake the Switch just fine, cannot wake the Switch 2. Seems like a forced upgrade issue, to me. :(
I have a 1st gen Steam Deck (256gb), and it has supported wake from bluetooth peripherals for a while. I've only tested it with a PS5 controller, but it works. [EDIT: btw I use the official dock. Idk if it'll work with others]
I use my SteamDeck as a streaming device too, and since my TV is connected via HDMI, waking the console also wakes the TV. So I can start playing/watching anything by just turning on my PS5 controller (which is not ideal because the PS5 controller has terrible battery life and is often dead when I need it, but that's a different issue)
On the other hand, PS5 controller - unlike an Xbox controller - gets you gyro control, which makes for a very nice mouse experience. I play tons of mouse-only games (e.g. Mechabellum) from the couch thanks to the DualSense.
Yes, the OLED model has a different Bluetooth controller and iirc that's the main reason. Though Valve has been working on trying to backport it to the original models as well.
Did Framework ever distance themselves from Omarchy after the whole discussion in October? Otherwise I hope and expect Steam to know better than to align themselves with Framework.
tldr; DHH is a controversial figure, and Framework are latching onto Omarchy. I think some folks think that Framework's image is being tarnished by working with DHH.
It really is so sad to see people get sucked into the alt-right pipeline and not even realize it despite it being so obvious from the outside that it's happening. For all his talk on indoctrination it's weird to suddenly have very specific opinions on a bunch of unrelated topics you have no personal involvement in, no expertise in, and tangible connection to. Even if you have feeling about some of these issues in passing no normal person with a dayjob becomes so prolific about all of them at once.
Except, of course, that despite these issues not moving the needle on basically anything in daily life they are all connected as part of a grand conspiracy corrupt society in some nonspecific way and must be eradicated. In a way I really can't blame any individual because there's very little in the way of defenses against it but it's sad to see the cocktail of intelligence, arrogance, and fame mean that no one will ever be successful at pulling him out.
Cool but I wish it had a single big APU chip like the consoles and Strix Halo - and unified memory. PCs are long overdue for adopting this change, and the only reason it makes sense to keep the separate is to make graphics cards swappable.
Considering how big GPU silicon is, when you have both integrated and custom, it'd have made sense to integrate them.
What they're using here is still mostly off the shelf silicon with some tweaks. If they got enough volume, they probably could go for an all integrated APU with unified memory that could keep the GPU fed, but that'd be a very expensive and new thing to develop.
I hope that if this is a success, they'll have the numbers to justify a Strix-Halo like APU with a smaller CPU but keeping the big GPU for the next generation of the device.
> and unified memory. PCs are long overdue for adopting this change
Why? Desktop PCs, especially gaming PCs, have nothing to gain and everything to lose by oversubscribing system memory with GPU workloads. The memory bus typically isn't fast enough anyways, and a modern PCIe x16 can easily handle the bandwidth of a gigantic GPU. The only advantage to unifying everything is latency, which isn't relevant at any framerate under 1000hz.
> when you have both integrated and custom, it'd have made sense to integrate them.
Sometimes, sometimes not. AMD's mobile packaging technology is not world-class like Apple and Nvidia's is. Valve had the experience with the Steam Deck to make the call if a mobile architecture was the right choice, and they decided against it.
Valve doesn't have to make a Mac. This is a gaming device, it's designed accordingly.
All consoles have been using a single integrated chip since the last generation. The memory bandwidth a CPU uses is much less than GPU. Let's say a CPU does 50 GB/s peak while the GPU does 200+
> Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
i'm having a hard time describing the feelings this makes me feel. like i've been stressed, bedraggled and worn down, and suddenly there's a moment where i can just rest
it's nice to be excited about something for once instead of the baseline expectation of a horrible adversarial experience, which is the case for most tech in 2025
it is somewhat depressing that it's this novel to expect a piece of hardware to actually exist to make my life nicer vs the default of being an abomination that tries constantly to extract money and information from me like a fucking vampire
(and i guess, not having used this yet, this also speaks to valve being one of the last companies that i have any trust in to be capable of making a business decision that makes them less money in the short run in order to deliver a better product)
Valve earned a lot of goodwill from me when I set up my docked steam deck as my main media player & gaming device. It required me to do a lot of little hacks. I was doing stuff the device wasn't meant to do, but it never put up road blocks just because I wasn't allowed to do it. Not like when I want to do simple things on my wife's macbook.
An ongoing 'background noise' concern I've had for a while is how PC gaming seems to be centralizing around steam. There's reasons why that happened, but it'd be real nice if 'infrastructure' was able to decouple from their store. It feels like practically requiring steam for PC gaming on windows and certainly on linux isn't a mile away from requiring MS windows, is it much freedom to pick which Seattle based company you run software from?
I don't think there's NO reason to be concerned, but I think it's pretty different considering the decades of history of how Valve acts vs how M$FT acts. Also, many games available on Steam are DRM free or available from other sources and Proton itself is open source.
Valve is also not publicly traded and they have a succession plan of some sort in the event that gaben kicks it, I can only assume whatever he's come up with is sound, he's done a great job of running the place so far.
Steam's near-monopoly was earned by simply being the best store. Other stores like Epic don't even include basic features like a shopping cart to buy multiple games at once.
I could go on and on about why Steam is so much better than any other store, but this isn't the place.
That said, I can understand being nervous. Steam is great because it's privately owned and GabeN is happy with the money he makes from it and doesn't feel the need to enshittify it in order to get more money. But eventually he will die or retire, and someone else will be given control. Supposedly, he's already vetted some people to take the job, but what's to say they weren't merely playing the part and will take it public as soon as they can?
The built in Steam DRM is very weak. Of course that can change at any time, but at least the current catalog of Steam DRM-only games are not really tied down to steam except via law/licensing.
There are plenty of competing stores, they just aren't good. I require a game to be on steam because I like the store and features, but many games are also sold elsewhere.
A couple weeks ago Amazon said something about "we were trying to compete with Steam and even with all our resources nobody noticed" and that made me realize something: ideally, companies with similar products and services compete on features and cost, but nowadays the big tech providers compete more on lock in than anything else. But in the market of video game retail stores the competition _is_ on features and price, because Steam competes on those terms (ref gaben's famous quote "piracy is a service problem"; they're even competing and succeeding against free products)
Plot twist, Valve AI will syphon all your user metrics into Valve's new model. J/k and all joking aside, I feel the same way. Feels like a love letter to gamers
Steam is a service that's been running for >20 years and somehow hasn't been enshittified (although, I suppose when it first appeared it was seen as enshittification). It's worth celebrating, to be honest.
A mainstream desktop PC that supports most games without windows is actually a massive deal in the long term as I know plenty of people who don't like windows but didn't have an alternative
A bit of topic, but I was wondering how much bigger is the steam machine compared to the mac mini m4, since that's what I have and is my frame of reference. Obviously comparing apples to oranges and only talking about physical volume, not features, compatibility, price, personal preferences, etc.
The Steam device has a 110W GPU and 30W CPU. The M4 Mac Mini's peak power consumption is less than half of that. Even with the Apple Silicon efficiency, it can't keep up with high power GPUs in graphical loads like gaming.
Mac Mini will throttle itself after sustained full load, especially with the GPU engaged.
A Mac Mini will start throttling well before the end of a 30 minute online gaming match.
A larger volume for better cooling was a good choice for a machine designed to run the CPU and GPU at full load for hours.
The elephant in the room: "will this game run on my Steam Machine?"
This is really the part a lot of people don't understand and not a qestion you even have to ask when you buy/download a game for a console.
Some of the biggest games right now like BF6, COD, or Fortnite, League of Legends, chinese gacha games won't run on this. That excludes a massive part of the market, many of whom would be the exact audience for a simpler, more console-like PC experience. There's also no guarantee that future AAA games will be compatible with this day one (8GB VRAM is very limiting already).
Yeah yeah indies but if people want to play X then offering them Z is not an option.
This is true also for steam deck but it’s a success anyway. COD, Fortnite, LoL players can stay on windows. I’m happy to play newest indie game on my Linux machine
You can likely install Windows on Steam Machine if you so wish, and then it would actually be a fairly competent mini PC while having great and silent cooling. However, I suppose most casual gamers aren't savvy enough to tinker and install their own OS.
And nothing wrong with that, the classic Win32 API is actually quite decent, especially the small subset needed for games. And it has the incredible advantage that it doesn't change since Microsoft doesn't care about Windows anymore ;)
Hell ya! A new gaming OS, linux based, getting console and portable hardware that is well built, it's what I've been waiting for, something that gives you a good console UX but lets you play PC games.
I've had my Steam deck plugged into my tv for the last year and I sometimes use the Linux desktop (just a menu option and it reloads into desktop mode) which has a really nice design is already preconfigured for casual linux use.
I'd look up game review youtube videos and search stuff in between games from my couch. No complaints.
The only downside to SteamOS being linux is the lack of easy mod support. It's either a PIA or not supported.
Many comments here and on similar posts bring up only keeping Windows for games, and only then for games that require heavy anti-cheat.
Is there a reason there couldn't be non-regulation copies of games that don't do anti-cheat but are otherwise fine. Like metal baseball bats, oversized golfballs, etc. Official, but not allowed in competitions?
In 2026 we should be getting Windows on a Xbox console with the Xbox skinned version of windows. This would be a direct competitor to that since most PC gamers have the majority of their game library on steam.
Isn't that what the ROG Xbox Ally devices have? At least that's what it looked like to me. Something like a SteamOS's gaming mode counterpart for Windows.
Holy shit, it's the Year of The Linux Desktop, for real this time. It's happening. It's actually happening.
A standard Arch Linux/KDE[0] PC for every home, in a polished, vendor-supported package. Like Apple, it's a single standard hardware/OS pair, so, FOSS' fatal hardware-support hell might well be made obsolete. The vendor is a household name corporation. There's an incredibly fortuitous (for Linux) market dynamic at this point in time, of "commoditize your complement"—the dynamic that Valve has incentives to invest massively in giving away a nice thing for free, because that does bad things to its competitors. And Steam is... the killer super-app to end all killer apps.
Any devs that find the visuals, keyboard driven workflow, or cult of DHH appealing enough to try Omarchy are likely already Linux users.
Linux has been a great platform for devs for a long time. This is exactly why WSL exists, and why MacOS has a native Linux container[1] tool.. because Linux was eating their lunch in this user segment.
I've been using MacOS as my daily driver for 20 years exactly because it had the best mix of (what I used to say a while back), "Linux that works, and ain't ugly"
OrbStack has solved all the issues I had with running containers on macOS. It's just a wonderful piece of software that just works. (Not arguing vs container, just specifying another option)
The body is really simple and appealing but as these are rare nowadays I wish they'd consider squeezing an optional optical drive inside or perhaps maybe some external one that would stack on top.
The PC looks pretty cool in a small form factor case. And since it runs ArchBTW, you can run a bunch of other games too outside of Steam. Wondering how the pricing will be...
It's glorious. The year has finally come. It's nice to feel excited about tech sometimes, especially when the company isn't completely horrible, and more competition! Great! Microsoft's move really, Sony and Nintendo are doing pretty okay!
It is truly amazing how far Proton/Steam OS has come along. I recently installed it on some old AMD hardware I had lying around, hooked it up to my TV and everything just works - zero problems. I look forward to checking out this Steam Machine!
While it's a dealbraker for me too, locking the spec is how Valve can make a stable hardware target for devs with the "Steam Deck Verified" program, which they've also announced is coming to this box. This is one of the main reasons the specs for the Deck have remained almost identical since launch as well, Valve have said as much in interviews.
I expect to see this and the Deck try to follow locked hardware revisions every few years, just like a console, to allow the verified program to work effectively.
This product is so not aimed at those of us already building our own gaming boxes, but I'm guessing more a way to tempt those who have only ever owned gaming consoles into the Steam ecosystem.
Maybe they'll pull a Cyberpunk, and just add a "Steam Machine" setting to their Windows version when you run it in translation.
I'd prefer that. It's easier for developers, easier for me, and only harms the already-negligible market of curmudgeonly native pundits that probably don't use Steam in the first place.
Two companies, both (quasi) monopolies in their field.
Company A built its fortune by exploiting people.
Company B built its fortune by building (somewhat) decent products.
Company A developed a very advanced approach to hiring: specific questions to assess a candidate’s psychometric profile, screens to weed out bad choices, and a laser focus on the "top 0.1%".
Company B made it very public that hiring well is vital and encouraged every employee to think about it and participate. They even published an Employee Handbook years ago [0]
Today, many startups copy Company A’s playbook: crafting advanced questionnaires, trick questions, and trying to detect behavioural traits in their candidates.
No startup (that I know of [1]) has adopted Company B’s strategy.
Take your pick on who Company A is.
Company B is Valve.
I love Valve games and I love that they are spending their resources in areas I care about and that feel underserved by other companies, but I don't think the moral comparison is so clear cut. They were also pioneers in micro-transactions, loot crates, software distribution tax, and turning Counter-Strike skins into a speculative frenzy.
I have to admit, I never got into micro-transactions and loot craetes. I did play CS, but never cared about skins and focused on head shots - I am ignorant in this aspect.
The only thing I'd like to know, if the CPU/GPU will be replaceable? The specs say "Semi-custom AMD Zen 4" and "Semi-Custom AMD RDNA3", but I don't see "soldered" anywhere, so I guess maybe they'll be switchable? If not with off-the-shelves components, maybe Valve will offer their own upgrade kits in the future?
RDNA 3 is going to hold this machine back. DLSS is far and away better, but Nvidia's apathy towards Linux has made playing on something like Bazzite a worse experience. Nvidia has little reason to keep investing in Windows gaming drivers given the AI race, so seeing DLSS 4 or something on Linux is a pipe dream.
I think this machine will be decent for most people, but it's no-one with a 3080 is going to be looking at this and thinking "this is worth it", as it's probably coming in at about $750. The question is whether it'll have power parity with whatever the next Xbox is.
You mean "16GB DDR5 + 8GB GDDR6 VRAM" or something else? I took it just as they didn't want to put VRAM next to the GPU for some reason, rather than them actually being linked somehow. Maybe I misunderstand.
Unless you made a typo here-- Apple's equivalent to this is Mac Mini, which has soldered CPU, GPU and RAM (and also the SSD as its not soldered, but it's not standard).
Yes, that was my point, Mac Mini solders components that are not soldered on most other computers of that form factor, but a socketed CPU or GPU would be extremely unusual.
Yeah, I mean my comment is all speculation, guesses and opinions. Given the limited information, some jumping is required, if at least in order to ask questions :)
I mean, honestly, do you ask the same question about a PS5/Xbox? At a certain point, just build an upgradable PC. I'd equate this product more to a home console than a PC at this point
All of those seem a little low (at least judging by power usage) when compared to your average tower gaming PC build, but modern parts are pretty power efficient and given the form factor (and hopefully reasonable price) it seems like it's gonna be a pretty good device - definitely enough for most indie titles, all e-sports titles, even AA/AAA games with some upscaling/framegen, although I predict that your average UE5 slop game will wipe the floor with it. That doesn't reflect badly on the hardware, just how the devs use the engine in some cases, but at the same time being able to use it as a regular SFF PC is nice as well, actually a good reason to buy it compared to most consoles.
I bet they decided to crash their skin market in part because too many people were exploiting the Steam Deck loophole to take the skin money out of the system.
Now people will need to give Steam real money to buy their new devices.
Really I think it was otherwise. Dropping prices mean that more transactions happen on their market place. And them selling games or hardware allows them to realise their liabilities as my understanding is that money in wallet on Steam is not yet revenue.
Forcing the use of the steam app for 2FA is such an ass move. Keeping this as a reminder of Valve still being a corporation with interests that can shift to the worst in a single day.
I had to install the app to try and work around a problem with Steam, and then had the same problems just browsing. You can probably disable that behavior, but I ended up just uninstalling the app entirely.
The support experience was so bad that I got really soured on Valve, and can't even get excited for these announcements now.
For this to truly become a console replacement, Steam needs to mint agreements with Netflix, Spotify and Discord.
Netflix and Spotify could live as a 'game' application in the store. Spotify also is fairly easy to plug into Steam's overlay music control (currently via Decky plugins).
Discord just needs integration with the Steam Friend List. I know Valve wants Steam Friends to compete with Discord, but that ship has sailed every since 2020 (and frankly, the entire decade before that when they let it languish).
Yup. This really needs to be fixed. There have been on-going bug reports on it for years. AMD just needs to move the hdmi 2.1 stuff behind a firmware binary blob already like NVIDIA does. It's so annoying not having full quality HDMI. It's the only think keeping me from using Linux on my current gaming PC that is hooked exclusively up to my TV... Either that or TV's need to start having Display Port.
This is a big miss for me. I can’t use my TVs 120Hz VRR mode without HDMI 2.1.
I realize the Xbox Series X is beleaguered at this point, but apart from playing games that are on Steam but not Xbox, I can’t see why I would prefer the Steam Machine.
I don't think there is an end to Windows gaming. It's the de-facto standard PC gaming platform. If there is a real end to its reign, it will be in decades, as in, at least 20 years.
My Shield is 7 or 8 years old at this point and still going strong. Was very much hoping for something like this from Steam just in case something were to happen to it.
What on earth is this abomination of a website? My locale is Greek and I'm presented with an auto-translated page in which most sentences don't make any sense. And I don't think it's AI slop, it's too bad to be even that. It feels more like google translate from a decade ago, translating everything word by word. FFS, go to fiverr and hire an actual human that knows how to translate stuff.
Oh, and of course you're presenting greek text, as awful as it is, but didn't think to check if the font you're using supports greek at all.
I'm sure it's the same for lots of other languages. sigh
Video games were the only reason for me to use Windows, now that Steam solved this problem no reason to look back anymore. I am also not big fan of multi-player games, so not being able to play games with anti-cheat system buried deep into their binaries isn't an issue.
Can I use it as a jellyfin client? Does that... make sense?
I bought a new tv (samsung s90d) and I haven't found have a great way to watch my jellyfin media. This tv doesn't have a jellyfin client in the samsung app store.
I feel like I'm being stupid here, would love some suggestions :P I've got a local jellyfin server running on a home server in the basement.
yeah it's just a Linux x86 desktop (Arch Linux) -- although, you'd likely want to make sure Jellyfin's hardware acceleration works well with AMD APU (last time I checked the AMD was under experimental)
"Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?"
It is not a DRM problem, you can run many EA games on Linux with no problems, it is an anti cheat problem, which can not be solved by Valve, it has to be done by EA.
The landing page says "Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?" so I'm assuming you'll be able to do whatever you want with it. Similar to the Steam Deck.
Why does Steam/Valve care so much about Linux? I know as devs we all would prefer to use Linux/Unix. But developer experience isn’t a good business justification.
It's because Valve's entire business model is currently reliant on Microsoft not being emboldened to try and lock down software downloads to only occur through the Microsoft Store.
15 or so years ago, Microsoft started making moves in that direction and Valve immediately started trying to build and sell Linux based gaming machines in order to try and protect themselves somewhat from Microsoft. Those Linux gaming machines (Steam Machines 1.0) were a massive failure because they were expensive, and had very very limited game support.
Valve then spent around a decade improving Wine, building Proton, and designing the SteamDeck, which was a great success for them and is now making lots of people take Linux seriously for gaming. Now they're moving up the value chain and trying to make Linux the go-to place for PC gaming.
They've still got a big battle ahead of them, but already Linux users are around 4% of active Steam users, and the Linux experience is rapidly improving. Meanwhile, Microsoft seems to be bleeding goodwill, and is actively pissing off a huge amount of their Windows audience while simultaneously giving up on Xbox, so this is really perfect timing for Valve now.
You can basically tailor the OS specifically for the device and remove unneeded bloat. Also the threat of Microsoft and Windows as mentioned by other users. The introduction of the Microsoft Store with Windows 8 basically kicked off this whole move for Valve. While it took over a decade of work, its paying great dividends now.
They don't want Microsoft to be able to use its control of the OS to push them out. It's not the Valve needs to control the OS, it's that they don't want a company that views them as a competitor to have said control. Linux ensures that they have protection from that.
> Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
From your mouth to Tim Cook's ear, friend.
That said, when are we going to get a public release for SteamOS? …There’s a joke somewhere about them reaching SteamOS 3
It's always been public:
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/65B4-2AA3-5F37-42...
https://gitlab.com/evlaV/holo-PKGBUILD
I have a SFF pc with an AMD GPU and AMD CPU both with better specs that the new Steam Machine just waiting for them to release a standalone installer for SteamOS :(
You can use the Steam Deck recovery image to flash an SSD with SteamOS. It's what those of us on other handhelds do.
Half-Life 3 confirmed
And Sundar's too with the latest BS about Android sideloading.
Tbf at least Android is open source and AOSP itself doesnt have this limitation
Sort of. Google has slowly migrated all essential services into closed source libraries they control.
This isn't quite true. My GrapheneOS phone isn't lacking any "essential service." The only issue is that some apps distributed through the Play Store (or an alternative frontend like Aurora) that depend on proprietary Google libraries won't work. But this is a problem that rests with the developers of the apps, not AOSP per se.
Is Google going to require that device makers provide unlocked bootloaders?
Tbf I haven’t heard any news that Alphabet is requiring all sellers that paid off phones to be able to change to AOSP.
Macs do allow both of those things.
Valve is even borrowing some of the work done for the Mac version of Linux to add support for Proton on ARM hardware.
> Gaming on Linux on M1 is here! We’re thrilled to release our Asahi game playing toolkit, which integrates our Vulkan 1.3 drivers with x86 emulation and Windows compatibility.
https://rosenzweig.io/blog/aaa-gaming-on-m1.html
> Gaming on Linux on M1 is here! We’re thrilled to release our Asahi game playing toolkit
That certainly isn't thanks to Apple
Apple gets the credit for designing a bootloader that allows you to run a third party unsigned OS without degrading device security when you do boot into MacOS.
Applying the security settings per partition instead of per device is much more flexible, and you don't have to worry about Microsoft controlling which OS signing keys are valid.
> designing a bootloader that allows you to run a third party unsigned OS
Oh thank you master for allowing me to boot a different OS!
Being allowed to run whatever OS you want on your device is a right, not something you should need permission for.
Does this mean the 1981 IBM PC gets the same praise? I mean you could install whatever you wanted on that thing.
You are allowed and maybe have one option, what's the problem?
It's uncharacteristic of them and better than nothing. But simply not blocking the installation of a 3rd party OS should be the bare minimum required by law. Ideally Apple would publish documentation on the hardware so it didn't have to be reverse engineered.
Apple doesn't deserve any credit for that. You should be able to use your hardware in any way you want without asking Apple for permission.
Although changes made since have left M3 and newer unsupported by the solution for the first two generations of their design.
That is not 100% correct. Apple is slowing closing in the walls on a general purpose computer and preventing the bypassing of Gatekeeper with the execution of unsigned applications to _protect the children._ [0] [1] [2] [3]
[0] https://support.apple.com/guide/security/rosetta-2-on-a-mac-...
[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256079635?sortBy=rank
[2] https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/20755
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907259
There is no "Mac version of Linux"
Apple allow this kind of thing only on Mac and while also ensuring it does not happen by providing 0 documentation and by not contributing to any outside project. FEX was not made as part of the Asahi Linux project btw. Please inform yourself before making statements
Bro. I played what I consider a basic game, Inscryption, on my MacBook Pro M4 Pro with 24Gb and that thing sounded like an aircraft taking off. ...meanwhile the weak sauce Steamdeck plays it flawlessly. Fan hardly even spins up. There is a lot of work to do IMO on the Mac front. I doubt Apple cares.
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steamframe [1]
> Steam Frame is a PC, and runs SteamOS powered by a Snapdragon® 8 Series Processor. With 16GB of RAM, Steam Frame supports stand-alone play on a growing number of both VR and non-VR games without needing to stream from your PC.
So Steam + Proton works on aarch64? Is this something already available/supported, or is this an announcement?
[1] Steam Frame, which is the VR Headset releasing alongside the Steam Machine. Dedicated discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45903325
Valve has been quietly working on integrating the FEX x86 emulator into Proton for a while, and it's official now.
https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/gaming-headsets/han...
I believe this work is a continuation of the work the asahi linux people did to get games working on M-series macs. It seems Alyssa Rosenzweig works at valve as a contractor. Super cool work. Some seriously talented folks.
Alyssa works for Intel now, so I doubt she'll be doing much contract work for Valve anymore...
What a jump, I'd be curious to hear first why anyone would prefer Intel above pretty much anything else, but also secondly how the actual experience difference between the two after working at both, must be a very strong contrast between them.
If I were Intel, this sounds like a great person to give an R&D skunkworks dream job.
Potential lottery ticket win, they are available for consulting internally anywhere that can add value, and they're not working for anyone else.
Maybe she was given a huge signing bonus to avoid her working on making X86 irrelevant? Combined with perhaps some interesting project to work on for real.
I'm sure most would stay at valve if they could. The just do so much contract work, and I'm sure a stable job at intel is better pay, benefits and stability.
Would it shock you to hear that many/most engineers don't pick an employer based on brand reputation?
usually a combination of money/benefits/locale is the answer to this question
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1493
This is fun, just found this issue from 2018 which was closed with this comment:
> Hello @setsunati, this is not a realistic objective for Proton. As @rkfg, mentions wine for ARM does not magically make x86 based games work on ARM cpus.
> Even if Steam were brought to ARM, and an x86 emulation layer was run underneath wine, the amount of games that could run fast and without hitting video driver quirks is small enough not to entertain this idea any time in the near future.
It's mentioned in this issue https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/8136 which was closed Oct 2024 with this comment by kisak-valve:
> Hello @Theleafir1, similar to #1493, this is not a realistic objective for Proton any time in the near future.
Finally some clarification on what valve time actually is.
What do you mean? Could you share your insight?
it's running joke that Valve will announce something as "coming soon" only to release months or years later
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time
This kind of thing is what makes me trust Valve.
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time
Valve deciding to support Arm-based gaming is HUGE news
Have to wonder if there is a world where Proton comes to macOS.
Pretty unlikely as long as Apple refuses to support Vulkan. Even if they did, the whole Proton project is about Valve controlling their own destiny rather than being chained to someone else's platform, and Apple is just another Microsoft in that regard.
> Pretty unlikely as long as Apple refuses to support Vulkan.
You would only translate into Vulcan when running on an OS that uses Vulcan as the native graphics API.
On a Mac, Wine translates directly into Metal.
Valve could implement a separate Metal backend for Proton, what I'm saying is they probably wouldn't want to spend their resources on that.
Couldn't Apple spend their resources on that? Proton is open-source, and Apple's the one with the incentive to have more "prestige" AAA game devs to parade around during keynotes.
Apple could but they're not interested in non-native games, they want native ports or nothing. As I discussed a few posts over, Apple went to the trouble of developing a DirectX compatibility layer, but then told game developers they're not allowed to use it for anything besides evaluating whether their game would run well enough on Mac hardware. If they go ahead with a port then Apple still expects them to do it all the hard way.
It's textbook "perfect is the enemy of good" because yeah, compatibility layers have overhead, native is better, but if you insist on native everything but can't get devs on board then you just end up with no games.
Apple could but Apple would rather die they allow something to work cross platform.
That's because D3DMetal already exists. Games run like they did on Proton ~4-5 years ago, some games better.
I mostly no longer boot my Linux machine anymore to play games.
The anticheat story is probably not as good but I don't play any AAA games, so I wouldn't know.
That's great as long as it works, but D3DMetal is a proprietary, closed-source Apple library so you can and probably will get rug-pulled by Apple neglecting or deprecating it as their priorities change. They've only ever positioned it as an "evaluation environment" for developers to estimate how their game will run before going ahead with a native Mac port, not as something for end-users to play Windows games with, so if developers don't bite then they'll have no reason to keep working on it.
Proton is a downstream fork of Wine, and upstream Wine already directly supports playing Windows games on Mac using D3DMetal.
You don't need Proton's Wine fork when you can just use Wine.
Right now, the user experience with Crossover is that you have to manage the whole thing of installing Windows Steam in a Wine bottle, then installing games within that second Steam installation, then dealing with the fact that Steam doesn't seem to like having two instances running on the same computer (my native Steam loses connectivity every time I start the Crossover instance).
Wanting Proton on Mac isn't about that specific fork of Wine, it's shorthand for wanting the user experience that Valve gives you on Linux.
That doesn't change the fact that D3DMetal is closed-source. Wine just links to it.
There's also DXMT which is open-source, but doesn't support DX12.
> Games run like they did on Proton ~4-5 years ago, some games better.
Proton previously only worked on x86, so there was not the additional overhead of x86 to ARM translation.
Proton on ARM will have the same performance constraints as Wine on ARM Macs.
Wouldn't it be Apple's benefit to get more gaming on MacOS? Their goals might align with Steam.
Apple's native gaming story has been similar failure as their AI and Siri ventures. Time to fix it.
Valve seems to break free form depending on someone else’s walled garden.
Apple seeks to builds its own walled garden.
Their interests do not align. Apple doesn’t want portable software on their platform, they want exclusive software.
I mean, theoretically they could backport the D3DMetal wine driver from the Game Porting Toolkit. Also I remember there was some early preliminary work done on stock wine a few years ago.
Honestly right now there is so much overlapping between all the wine "flavors" and forks available (Stock wine, Crossover, Proton/Proton-GE/Wine-GE, Game Porting Toolkit, winevdm, probably a few more I'm forgetting right now) I'm not entirely sure how many features have been independently implemented already multiple times.
True, forgot about that. That said, Apple does have D3DMetal. A man can dream that they eventually opensource that.
Proton is just a fork of Wine that also translates from Microsoft's DirectX graphics API to the native graphics API of Linux (Vulcan) so you can run Windows games on Linux.
The new thing Proton is adding is translation from x86 to ARM.
Macs already have Wine, an x86 to ARM translation layer (Rosetta), and an Apple provided translation layer from Microsoft's DirectX to the Mac's native Metal graphics API (D3DMetal) which is integrated into upstream Wine.
There was also a parallel effort to this end, targeting Android rather than plain Linux, resulting in an app called https://winlator.org/ — which also works quite well at this point. (See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP0yUqcyY18)
That was a very higher quality YT video. It's clearly written by someone who knows when they're talking about even though it's mostly non-technical
Just to clarify that's for the Steam Frame VR Headset. The Steam Machine PC uses an AMD Zen 4 x86 CPU.
The headset isn't natively running games, right?
It can, but it'll be a small subset of stuff. You'll probably be able to just hit install + play on most things, but it'll have a "Steam Frame Verified" program like the Steam Deck's.
Yes, in the same way that a Quest 3 can run BeatSaber and other similar calibre games.
For more demanding games it's designed to stream from a PC.
Wow this looks great. Foveated streaming, great resolution, wireless, 144hz, looks much more comfortable... As much as I want this, I feel like it'll end up being a really cool thing that just sits on the shelf.
Edit: foveated streaming, not rendering
It looks good until I reached one bit:
> Passthrough - Monochrome passthrough via outward facing cameras
This is an outright bone-headed move that I can't believe Valve is making. Only having monochrome cameras means augmented reality is basically a non-starter.
AR has a lot of potential. I literally bought a Meta Quest 3 just for PianoVision [0] when I already had a Valve Index. I would love to see some sort of AR-based game you could play outdoors. But with only monochrome vision, that's gonna be awful.
[0] https://youtu.be/apwZTV-Rg0s
The videos I've seen about the Frame all call out the front expansion port, which "Valve says ... offers a dual 2.5Gbps MIPI camera interface and also supports a one-lane Gen 4 PCIe data port for other peripherals."[1]
That's plenty to support color passthrough as a physical addon, which in turn makes me think that, like with the OLED Deck, we'll see a Frame with built-in color-passthrough later as a different premium SKU when/if they justify it.
1: https://www.uploadvr.com/valve-steam-frame-official-announce...
I recommend preparing a drink or two and loading up VRchat and joining one of the rave club groups. Check out the metaverse zuck wishes he ran.
VRChat is one of the most socially dysfunctional online platforms I've ever used
I tried VRChat once or twice but never seemed to have found any fun places/groups to hang out that weren't obsessing about anime/manga most of the time. Anyone here on HN have better suggestions of worlds/groups or where to even look?
There are groups that are more focused on music (DnB, dubstep, other festival-friendly genres), focused on dancing, focused on drinking games, focused on world-hopping, etc. I'm into the underground rave vibe, so for that there's VRC Party Hub, which is a guy who runs a discord who befriends as many clubs as he can find in that scene, and imports their schedules/announcements channels into a nightly report of all known events.
https://x.com/VRChatPartyHub
I could see Steam creating the OASIS
Any idea if Gabe likes Rush?
Maybe they've cracked the code with the dongle? Usually, you either have to invest both time and money into setting up the perfect streaming network, deal with annoying cables or resign yourself to inferior on-device game versions. The ergonomics matter more than you'd think.
But if it's a very easy plug-n-play type deal to run SteamVR games (and on Linux!), that's a huge ergonomic improvement. Don't have to think too much about whether everything is running correctly or what-have-you.
If it's just plug and play and works well, it'd be brilliant. I have experimented a lot with a couple or wifi dongles I had lying around and setting up a hotspot, but honestly I could never get it to work well.
Streaming VR content is just so sensitive. I have a good cabled network but even a simple switch introduced noticeable lag spikes. In the end I have a separate router that I just connect straight to my PC, and then I share my wifi connection through my PC to that network. A whole silly setup just to minimize latency and packet loss. If that could be replaced with a simple USB dongle I'd be amazed.
My NVIDIA Shield is getting old and slow. I can see this as a good replacement, because it supports HDMI CEC, so you can control it with your remote control.
Install Plex, JellyFin, FreeTube et.al. to it and you have a nice open source TV box.
You also get 4k gaming from Steam, GOG, Epic etc. and you get emulators. I've been wanting to build a computer like this, but CEC is hard to find and the adapters that exist don't support full 4k resolution.
The specs for this steam machine say HDMI 2.0, in the past I used a pulse8 HDMI CEC USB dongle with a computer which was also HDMI 2.0 iirc. I was using a 1080p projector with it but their website claims 4k support: https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-adapter
I recently replaced a shield with an Ugoos Am6b+ running coreELEC, which works okay and supports some stuff the shield doesn't but I miss being able to run some android apps easily. I wonder if the new steam machine will support DV.
I lowkey hope it's good enough for coding. Really wanted to try out the xreal glasses, but multiple people said they aren't crisp enough for text.
There are already headsets with decent text fidelity, but IMO the problem is now on the host side. I tried to get an XR desktop env running (Stardust https://stardustxr.org/) on Linux but ran into graphical issues. The Windows ecosystem is much better though.
I can't wait until the tech reaches this stage. Infinite desktop space, surrounded by text and terminals. It will be so hard to unplug.
resolution is in the 2000x2000 range so don't count on it.
I don't think there is foveated rendering. There is foveated encoding, when game streaming.
Looks like a very competent headset indeed though! Nice combo of fast streaming that can prioritize well with foveated encoding, and hopefully a pretty nice malleable capable standalone headset too.
Yes - thank you, fixed
> So Steam + Proton works on aarch64?
CodeWeavers just announced[0] CrossOver on ARM a couple of days ago, so yes.
[0]: https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2025/11/6/twist-ou...
When's the preorders happening?
I'm more confused that it's running SteamOS which is supposedly Arch based, but arch doesn't officially support ARM. You have to use the ArchLinuxARM distro for that, which is less maintained. They got to be doing something off label for that.
> arch doesn't officially support ARM
Doesn't really mean much to Valve as SteamOS vendor:
- linux kernel supports aarch64 just fine
- user space supports aarach64 just as fine
- Valve provides runtime for games (be it via proton or native linux), so providing aarch64 builds is up to them anyway
The main point of ArchLinuxARM is providing compatible binaries, which isn't something hard to do in-house.
Arch doesn't support ARM at all. Arm is somebody else hobby project.
Arch has been working with Valve on various build system improvements for some time [0], which as I understand it are targeted at making it more feasible for them to eventually support more architectures [1]. This doesn't release for several months; I wonder if there'll be an official Arch Linux ARM by then?
[0]: https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@li...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696041
You mean valve's?
isn't Steam Deck arm based?
No, it's AMD based
No. It's an AMD x64 CPU married to an onboard GPU.
Even if they are, Valve has a long track record of contributing back to open source projects.
Proton was a community led effort years back. The guy who started that is now an employee at Valve (IIRC) working on Proton, but also getting paid :)
I think this is a form of an announcement but without many details. I'm curious to see how well it works
Pretty much the only reason I boot to Windows anymore is to play games with my kids and family. The direction of this thing is dangerously close to being all I'd care about from a desktop computer.
If Valve pivoted into making a well-supported laptop with good hardware that ran Linux and played games...
Like other commenters, I also recently made the switch. Figured I would dual-boot windows but have never needed to boot it back up again.
ProtonDB is a goldmine when a game doesn't work. Oh, and switching from Nvidia GPU to AMD GPU seems to have worked great to get games to "just work".
one limitation for Bazzite for instance would be some titles that require anti-cheating won't work but just like OP, only use case I have for windows is gaming and running some banking app which won't work on non-Windows device
love to see more and more users realize they can game just fine on linux
It's time to stop buying such games and send game studios a signal that we won't tolerate rootkits and/or closed platforms. Anti-cheats should run server-side, or better yet, servers should be community-operated. I would probably bought BF6, but since I exclusively use Arch, EA lost a sale -- too bad for them there are thousands of other games that work flawlessly on Linux.
I want to echo a previous comment of mine on this topic:
With the rise of mainstream-compatible, as in a standard gamer can get them running and use them with a similar frustration level as Win11, Linux first systems like steam deck, steam machine and even steam frame, there is a real, even if currently low, pressure for big publisher to support Linux/SteamOS. I somewhat hope/fear there will be a blessed SteamOS version that supports anticheats enough for publishers like EA, Epic and Riot to accept the risk.
I was in the same shoes, then one day I decided to give a shot to Bazzite. To my surprise the installation was extremely smooth, and everything worked right away. Now I’m playing almost everything on it (Arc Raiders, EU V, HLL and Horizon FW recently). If you want to _try_ all you need is 15 minutes, some HDD space and an empty USB. You don’t have to give up Windows at all, dual booting is also pretty smooth.
Loved the concept, tried it out, didn't work, at least not for RDR2 which I was trying to play. But how would it work, there is Linux, Bazzite, then there is Steam, RDR2 needs the Rockstar launcher, it's such an intricate web of dependencies, I'm not surprised something isn't working.
RDR2 has a gold rating: https://www.protondb.com/app/1174180
It should work with some tinkering.
I have finished RDR2 on Bazzite (story mode), zero issues.
RDR2 works great on my AMD Linux machine.
When silly DRM or a game launcher is all that is keeping you from enjoying a game, that is when you get the pirated version without any of this bs and enjoy it without remorse.
I have a bazzite box connected behind my TV. Even with a non optimal choice of graphic card (an old Nvidia) it works better than I was expecting.
I also bit the bullet and did a bazzite install and am blown away how seamless it has been for what I need. All the games I like run on Steam. Even Diablo 4 runs through the Blizzard launcher which does take some work to get installed, but nothing you can't find in a youtube video.
No issues using the system as my daily driver for personal things. I have dual monitors, one oriented vertically and one 144hz. All works great! I'd recommend it to anyone
The whole Universal Blue image ecosystem is so polished, consistent and coherent. Bazzite is their gaming image variant, I’ve also recently switched to Bluefin which is their Gnome variant on my workstation and everything works so nicely together, it’s the most joy I’ve had using a computer in a long time.
the limit last time was anything competitive or multiplayer that required a weird launcher or some low-level permissions or something. I just want to play CS2 and hunt showdown.
I used to also have a dedicated Windows machine just for gaming, but two years ago I formatted the Windows drive and put SteamOS (via ChimeraOS) instead. I can legitimately say that it has been more stable than running the same games on Windows. Just flawless.
Same, if they also released something like a Steam Machine Pro with more ram+vram and bit higher specs I would instantly purchase it. Nvidia and AMD have been rightly criticized for releasing 8GB video cards in the past year and valve shouldn't be immune to that criticism.
This promises 4k 60fps gaming and Valve is good with hardware, so this is an immediate buy from me if it's under 1000€
No need to mess around building a gaming PC anymore.
Just wondering, what games are you playing that dont run on Linux yet? I can't think of games I'd play much with family that dont work well
I do not believe that _you_ are trolling with this question, but answering this is just asking to be trolled.
That said. Fortnite. Yes, I still play it with friends and cannot play it on Mac or Linux. :(
I'm sure others have similar examples. Also there are just simple things like playing with friends and streaming on Discord. Anybody streaming from Windows always comes across smooth and HD to the other participants while anybody on Linux seems to consistently be received (I don't know where exactly in the chain the problem exists, so just "received", as it may not be a broadcasting or encoding problem, I'm not an expert in this) with a lot of artifacts and lower framerates.
A friend of mine, a Linux user, says he installed Windows for gaming. Apparently the main issue isn't actual compatibility for games, but that a lot of games require some kind of kernel level anticheat (rootkit?).
It’s a few games, but a few very important ones.
GTAVs online ecosystem with custom servers. Rust hasn’t enabled Linux Battleye support. Valorant
Some releases that are temporarily popular like BF6, playtest of Battleye games where Linux support isn’t enabled (Fellowship, Exoborne). All games in this paragraph also by Swedish developers. Kom igen, linuxstöd
Some intrusive ones (EA's anti cheat for recent Battlefields, Activision's anti cheat for Call of Duty, anything from Riot to name a few) do not work.
However, EAC - who is a major player in this field producing generic solutions - does support Linux. The involved publisher, however, needs to approve this and the developer need to turn on a feature flag. That's it.
However, some publishers simply deny this for... totally mental reasons ...and this means that the game is marked as borked in protondb even though the game could as easily be played on Linux thanks to EAC's Linux support.
"EAC supports Linux, but devs just won't turn it on" is the clickbait answer, but the details are more nuanced. EAC has multiple security levels that a title can set based on the threat model of the game, and most games with heavy MTX that use EAC shy away from it, largely because Fortnite doesn't do it. EAC is owned by Epic, and if Tim Sweeney says that you can't do MTX on Linux safely, then any AAA live services game with in-game MTX is going to shy away from it, regardless of how true the statement actually is.
The Finals has mtx, is protected by EAC, and is playable on Steam Deck.
Throne and Liberty, which is also protected by EAC and has mtx, is also playable on Steam Deck.
So this is bullshit and it clearly shows it's the publisher's choice. What Sweeney thinks has nothing to do with it.
"MTX" as in, microtransactions?
What do microtransactions have to do with anticheat?
You don't want someone having a skin that you are charging money for among other things.
granting clientside without paying, things like that
Yes, this is broadly true. Just about everything that does not have Linux-disabling anticheat runs wonderfully on Linux these days. You can check https://protondb.com/ to see how any given game runs.
Yep anticheats are one of the big hurdles to 'porting' a lot of online focused shooters to linux. It's an unfortunate situation but I get it from the company's perspective, not having any anticheat leads to shitty situations for way more players than not having a linux version of their anticheat and a vast majority of players have Windows devices or are willing to dual boot.
Yes. Valorant and Battlefield 6, for example.
Escape from Tarkov is the only reason I have a Windows Hard drive still. It doesn't have anything else on it.
EFT has a pretty ridiculous history with attempts at anticheat. Several years ago they set up their servers to kick anyone with virtualization enabled because cheaters had been using VMs to intercept network traffic (the network traffic wasn't encrypted for tarkov then). The response from cheaters was to use a seperate bare metal build to intercept the traffic. The devs "fixed" it right before windows 11 came out with virtualization on by default.
FWIW, PvE and modded Tarkov does actually run fine on Linux (Streets map doesn't, nor does Arena).
It's definitely not the same, but between Arc Raiders and PvE I get my extraction shooter fix. Online Tarkov is mostly populated by Gaming Wizards™ anyways.
Yes I am playing Arc Raiders now instead of Tarkov because switching is not worth it. Until it will be!
This is true. Battlefield 6 is in this boat
Yes and they could just make it(the rootkits) work on linux. It's more about the publishers/devs actively opposing linux.
The major anti-cheats do support Linux, but it's opt-in on the dev side because they're significantly easier to bypass than the Windows versions. It's not even close, getting around the Linux ACs is child's play. It sucks but nobody really has a good solution yet.
Alternatively it's still a pretty small slice of the market that's not willing to dual boot for the major games that do require windows only anticheats so it's just not worth their dev and support time to try to serve that small slice. Valve's work on Steam Machines/Decks is the thing needed to actually push developers to supporting it by providing a relatively consistent target OS and a large enough install base to justify spending the money to support.
I dont think I'm getting trolled, I know that loads of games still dont work. I just wanted to get an idea of which games are the current biggest ones holding people back.
Fortnite & Call of Duty
If I could travel back in time and prevent my kids and nephews from ever learning about Fortnite, I might do it. Instead I'm out here trying to keep from getting sniped by a Simpson character.
Fortunately, it seems like the rest of the family is getting tired of COD's ceaseless churn, and might be willing to pick up something else.
Fortnite is a fun game though, it's the only game holding me back from fully switching to Linux. Cloud streaming just doesn't cut it, latency is way too high (+ more money for a single game)
Ah I had kinda forgotten Fortnite exists haha. I think I assumed your kids were younger.
For me it's only games the specifically don't support Linux, which are mostly competitive multiplayer games with anti-cheat software. Apex Legends used to work great on Linux, but they removed support as an attempt to combat cheaters (there are still tons of cheaters).
In addition to what others have said, a group of friends still plays enough League of Legends that I don't both dual booting. Also if you play RuneScape (RS3, not OSRS) the best 3rd party add-on, Alt1 Toolkit, only works on Windows.
For me the thing that pushed me to reinstall windows after I got a cheap $10 copy was Kerbal Space Program. Though, in my specific case I strongly suspect it was older hardware & driver issues than anything else, since I've not had any major problems on steam deck.
I do have more random crashes on certain games even on steam deck, but not as bad as Kerbal Space Program on my old (12 yr) desktop.
Factorio seems to work better on Linux. Which is both good and bad (since it's so addictive).
BF6 and any multiplayer EA games with anticheat
Apex is an EA game and actually ran great on Linux until they removed support. Unfortunate, but they said it was necessary to combat cheaters though that claim is somewhat dubious since cheaters is perfectly viable on Windows still.
FIFA is another one that comes to mind, or however they call it these days.
Also from EA
Battlefield, Call of Duty, Apex Legends, PUBG, Rainbow 6 Siege, Fortnite
Basically all the games I play regularly with my friends.
Microsoft Flight Simulator
Trying to get RDR2 to work on Linux, so far no luck.
I play it on Linux, try Proton hotfix.
I've played it on the Steamdeck without issue.
Battlefield 6, GTA V online, Escape From Tarkov, likely GTA VI
Imagine not supporting the latest releases that all your friends are playing.
Depends on your friend group; statistically speaking they're more like to play ARC raiders than EFT which does run on Linux
Zero of my friends are playing any of these games. GTA VI will probably do the console first release thing anyways.
Edit: Fair enough to the other ones though. This comment wasnt meant to be inflammatory or argumentative, but clearly someone else believed it was.
What's the point of arguing like this? You're asking for experiences from people, then when people give you proper answers it glides off with "well no one I know plays those anyways". Isn't the discussion larger than your personal and private experiences, if you're discussing in public like this?
You seemed to have some initial claim that "all games actually work perfectly fine, prove me wrong" but then you don't seem to actually want to engage faithfully anyways.
They think HN is Reddit, notorious with its flaming war
Steam Box 2 will be out before GTA VI
Extremely hard pass on a laptop. They already have the steam deck, and now they have this. Whether you want it portable or not, there are options. Laptops always end up being just... so disappointing.
I've been using Pop_OS, buggy as hell but steam games work great!
Everything is kinda a dumpster fire, but they nailed steam games.
Pop_OS is pretty rough. Theyre running on a super outdated base while working on COSMIC
The pop shop app being single threaded is just embarrassing. Do a search, the entire UI freezes up until the search is complete.
Also updates regularly break my KDE session and I have to restart my display server.
Sometimes I have to switch to a tty and back to my graphical console to get my display back.
It is a mess all around.
I haven't managed to get my GPU working in Docker, ugh.
That said, it does work. Mostly.
In this big hardware refresh, honestly most excited about finally getting a new steam controller [1], which feels like it might finally give us a better, more extensible standard than the extremely outdated XInput protocol (which still doesn't even support motion controls)
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steamcontroller
In my dream world, hardware enthusiasts would be constantly creating absolutely crazy game controllers with bizarre combinations of inputs that look nothing like an xbox 360 controller. There'd be a universal input protocol that would allow for self-describing gamepads with arbitrary numbers of digital buttons, analog sticks and triggers, touchpads, mouse inputs, haptics, gyro sensors, levers, sliders, wheels, etc. etc.
I realize this may not be practical, but it's kind of weird that PCs have been more or less stuck with a protocol designed for XBox 360 controllers for 2 decades now, while the locked-down console space is seeing much more experimentation and innovation around input. The original steam controller at least hinted at being sort of an open platform for this sort of thing, although it didn't really take off. Fingers crossed for the new version.
It's because the two-thumbstick, 8 face buttons, 2 shoulder and 2 trigger form factor covers so many games there's not been a real reason for super wacky controllers. They kind of hit it out of the park on the 360 design and the only real sticking point left is the exact ergonomics which mostly fall into the PS thumbstick position (both lower) vs XBox position (left high and right low).
One big reason would be that the 360 controller was when they first made it standard USB to connect, and introduced Xinput with the standard set of inputs for games to target. I expect most gamers wouldn't find it pleasant if they had to assign buttons and axis before the joypad would be active/useful, then hitting play and trying to remember what JOY_5 mapped to as used to be needed with directinput.
The Xbox controller doesn't even have a gyro. Xbox controller design is completely stagnant.
Gyro aiming being on all 3 console platforms would be such a huge boon, because then it could finally get implemented in every shooter. And they could start heavily nerfing the frankly ridiculous aim assist that controllers currently get.
Back buttons would be another nice one. Right now there's just 2-4 buttons too few on controllers, and it often leads to strange button mappings that either shift with context or require multi-button activations, which gets even more annoying if you have to do it during, say, a jump.
Is that something people are actually asking for? I don't think I've heard of anyone actually pushing for gyro aiming in major shooters like COD, Fortnite etc.
It's one of those things that people who haven't experienced simply wouldn't know to ask for. Wii had motion aiming but it was more of a gimmick, it wasn't until playing FPS games on the first Steam Controller that I, personally, realized how much more playable and comfortable gyro aiming made these games-- coming from mouse+keyboard, I found fine-aiming challenges on thumbsticks to be very uncomfortable.
Gyro aiming completely solves both fine aiming and tracking aim on a gamepad when paired with some kind of touch sensitive control for enabling the gyro (natural recentering).
In console FPSes they just automatically track the enemy if they're near your crosshair and call it a day-- giving everyone an aimbot instead of solving the UX issue.
I've tried Gyro aiming and could not get used to it even in games where it's the 'superior' choice like my brief daliance with Splatoon.
USB HID actually works pretty much how you describe, for instance a Physical Descriptor can contain metadata about which body part a button/control is supposed to be used with.
It's extremely complicated however (like many things USB), which is probably why everything just emulates an XBox 360 controller like you said.
SInput recently released and got supported by SDL, which plenty of games, but also Steam Input uses. So you can already use SInput in Steam Input. Better than XInput for sure.
https://docs.handheldlegend.com/s/sinput/doc/sinput-hid-prot...
I don't think Steam has ever published specs for their protocol. And without Steam, their old controller would fallback to a mouse/keyboard mode. The Linux kernel drivers (that didn't require Steam) were reverse engineered. Hori released a Steam Controller recently. Even that still had an XInput fallback switch.
I love my OG steam controller still. I can't tell if this new one has the dual stage triggers like the og (like if there's an additional click on full trigger pull).
I used that to set things like boost in rocket League and it felt super intuitive.
First thing I checked for! I feel like it's such a niche feature but also distinctive. It's actually a "necessity" for a proper Gamecube emulation experience, which has the two stage shoulder buttons.
Like you, I also used this for boost on Rocket League and it was surprisingly intuitive. You can map it to the triggers lowest threshold to emulate it but without the tactile bump to rest against it just won't work.
According to digital foundry it does have dual stage triggers
It looks way too chunky, just like the original Steam Controller, Steam Deck or original duke Xbox controller. Not everybody has Jack Reacher hands.
Microsoft really did it right with the XSX controller. They took the old X360 / Xone design (perfect for large and medium hands) shrunk it slightly and then added cut-outs and and angled button surfaces (perfect for medium and small hands). The Elite is similarly good, with the back buttons being elongated and thin, meaning everyone can reach them comfortably without them getting in the way.
I own a steam controller and have been using it for multiple years. It's actually really comfortable with the way it sits in my hand. Far more comfortable than whatever sony had going on with the PS4 dualsense stuff
Maybe in size, but at least by weight, it's not bad at all.
Steam Controller weight: 292g.
Nintendo Switch 2 controller: 235g.
Sony Playstation 5 DualSense controller: 280g. DualSense Edge: 322g.
Xbox Wireless controller: 280g. Wireless Elite series 2: 345g.
My kids have been using the steam deck since they were 3 years old. Granted, their hands were a bit too small but the Deck is way more manageable than it appears.
No mention of dual stage trigger though, which was my cheat code in rocket league to have one button for accelerate and boost
You can set a dual-stage trigger in Steam Input binding with any controller its trigger range, its not something unique to the Steam Controller.
Sure, but having a tactile bump in the travel makes it that much easier. I can see the argument that it might seem overcomplicated or confusing to typical users though.
If we get really lucky, some gamer dev will look at the Sony DualSense driver (yes, they wrote and upstreamed an official one) and figure out a way on how to shim / expose the adaptive triggers to Steam Input bindings.
I wonder if the haptics are programmable enough to simulate that.
Wow lol. I just posted the exact same comment, there are dozens of us! I literally cannot play rocket league without the steam controller for this reason.
Also set rotate left and right to the grip triggers (roll in aviation terms I guess).
Steamdeck has the dual stage triggers right? (Though maybe just in software?) I'd be shocked if the new controller is less capable than that.
Hoping it's there just not mentioned.
This controller seems more like it's going for parity with the Deck, which doesn't have dual stage triggers. I wouldn't get your hopes up.
I've been using a Stadia controller with my Steam Deck OLED but finally it'll have a worthy upgrade.
Same here. The trackpads on the steam deck work great. Might get this for docked mode. Kinda wish a splittable controller was more common for ergonomics ( not great to be clenching your chest on a centered object like that for hours on end, similar to non-split keyboards ). Seems like split controllers are still reserved for VR and nintendo switch style systems for now…
I'm just hoping it has a standalone "pretend it is an xbox/generic controller" mode that doesn't rely on steam, so I can bring it to friends easily.
The trackpads are a deal breaker for me
They should have put them just above the joysticks, like the PS5 controller
Better, they should have made them detachable with a magnet, similar to the Switch JoyCon's system, what a missed opportunity
> They should have put them just above the joysticks, like the PS5 controller
I don't understand how that would be in any way ergonomic. The new Steam Controller's layout has a proven track record with the Steam Deck, which is essentially identical. It allows you to play KB&M games like Alpha Centauri on the Steam Deck without any external peripherals. It would be utterly unplayable if the trackpads were in the same place as the PS5's pad, which is basically just used to open a menu or map or for gimmicky in-game gestures.
I found the original Steam Controller's trackpad placement to be just about perfect.
Isn't the lack of extensibility kind of the point?
It forces everyone to make the same controller, so the developer knows what the user will have.
Very weird USB-C port placement choices...
- 2 USB3-A on the front
- 2 USB2-A on the back
- 1 USB-C on the back
If you want to plug an external USB hard drive or SSD at full speed, you'll need to plug it at the front? Or use up the only USB-C port...
I suspect most joysticks sold today come with a USB-C to USB-C cable, so if you want to charge your controller you either need to plug on the back, use an adapter, or get a USB-A to USB-C cable?
Also the single USB-C port isn't Thunderbolt/USB4, and they're only including gigabit ethernet, which is disappointing but perhaps understandable if they're trying to keep it at a low price.
Valve / Steam presumably has good data on what controllers and peripherals people are using, so I'd imagine their port choices are based around that. Here's a June 2024 post talking about Steam Input and controller market share: https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail... . At the time of the post they say "59% of sessions are using Xbox controllers, 26% are using PlayStation controllers, 10% are on Steam Decks"
Steam input controller says nothing about the interface being used (USB A vs USB C). A single USB C (with DP support, I hope) port in 2026 sounds like a bad design.
Most gaming peripherals still seem to use USB-A on the computer end for cables and dongles.
Current Xbox and PS5 controllers charge with a USB-C port on the controller end but a USB-A port where the plug into the console.
For controllers you can use any cable you want. The Xbox controller will charge just fine on a C-C cable. I don't think they should have gone all in on USB-C like laptops have, but there should have been more than one USB-C and one should have been on the front. Pretty much the only thing you need USB-A for these days is mice/keyboard with non removable cables. Which are becoming increasingly rare.
Of course you can swap cables or adapt. I was taking about the cables these devices come with.
I’m all about the USB-C lifestyle but PC gaming peripherals are still pretty dominated by USB-A.
You'd be wrong C to A is still pretty standard for controllers in my experience.
As for gigabit fewer and fewer people have ethernet routed to their office/TV area much less >1gig networking to take advantage of anything better than a 1 gig.
I agree that gigabit Ethernet is adequate for the type of product this is. But I do find it funny that the Wifi chip on this is very likely capable of 2Gbit. We somehow entered a world where WiFi is typically faster than Ethernet.
What do you mean some how?
Most people can't or wont retrofit their homes with wired networking. Those that did in the last couple decades likely used cat5/e.
The demand in the consumer space definitely favours advances in wifi.
mmm ...let's agree to disagree
I wired my whole place with 10Gb - couldn't do it in the wall (as in, hidden) so I have flat cables around the door frame and wall corners. I was willing to accept the cables, just to get 10Gb.
And, IMHO, it's worth it.
Not sure what we're disagreeing about, I'm not saying it's not a useful thing to have just that most people don't have it and don't intend to have it so it's not a useful spec bump for Valve to spend money on.
I'm personally planning on going through the pain to get ethernet run (luckily I have both a basement and an attic so it should be fairly easy) in my house and if I ever build new there will be whatever is the best standard at the time in the walls (and maybe some dark fiber but I'm less sure on that) but I also know I'm a vast minority of users at the same time. I'm also in a pretty big minority having a >1 gig symmetrical pipe into my house to make a 10 gig connection to my devices actually worth while.
You could probably connect a 10gbit usb adapter to the USB-C port on this thing for this use case.
I must have misunderstood - I prefer ethernet over wifi and I took your comment as more favourable towards wifi - in that case, my bad ^^
My setup is far from my ideal one so I'm on wifi for a lot of things but I was just pointing out the business reasons they probably went with the 1 gig port, there's just not that many people who are looking for or could take advantage of a 1 gig port.
The steam controller also revealed has a USB-C, as does Hori's official steam controller.
However, you can charge it from things that aren't USB ports. Charging bricks are cheap and most people have one for their phone now, except some unfortunate old iPhone users
Yes but the cord it comes with will likely be a C to A cable. A lot of controllers have come with USB-C ports on them now but ship with C to A cables. Microsoft, Sony, 8Bitdo; all controllers I've gotten that have a C port but came with the usb-a for the PC/charger end.
What do you expect to do with the steam machine that will take more than a gigabit? I mean, it's cool when things are faster, but if you can saturate the link, downloads are still bottlenecked by the drives. And even 4k streaming is under 100Mbit normally.
I can download at approximately 2.5 Gbps from Steam on my PC.
I think not having a 2.5 gigabit port at least is a poor choice.
> And even 4k streaming is under 100Mbit normally
Are you talking "4k streaming" as the current streaming providers do it, with trash bitrate, or "4k streaming" as you would do it if you had ripped your own blu-ray disks and you want to stream it from a NAS somewhere else in your house to your living room?
The highest bitrate UHD Blu-ray supports is 144mbit/s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_HD_Blu-ray. A one gigabit NIC is not even close to the biggest compromise on this system.
"the average bitrate for a 4K Blu-ray DVD can range between 48Mbps to 75Mbps. Some discs can also carry around 100Mbps or even 128Mbps, but these are more rare."
https://www.tomsguide.com/tvs/forget-streaming-services-here...
The extreme high quality blurays are going up to 144Mbps or so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_HD_Blu-ray Still nowhere near a gigabit.
I think the decision of usb2-a at the rear is for wireless keyboard and mouse adapters. Those ones can behave abnormally on usb3-a, plus it’s nice to have those ugly adapters out of sight.
Most controller/headphone dongles come with USB-A, so 2.0 in the back makes sense. Radio for new steam controller is integrated.
I have a Y-splitter for my PS5 controllers and if I didn't, I would have had some sort of controller dock. I assume I would do the same for this. Either way, TV is too far from my couch for a cable, so I wanted to keep playing and charging I'd use a powerbank from my coffee table.
Gigabit Ethernet...that's sad, I'd take 2.5G, so I can better stream my legally ripped Blu-rays. I assume most people don't care because they would use Wi-Fi or their switch only goes to 1G. Better than JBL making android TV sound bar with 100mpbs.
I think it purposely designed, so you don't try to build a NAS on it.
A lot of devices that you commonly plug and unplug like flash drives and passkeys still make sense as USB-A for a lot of people because of the specifics of the USB spec.
C to A converters for devices are technically verboten since they would allow an enduser to make a A to A cable, which can fry hosts if you plug them into eachother if they don't support USB OTG. You can lose certification if you try to ship a device with a C to A converter.
Because of that, USB-A devices with an optional A to C converter (or neater devices that have both plugs on them natively) are what makes a lot of sense for a lot of people for the kinds of devices that live on a key chain. So it makes sense for that to be the default on the front of a desktop, IMO.
> I suspect most joysticks sold today come with a USB-C to USB-C cable
while things can be charged with USB-C cables, the only thing I've ever received A C-to-C cable is... a USB-C wall charger. Granted I haven't gotten a USB-C iPhhone yet and I gotta imagine that one is C-to-C.
Generally lots of pack-in cables I've seen in the wild for charging devices continue to be USB-A-to-C. Switch 2 ports are USB-A, PS5 front port is USB-A... we're still getting there.
I suspect it'll be like the Mac mini situation, and the after-market USB hubs that fit the form factor will expand rapidly ..
It would be a case if it had I/O like Mac mini. Like if it had TB3/TB4/USB4 somewhere, it doesn't.
most of the usecase is going to be keyboard, mouse, and bluetooth headset dongles. All three of mine attached to my Steam Deck dock are USB-A.
although I own a bunch of those usb-a->c attachments you plug on the end, so it wouldnt make much difference
> bluetooth headset dongles
I imagine this has decent Bluetooth support out of the box even if not mentioned? Its hard to find a WiFi chipset these days that doesn't have some kind of Bluetooth support.
Maybe proprietary headset dongles, but if its just bluetooth its probably not needed.
Could it be a synergy with the Steam Frame's dual band wireless dongle? I'm guessing they would really want users to plug that into the front of the device.
It's an old semi-custom semi-discontinued laptop soc.
"Steam Machine’s pricing is comparable to a PC with similar specs" [0]
It has to be no more than 800€ then if it also wants to compete against the console market.
Even 800€ is too much imo because looking at the specs it's already not a "future proof" build, more like a previous gen gaming laptop
0, https://www.theverge.com/tech/818111/valve-steam-machine-han...
thanks for that. The internals photos were what I was really wanting to see!
Wow, the heat sink takes up most of the internal space!
Having a single big fan cool a massive heatsink (that is hopefully very quiet) can legitimately a good reason to get this over building a typical SFF PC, which often runs hot and loud. It sorta reminds me of the trashcan Mac Pro. I myself have a sandwich style case with an RTX 5070 in it which is quite loud under load.
Paywalled, and also The Verge.
https://archive.vn/ndOmA
What is the controversy?
A bit too sparse on details.
- No price
- No indication for whether the CPU/GPU/RAM/SSD are upgradable or all soldered together on the board.
- "4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR" but doesn't mention what kind of games it can run at that quality.
- No performance benchmarks, or mention of what the equivalent retail CPU/GPU to their custom one is.
At face value this seems like a $500-600 PC, and that's also the price it would be able to compete with consoles at.
> "No indication for whether the CPU/GPU/RAM/SSD are upgradable or all soldered together on the board"
With 99.9% certainty this box is carrying on the legacy of the Deck and the Deck OLED, which means that it has a 100% custom crafted SoC with soldered components. Which also means they also could perform some trickery not found in "normal" PCs, like UDMA and custom interface.
> "but doesn't mention what kind of games it can run at that quality."
According to the specs it has a custom RDNA 3 chip w/ 28 CUs and boost clock at 2.45Ghz. The Playstation 5 has a custom RDNA 2 chip w/ 36 CUs @ 2.23 GHz and the Xbox Series X has a custom RDNA2 2 chip w/ 52 CUs @ 1.83Ghz.
Given the optimizations AMD made in RDNA 3 (the "budget" 9070XT can easily keep up with the prev gen "enthousiast" 9700XTX) I could make a safe bet it's on the same level of performance as a Playstation 5
> "No performance benchmarks, or mention of what the equivalent retail CPU/GPU to their custom one is."
~7600X, ~RX7700, but like I noted earlier that's meaningless because the overall architecture of the hardware in this box is likely completely incomparable with a generic PC (just like with XBX and PS5, by the way)
According to [1], the RAM and SSD are upgradable.
* 16GB DDR5 SODIMM (upgradeable)
* M.2 2230/2280 NVMe SSDs
[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/steam-machine-everything-we-know-a...
7900XTX not 9700XTX which didn’t exist.
9070XT is RDNA4 not RDNA3 and steam machine has 28CU’s on RDNA3 which is same as RX7400 the bottom of the range RDNA3.
The 7900XTX has 84 and 24GB of VRAM.
This is a strictly entry level last gen GPU, don’t expect miracles.
The hardware is not good unless the price is very cheap.
As for the 7900XTX been enthusiast only in the sense it it was the top of the line from AMD it’s about 4080 in some areas and loses badly in others (ray tracing), price wise it wasn’t far of the 9070XT price wise at launch.
I have a 7900XTX I like it a great deal but the 4090/5080 and 5090 crush it and the 90’s are enthusiast both on price and perf.
I ended up with a 7900XTX because nvidia pissed me off on Linux one time too many otherwise I’d have gotten the 4090 but between kernel installs causing pain (nothing insurmountable) and them straight breaking power management for nearly a year on mature hardware, nah, AMD deserved the sale, they really do support Linux better.
They said it's semi-custom discrete not a custom SoC. So basically it's a Ryzen 7400 + Radeon 7400.
I was close :)
Would this be capable of utilizing the ray/path tracing many games have now?
Steam Deck has a RDNA 2 chip which supports ray tracing (since it happily runs Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which has a hard requirement for ray tracing) so I guess it will .
There are some early previews where people ran some actual games at it[0].
Here are some of their results:
> In Cyberpunk 2077, running at 4K, it’s a surprisingly stable 60fps, albeit with the caveat of that using FSR 3 upscaling on Performance mode with Medium quality settings. But, also: basic ray tracing, something the Deck can’t even think about enabling outside of very specific games.
> The next game I tested, Black Myth: Wukong, is best run with its own RT effects switched off. Still, it also averaged around 60fps on otherwise similar settings: Performance-level FSR 3 upscaling to 4K, plus the Medium quality preset. And, in an almost unnerving repeat performance, Silent Hill f ran close enough to a solid 60fps (with most drops owed to Unreal Engine 5’s signature stuttering) on the Performance-level graphics settings and, once again, FSR 3 running on Performance mode.
[0] https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/hands-on-with-the-new-steam...
> In Cyberpunk 2077, running at 4K, it’s a surprisingly stable 60fps, albeit with the caveat of that using FSR 3 upscaling on Performance mode with Medium quality settings
So it's not running at 4K nor 60fps. I wish people would stop calling 1080p upscale through some dogshit filter as "4K"...
I agree 100%. However, the upscaling is pretty good. You can tell it's not 4K, but it's also considerably better than simple bilinear resampling from 1080p.
I would call it TV 4k, not monitor 4k. FSR looks just fine from across the room.
It's basically a more powerful Steam Deck that's connected to a TV. The games will be "verified" and the settings pre-tuned for ideal performance just like the Steam Deck. They did a good job making the most of mediocre hardware in the Deck.
My initial thoughts were that this thing would cost considerably more, but I'm looking at the specs and it might not be too bad. Maybe it'll start at $499 or $599 and go up $749 or $849. I'm guessing SoC and not easily upgraded. It says Zen4 so it won't be Strix Point/Halo, but maybe some bastard variation with a Zen4 core and newer GPU than the Deck.
All my friends have moved on to PC, and I don't really want to build a $1000 minimum computer with crazy LEDs that takes up a ton of space with a monitor at this point in my life. And SteamDeck doesn't support KB+M well.
I have no qualms about couch gaming with a KB+M if I can do it with my friends and my already extensive Steam library. Unless they completely drop the ball on this, I'm in.
> and I don't really want to build a $1000 minimum computer with crazy LEDs that takes up a ton of space with a monitor at this point in my life.
The beauty of a PC is you can build whatever you want. It doesn't need to be large, and doesn't need to have LEDs. There are plenty of small form factor cases on the market with the same footprint as this one.
Yep, but you need to put insane amounts of research into figuring out which GPUs and CPU coolers can fit your small case...
And then you get your case and mobo and PSU and maybe CPU and your budget is already at over 1000€ and you still need a GPU.
This is a fairly low spec device. You can comfortably fit all the hardware, case, PSU, cooling etc. in a $600-700 budget. If you want to go small form factor then it'll cost a bit extra, but not that much extra.
The Steam Machine is smaller than any case that would be considered mainstream in the small form factor community, at least to my knowledge. The FormD T1 is around 10L for example, and would look almost comically large compared to the Steam Machine.
And enthusiast cases like this are often quite expensive and not easy to get. Then you need to think about thermals, and find hardware that actually fits.
You can approach it form another angle and treat it more like a NUC and get a SoC but then you're probably not going to get close in terms of gaming performance.
So long story short: I disagree that it would be straight forward to build something like this on your own, at the same price point.
How are you declaring it not possible "at the same price point" when the price of this isn't even announced?
I would reach out to those friend for freebie parts.
8GB VRAM + 4K + FSR3 is very tough situation. Basically bit better than an Xbox Series S but quickly outpaced by midrange PCs.
It will all come down to the price.
Yeah non-upgradable 8GB VRAM would make it a no-go for all but the most casual gamers. But then the casual gamers would rather buy a PS5 for the same price, so let's see where this one fits in.
Quite a lot of actual casual games, things you'd see in the indie or "cosy"/stardew valley-like genre only release on PC, or they take years to come to the Switch but nothing else. I see a lot of casual gamers getting the Steam Deck just because it's has the best selection of casual games.
For casual games even the steam deck can run most of them at 4k 60fps
They already own the PC market. This seems more like a play to start to introduce Steam towards more of the console market.
And for that, assuming a reasonable price, it looks like a nice attempt. Certainly much better than last time.
It's essentially an RX 7600, roughly. It's not quite 'the most casual gamer', but it isn't super amazing. But... neither is the steam deck, and steam deck flies off the shelves.
Yeah it's confirmed solderd and not-upgradable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWUxObt1efQ&t=591s
The size here is actually important too. I think the PS5 is monstrously large and ugly. I do not want it in my living room.
If this little box is roughly PS5 power and reasonably priced (we shall see) then that might hit just right.
> No indication for whether the CPU/GPU/RAM/SSD are upgradable or all soldered together on the board.
Almost certainly. This is the direction the industry is heading, and the perverse unavailability of high-end discrete graphics cards is the nail in the coffin.
See also the Framework PC.
We do have an indication. The RAM and SSD are both upgradable. The RAM is SODIMM, and storage is NVME
I feel like these are the only things worth upgrading even in a desktop too. Unless you are the kind of person who buys the new CPU every year, upgrading anything in a desktop usually means replacing almost everything.
Every time I've looked at upgrading a part in my PC it's been the case where the CPU socket has changed, memory has changed to the next number of DDR, etc so it's basically just buying a new one of everything but the storage, psu, and case.
There are absolutely cases where I've wished I could upgrade the storage in devices though.
Consoles frequently get better performance than an equivalent pc because companies optimize for that specific hardware.
Frame becoming a mainstream device (compared to any random combination of components) might make a difference that way.
It's soldered on the board, Gamers Nexus has already reviewed it: https://youtu.be/bWUxObt1efQ?t=591
Yeah, gemini gives $649 - $699 for BOM, $749+ if they want some margin from the hardware. Which is cheaper than most "Gaming PC", but still more expensive than Switch/PS5, and lack the expandability of PC.
I wish they could sell at $300-$500, that's really going to make this a must have for this year.
Using the deck prices seems like a good place to start unless they're using the opportunity to change strategy. It's an updated SoC, but minus a screen, battery, separate dock, built-in controller, and less pressure to pack it in a handheld chassis. They mention a built in wireless adapter for the controller, so I assume there will be bundles with and without a controller.
I feel the same way, it has to be priced in the range of gaming console rather than gaming PC.
If that's the case I think it's a hugely positive thing, and has gone away for newly bought hardware for a variety of reasons over the past decade. Having a basic PC and then upgrading it with a GPU used to be a realistic route to a respectable gaming PC, but I think that's largely gone away now (partially due to the death of the general "home PC" or many being on laptops. There are bargains to be had in the used market, but that comes with a lot of asterisks.
If they can get this to a large market I think it's great value, not just as a console-model PC but because a full featured desktop without lockdown is so near. It's a reverse of where I've thought MS missed a trick with the xbox, add a keyboard and mouse and let users have turn on a sandboxed lightweight desktop mode then funnel users to get software through their store, which would have been a great way to get xbox hardware installed in houses (especially the cheap S models) during covid when there was a sudden rush to buy PCs for home working that previously didn't need it.
This is targeted at the living room, but I'd love to see non-gaming uses highlighted and get the equivalent of 'deck certified' whether that's linux native or efforts into working well under wine.
Excited for Steam/PC games on ARM to get better as a side effect of the Frame running using a Snapdragon CPU.
Running x86 PC games on higher end Android devices already works better than you might expect via gamehub/gamehub lite/winlator, but it requires much random trying of different driver and runtime versions for every game and even then a lot don't work or have issues.
I do like this about Valve. They understand the 'Chicken and egg' scenario and thus try to push hardware or software ideas forward in the hopes that it encourages others to work to that.
Like Steamdeck with Proton, developers have a tangible target and can ensure their stuff works on it.
Very interesting! The one killer issue that jumps to mind is anti-cheat. I switched away from gaming on Linux via Proton to gaming on Windows because Battlefield 6's anti-cheat won't work under Proton. Many games are like this, particularly some of the most popular (Rainbow 6 Siege for instance). And BF6 made this decision only recently despite the growing number of Steam Deck players (and other players on linux - in fairness I don't think there would have been that many BF6 players on a handheld).
Edit: I specifically use a gaming-only PC. The hardware is used for nothing else. Hence, discussions of rootkits don't really bother me personally much and on balance I'd really rather see fewer cheaters in my games. I think it would be the same with any of these machines - anything Steam-branded is likely to be a 99% gaming machine and their users will only care that their games work, not about the mechanisms of the anti-cheat software.
I view it as Valve is doing me a favor by adding friction towards me installing a rootkit to play video games.
There's also been numerous userspace ACs that work well and also run in userspace (EAC, Battleye, etc.) that have been enabled for Linux/Proton users (including by EA with Apex Legends at one point). A lot of the support for Linux mostly comes down to the developer/publishers not wanting to and not because of technical reasons.
on the other hand you can't play any of the older battlefields due to cheating (not like "is he cheating?" more like blatant "this guy is speedhacking and heashotting everyone" cheating that the server could easily detect if they cared about it)
This is a issue of critical mass. With the continued growth of steamos, steamdeck, and linux as a game platform, eventually it will pull over support.
I have to wonder if it's possible to ever even guarantee something that can't be trivially bypassed on Linux - Windows, sure, it's possible with DMA, but it's damn hard. On Linux you could just compile a spoofed kernel or a DKMS module or something.
Look at android, locked bootloader, no root, se linux, and voila
It looks like Valve wants to avoid going down the road of an extremely locked down system like that. They even view the ability to load alternate OS's as a feature of their products.
you can make a signed readonly linux installation, and restrict your games to it. this would be like "support steamos but not linux".
Or deliver the game as a container format, like snap or appimage to bypass most of the system.
Or demand the installation of a kernel driver like they do on windows.
or just give up on kernel level aticheat since they're been breached all the same, just as windows are restricting their power too.
easy-anticheat has a linux version. Developers have to disable the support intentionally.
is it not possible for someone to have Linux spoof that it's Windows to the game?
Perhaps a trusted execution environment based anti-cheat system could be possible.
I think Valve said something about working with anti-cheat developers to find a solution for the Steam Deck, but nothing happened. Perhaps they will do something this time.
With a TEE, you could scan the system or even completely isolate your game, preventing even the OS from manipulating it. As a last resort, you could simply blacklist the machine if cheats are detected.
There would probably still be some cheaters, but the numbers would be so low as to not be a problem.
It's worse than that, BF6's anticheat is kernel level and requires the Windows-only version secure boot to be enabled, at least on my motherboard. There is no way I'm going to faff about with my BIOS when rebooting just to play this game.
Looking at the specs and marketing copy, it sounds to me like you could secure boot windows 11 on this machine.
> ... a discrete semi-custom AMD desktop class CPU and GPU.
> Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
Same. I mainline Destiny2 (well, a bit less these days), and Bungie won't support Linux/Steam Deck because they depend on BattlEye kernel anti-cheat.
(and yet still have a problem with cheaters, see all the bans following the Desert Perpetual raid race)
Do we know what kernel SteamOS uses? Is it built on linux, or could it be some sort of kiosk'd mode Windows where this will be a non-issue? One could hope but I truly don't know.
SteamOS on the Deck is just a standard (tuned) Linux distribution under the hood. It would be very surprising to me if Valve shifted to an entirely different OS for the Cube.
All Valve has to do is say “Your software cannot deliberately exclude linux support including kernel anti-cheat to be listed on Steam.” And that would be that, the few devs big enough to make it on their own would leave, and everyone else would adapt.
Worth noting: Valve’s own first party tournaments for their own game require kernel level anti-cheat (from a third party vendor). Valve themselves have given up on allowing players in their own title play competitively in a Valve sponsored event with a kernel level anti-cheat. I can’t imagine they’d ever be this brash.
There is no adapting without a proper solution for securing game integrity.
The games would just leave Steam. The big publishers want their own platforms and launchers anyway.
The big publishers already have their own launcher and platforms and are increasingly moving back onto Steam because they see higher PC player counts and sales when their games are there
That's not the trend that we're observing. As much as publishers and developers want to control their sales channels, the current trend is for them to move towards Steam, not away from it.
The more likely outcome is that developers would segment matchmaking into people with kernel-level anti-cheat, and people without it. This seems fair to me.
Several big publishers did move away from Steam until Valve conceded some of their revenue, reducing their cut from 30% to 25/20% at certain revenue thresholds. That convinced the publishers to return to Steam, but it showed that Valve isn't immune to being flexed on by the bigger players.
Yeah, I would hope not. Trying to impose your will on suppliers and b2b customers like this is how you get hit with an antitrust lawsuit.
Is there an feasible alternative to "kernel anti-cheat" available on Linux?
There isn't.
When it comes to anti-cheat on Linux, it's basically an elephant in the room that nobody wants to address.
Anti-cheat on Linux would need root access to have any effectiveness. Alternatively, you'd need to be running a custom kernel with anti-cheat built into it.
This is the part of the conversation where someone says anti-cheat needs to be server-side, but that's an incredibly naive and poorly thought out idea. You can't prevent aim-bots server-side. You can't even detect aim-bots server-side. At best, you could come up with heuristics to determine if someone's possibly cheating, but you'd probably have a very hard time distinguishing between a cheater and a highly skilled player.
Something I think the anti-anti-cheat people fail to recognize is that cheaters don't care about their cheats requiring root/admin, which makes it trivial to evade anti-cheat that only runs with user-level permissions.
When it comes to cheating in games, there are two options:
1. Anti-cheat runs as admin/root/rootkit/SYSTEM/etc.
2. The games you play have tons of cheaters.
You can't have it both ways: No cheaters and anti-cheat runs with user-level permissions.
Rootkit anti-cheats can still often be bypassed using DMA and external hardware cheats, which are becoming much cheaper and increasingly common. There's still cheaters in Valorant and in Cs2 on faceit, both of which have extremely intrusive ACs that only run on Windows.
At the level of privilege you're granting to play a video game, you'd need to have a dedicated gaming PC that is isolated from the rest of your home network, lest that another crowdstrike level issue takes place from a bad update to the ring 0 code these systems are running
Even kernel anti-cheat can be defeated, this is a similar fight to what captchas have.
I can just have my screen recorded and have a fake input signal as my mouse/keyboard.. or just simply hire a pro player to play in my name, and it's absolutely impossible to detect any of these.
The point is to just make it more expensive to cheat, culling out the majority of people who would do so.
I don't fully agree with the 1 and 2 dichotomy. For example, before matchmaking-based games became so popular a lot of our competitive games were on dedicated servers.
On dedicated servers we had a self-policing community with a smaller pool of more regular players and cheaters were less of an issue. Sure, some innocents got banned and less blatant cheaters slipped through but the main issue of cheaters is when they destroy fun for everyone else.
So, for example, with the modern matchmaking systems they could do person verification instead of machine verification. Such as how some South Korean games require a resident registration number to play.
Then when people get banned (or probably better, shadowbanned/low priority queued) by player reports or weaker anti-cheat they can't easily ban evade. But of course then there is the issue of incentivizing identity theft.
And I don't think giving a gaming company my PII is any better than giving them root on my machine. But that seems more like an implementation issue.
Except most anti-cheats started on dedicated servers because it turns out most people are not interested in policing other players.
Punkbuster was developed for Team Fortress Classic, even getting officially added to Quake 3 Arena. BattleEye for Battlefield games. EasyAntiCheat for Counter-Strike. I even remember Starcraft 1 ICCUP 3rd party servers having an anti-cheat they called 'anti-hack'.
You can still see this today with modern dedicated servers in CS2: Face-It and ESEA have additional anti-cheat, not less. Even modded 3rd party server FiveM for GTAV has their own anti-cheat called adhesive.
> For example, before matchmaking-based games became so popular a lot of our competitive games were on dedicated servers.
I still had a lot of problems with cheaters during this time. And when the admins aren't on you're still then at the whims of cheaters until you go find some other playground to play in.
And then on top of that you have the challenge of actually finding good servers to go join a game with similarly skilled players, especially when trying to play with a group of friends together. Trying to get all your friends on to the same team just for the server to auto-balance you again because the server has no concept of parties sucked. Finding a good server with the right mods or maps you're looking for, trying to join right when a round started, etc was always quite a mess.
Matchmaking services have a lot of extremely desirable features for a lot of gamers.
> So, for example, with the modern matchmaking systems they could do person verification instead of machine verification. Such as how some South Korean games require a resident registration number to play.
If you think the hate for anti-cheat is bad, just wait until you see the hate for identity verification.
I'm actually rather blown away that you would even suggest it.
There's a third path:
3. No humans in your multiplayer
As someone who grew up amazed at Reaper bot for Quake, I'm surprised we don't see a rennaisance of making 'multiplayer' fun by more expressive, fallible, unpredictable bots. We're in an AI bubble and I don't hear of anyone chasing the holy grail of believable 'AI' opponents.
This also has the secondary benefit of having your multiplayer game remain enjoyable even when people's short attention spans move on to the next hot live service. Heck this could kill live service games.
Then again, what people get out of multiplayer is, on some unspoken and sad level, making some other person hurt.
the third option is cloud gaming for everyone.
3. write your codebase in a way which is suspicious of client data and gives the server much more control (easier said than done however)
That's just server-side anti-cheat, which I've already addressed.
Cheating isn't always about manipulating game state, especially in FPSes. There, it's more about manipulating input, ie, auto-aim cheats.
But isn't all client-side anti-cheat bypassable by doing image recognition on the rendered image? (either remote desktop or a hardware-based display cable proxy)
Modern cheats are far more advanced than this. Using a DMA cheat, you basically just read the game's memory from a different computer and there's no way for the game to know unless the PCI device ID is known: https://intl.anticheatexpert.com/resource-center/content-68....
DMA is "easy" to patch. No reason to allow a device to have arbitrary memory access. Just require use of IOMMU.
FaceIT essentially has countered most modern cheats including those using DMA. https://www.faceit.com/en/news/faceit-rollout-of-tpm-secure-...
Nowadays if memory access is needed, you are looking at having to find a way to load a custom BIOS or UEFI module in a way that doesn't mess with secure boot. Even then, certain anti-cheats use frequently firing interrupts to find any unknown code executing on any system threads.
Yes. Using another machine, record the screen & programmatically move mouse.
At that point you have to look at heuristics (assuming the input device is not trivially detectable vs a legit one).
However, that can obviously only be used for certain types of cheating (e.g. aimbot, trigger bot (shoot when crosshair is on person)).
I'm not letting a game company have root on my PC. How does that kind of exposure for something as frivolous as gaming even make sense?
Something that is "frivolous" to you is a passion or even a profession for others. Competitive gaming is a massive market worldwide, and it wouldn't exist without the ability to enforce a level playing field. Not everything has to be a holy FOSS war.
"holy FOSS war"?
Why not have a commissar sit behind every gamer to make sure they're not cheating?
That's a startling degree of access to give to these people for access to cosmetic micro-transactions.
But, I guess if all your friends are snorting coke in an alley, FOMO will have you right there with them.
That's how gaming on windows work. You're a minority with that opinion.
Today, no. Very simplified but the broad goal of those tools is to prevent manipulation and monitoring of the in-process state of the game. Consoles and PCs require this to varying degrees by requiring a signed boot chain at minimum. Consoles require a fully signed chain for every program, so you can't deploy a hacking tool anyway; no anti-cheat is needed. PCs can run unsigned and signed programs -- so instead they require the kernel at minimum to be signed & trusted, and then you put the anti-cheat system inside it so it cannot be interfered with. If you do not do this then there is basically no way to actually trust any claim the computer makes about its state. For PCs, the problem is you have to basically trust the anti-cheat isn't a piece of shit and thus have to trust both Microsoft and also random corporations. Also PCs are generally insecure anyway at the hardware level due to a number of factors, so it only does so much.
You could make a Linux distro with a signed boot chain and a kernel anti-cheat, then you'd mostly need to get developers on board with trusting that solution. Nobody is doing that today, even Valve.
Funny enough, macOS of all things is maybe "best" theoretical platform for all this because it does not require you to trust anyone beyond Apple. All major macOS programs are signed by their developers, so macOS as an OS knows exactly where each program came from. macOS can also attest that it is running in secure mode, and it can run a process at user-mode level such that it can't be interfered with by another process. So you could enforce a policy like this: if Battlefield6.app is launched, it cannot be examined by any other process, but likewise it may run in a full sandbox. Next, Battlefield6.app needs to login online, so it can ask macOS to provide an attestation saying it is running on genuine Apple hardware in secure mode, and then it could submit that attestation to EA which can validate it as genuine. Then the program launch is trusted. This setup requires you to only trust Apple security and that macOS is functioning correctly, not EA or whatever nor does it require actual anti-cheat mechanisms.
>RAM 16GB DDR5 + 8GB GDDR6 VRAM
Hmm. Not that it is big deal, but I would be somewhat worried about true longevity with the VRAM. Not sure if SteamOS helps there, but on PC some new titles are going over the 8GB VRAM.
One of the things I've noted for a while is that PC gaming as a platform seems to be polarizing between high and low spec, especially if you look outside of North America/Western Europe to places like South America or SE Asia. The steam deck and now this seem to be a reference/target platform for the low spec group. It might not be able to play the prestigious high spec titles well if at all, but so long as "your mileage may vary" is messaged well I can't see it being a problem, it hasn't so far.
It's a very low end Radeon 7000 series. It's absolutely incapable of the highest texture quality and rendering resolutions that need more than 8GB of VRAM. You'll likely never go above 1080p on this card (1440p is going to be rough based on benchmarks of the existing low end 7000 series).
There's absolutely no reasonable way to use more than 8GB of VRAM on this card.
Even modern low-end GPUs should have more than enough fill rate for high-res textures. The texture quality setting in games is usually not affecting performance at all until VRAM runs out.
Part of that is that the texture detail scales to the point where on a low end card at low resolutions you aren’t seeing any difference between high and low detail textures.
No DisplayPort 2.0 is interesting because RDNA3 should support that.
More importantly, FSR4 (currently) doesn't support RDNA3, so you'll be limited on upscaling too.
You always have the option of streaming a game, though.
8 GB is good enough for most everything, and can you stream on an exception basis, if something truly demanding catches your eye.
It should be good enough for any game with a toggle on textures quality, which is pretty much every big title for the foreseeable future?
Games publishers/developers are going to have to wind in their necks a little. Whilst memory is abundant it's also still quite expensive. We should still be aiming for efficiency and the chances are 16gb+ are in the minority here. Fact is, the more VRAM and compute you demand the smaller your customer-base becomes.
I've played many games with 8GB VRAM* and will do so for the forseeable. If that's not enough, I am not a customer. Simple as.
The truth is, there is going to be a massive motivation with the likes of Steam Deck/Machine to actually make titles that are optimised and perform well within their hardware parameters. It's money you won't want to ignore.
*One example was Silent Hill remake on PC, which used the unreal engine. It was optimised beautifully and ran without visual glitches and stutters even with the highest graphic demands on a 8GB RTX
I think it does also help that a big chunk of Steams userbase are playing smaller indie titles that don't need obscene amounts of vram. The steam deck audience for example has a lot of people playing both a mix of AAA and smaller games. Given this is advertised as 6x as powerful as the deck I'm sure they'll be fine. It's not meant to be a top of the line console thats for sure, and if it was people would be moaning that its too expensive.
Not using the highest settings obviously but i can run RD2 and CP2077 on the deck fine.
It will be a while before there is ps6 or new xbox.
Not sure how heavy SteamOS is, but wouldn't modern games actually prefer a flipped memory configuration? So, 8 GB RAM and 16 GB VRAM would make this a more 'balanced' gaming appliance. But it is advertised as a general purpose PC, so 8 GB RAM wouldn't be enough.
The RAM's upgradable, it's standard DDR5 on a SODIMM module
8GB just isn't enough for modern AAA games. Battlefield 6, probably the most highly optimized AAA game to have come out in the past few years, still has a 16GB RAM minimum and Arc Raiders, which is also incredibly optimized, still has a 12GB minimum. Games are only going to become more resource hungry from here, so 8GB in early 2026 would be a terrible idea.
> most highly optimized AAA game to have come out in the past few years, still has a 16GB RAM minimum.
Are you talking about VRAM or system RAM? Steam machine has 16GB of system RAM and is expandable. VRAM is limited to 8GB.
https://www.ea.com/en/games/battlefield/battlefield-6/system...
I do agree 8GB of VRAM is a little low for a device to release in 2026 though. But it technically does meet all memory requirements for Battlefield 6.it meets or exceeds the ps5 and xbox series x, so it might not be top tier, but it'll be fine. I have a plenty good time on my series x, cant think of any stutters.
Both consoles allow more than 8GB to be used for the integrated GPU.
Actually looks like its just _slightly_ less powerful than them.
Steam is the only reason I have a Windows desktop, I'll probably just get one of these next time I want a hardware refresh (which admittedly will probably be many years).
Interesting that it uses KDE Plasma for the desktop
It doesn't boot into the desktop by default — it uses its own session with the Gamescope compositor. The desktop is easily accessible through the power menu though.
> Interesting that it uses KDE Plasma for the desktop
SteamOS on the Steam Deck already used KDE Plasma for the desktop.
I like SteamOS a great deal, though it's not my daily driver (yet). I'm curious if people will begin to use it as a daily driver and thus expect Valve to be an OS developer on top of creating software for their gaming hardware. That's a different set of expectations and I wonder how they'll navigate it.
> thus expect Valve to be an OS developer on top of creating software for their gaming hardware. That's a different set of expectations and I wonder how they'll navigate it.
They've been doing it since Steam Deck launched, or even since they started to contribute to Proton/Wine (depending on exactly what you see "OS" to be). They seem to have grips on it more or less already, Deck upgrades are a breeze and the machine and software itself is open enough for a Linux hacker like me to be very comfortable on it, and also closed down enough for my nieces to not be able to brick theirs by just tapping around.
They seem to have worked it out well by limiting SteamOS to their hardware, so they don't have to handle all the varieties a regular distro has to. There's a significant number of people who want an 'official' release as a regular installable distro but I doubt it'll happen and Valve are happy to delegate that to others
Indeed, even much earlier. With Steam Deck they achieved wider adoption but the first generation of Steam Machines came out in 2015 and they have been committed to the SteamOS linux distro since then.
Yeah, I'm sure you're right overall, they've been at it for a long time. I think it's worth keeping in mind that all of the SteamOS'es before Steam Deck were pretty much nothing like the current (3.0) iteration. If I recall correctly, I think they were based on Ubuntu or Debian, compared to the current Arch Linux distribution.
I've used SteamOS as a daily driver for half a year. Immutable distros have limitations and my distrobox images failed to work after a SteamOS update.
If you're ok with running work stuff in a separate VM within SteamOS, that works great. Using Geekbench I saw only a 5% cpu performance penalty. Io takes a bigger hit, but that wasn't a blocker for me as I was intending to run VMs with encrypted storage anyway (which adds even more latency) but still a good experience for my work.
Linux is my daily driver, and I run steam to play games (though, not on a work linux partition for reasons).
It can run just about everything I want to play, but yes, there are plenty of things that don't work yet. Doom Dark Ages, for example.
I have been using Steam Deck oled as my main computing device for 2 years. It has been amazing. It's fast and silent.
A reason to get this instead of Playstation/Xbox is that games on Steam are significantly cheaper through keys sites like g2a.com or just waiting for discounts.
Playstation/Xbox know you're locked in because you've already sunk money into the console, and they use this pricing power against you.
A big thing here is that you can always buy another or build another PC that can run this stuff if you don't like the Steam Machine. You cannot build a PS5/Xbox to do the same.
I work in games.
Please don't buy games from g2a and the likes. In the best case, g2a make money and the developer don't. in the worst case you're buying bogus keys or stolen accounts. Please, just pirate games instead.
Arch-based? KDE Plasma? There might happen a real "year of desktop Linux", in a way. That is, a Linux desktop that sneaks in as a side dish, but maybe gains some non-zero traction, and bringing FOSS to more people who are not engineers.
AI + Games is the killer app for Linux on the <everything>. You can make a beast of a gaming PC that also happens to be a beast of a local inference system, and that local inference system can manage the system for you, so grandma won't have to worry about the shell ever again.
"I’m on the record saying, that maybe Valve will actually save the Linux desktop. And it’s actually not because I think games are important! I don't care, I don't play games. I think some people do, so games maybe important. But the really important issue is I guarantee you Valve will not make 15 different binaries. And I also guarantee you that every single desktop distribution will care about Valve binaries." – Linus Torvalds in 2014
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc&t=310s
Huh, I had just been trying to look into whether there existed a "mini PC but with a GPU in it that's at least as good as the ones in game consoles."
(Or, to put that another way: fundamentally, I want a game console — a piece of well-integrated consumer electronics that lives unobtrusively in my entertainment center, hooked up to my TV, requiring no maintenance, controlled entirely with a Bluetooth gamepad. But I want it to enable me to run both 1. current-gen games at at-least-equivalent fidelity to the console ports of those games; and also 2. "all the games a Windows PC can run." So, anything on Steam, yes; but also, all the weird little indie games on itch.io that never make it to Steam; and old DOS/Win31/Win95 games (either as polished ports from GOG, or through various forms of virtualization/emulation I'd set up myself); and even the little freeware games floating about on the "old internet", that someone made in Game Maker or RPG Maker 2000 or even as a standalone Flash projector executable, way back when.)
The closest thing I had found to that description so far, that even might work for the use-case, was the ROG NUC.
I wonder how this compares to that?
We have the ROG NUC and absolutely love it for our living room. Not playing any crazy AAA ultra graphics games, but it's been great.
If I had known this was finally releasing, I would have waited though.
probably exactly what you need! :)
I wonder if Steam will finally implement multi-user sign on for local multiplayer games (like all true consoles).
It's something that doesn't get headlines, but a real barrier for enjoyment for a console-like PC. Hate being stuck with 'guest 1' and 'guest 2' or whatever. Many games want each player to progress and without true multi sign on, it just doesn't work. Hence games dropping local multiplayer on PC.
Steam would need to reliably pass multiple controller inputs to the game before your qualm gets addressed
Valve reports that the Steam Machine will support inputs from up to 4 Steam Controllers [1], so presumably they are updating SteamInput to handle that.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine
Being able to play PC-ish games without Windows (all on its own) makes this pretty interesting. Looking forward to seeing its real world performance. The fact that it doesn't take up the space of a household appliance is a plus too.
What exactly do you mean by "pc-ish"? Setting aside steam deck, are you aware that you can already install steam on linux and play many games [0]? Are you aware of Bazzite [1]?
0 - https://www.protondb.com/
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazzite_(operating_system)
Long time veteran Linux user. I was not able to get anything to run on Steam. It's some sort of display driver issue/conflict, but if it takes me longer than an hour, I'm over it.
This is exactly where Bazzite is convenient since it comes with the latest drivers (including 32-bit) out of the box.
You can do that today with a Steam Deck + a dock. The performance is surprisingly good and most higher end games you buy on Steam will come with pre-configured steam deck settings to downgrade video settings if needed.
I'm going to be buying the box though for the faster AMD chip, as I wasn't able to play some like Resident Evil 2 remake. While the Silent Hill 2 Remake played decent enough.
> you can wake your Steam Machine without leaving your couch. [using the built in steam controller wireless adapter].
This one simple thing is the only thing that makes my SteamDeck+Dock feel like a second class console. So far they only claim it's for the Steam Controller, but I'd be great if it worked with the handful of 8bitdo or Switch controllers I've been using.
I agree. It looks like it's in progress.
Earlier this month SteamOS had a release: "Temporarily re-disabled experimental wake-on-bluetooth support for Steam Deck LCD while issues with spurious wake-ups are investigated"
https://www.steamdeck.com/en/news
Same issue with Switch 2. You can only wake it with a Switch 2 controller. Nintendo's own Pro Controller for switch, which used to wake the Switch just fine, cannot wake the Switch 2. Seems like a forced upgrade issue, to me. :(
I have a 1st gen Steam Deck (256gb), and it has supported wake from bluetooth peripherals for a while. I've only tested it with a PS5 controller, but it works. [EDIT: btw I use the official dock. Idk if it'll work with others]
I use my SteamDeck as a streaming device too, and since my TV is connected via HDMI, waking the console also wakes the TV. So I can start playing/watching anything by just turning on my PS5 controller (which is not ideal because the PS5 controller has terrible battery life and is often dead when I need it, but that's a different issue)
On the other hand, PS5 controller - unlike an Xbox controller - gets you gyro control, which makes for a very nice mouse experience. I play tons of mouse-only games (e.g. Mechabellum) from the couch thanks to the DualSense.
Waking up the deck works for me with my xbox controller connected via bluetooth. Are you using those controllers via BT or USB?
Edit: Now that I think about it, this might have been a feature added to the OLED model.
Yes, the OLED model has a different Bluetooth controller and iirc that's the main reason. Though Valve has been working on trying to backport it to the original models as well.
Valve, please partner with Framework. I think this could be a great partnership in the future and the whole ecosystem as a whole.
Did Framework ever distance themselves from Omarchy after the whole discussion in October? Otherwise I hope and expect Steam to know better than to align themselves with Framework.
Any additional context for those out of the loop?
This was the first blog that I found on the matter: https://gardinerbryant.com/the-omarchy-framework-thing/
tldr; DHH is a controversial figure, and Framework are latching onto Omarchy. I think some folks think that Framework's image is being tarnished by working with DHH.
DHH is a controversial figure who increasingly comes out as tone deaf and perpetuating reactionary myths. It's not new either.
https://davidcel.is/articles/rails-needs-new-governance https://blogs.library.duke.edu/blog/2023/11/30/why-were-drop...
It really is so sad to see people get sucked into the alt-right pipeline and not even realize it despite it being so obvious from the outside that it's happening. For all his talk on indoctrination it's weird to suddenly have very specific opinions on a bunch of unrelated topics you have no personal involvement in, no expertise in, and tangible connection to. Even if you have feeling about some of these issues in passing no normal person with a dayjob becomes so prolific about all of them at once.
Except, of course, that despite these issues not moving the needle on basically anything in daily life they are all connected as part of a grand conspiracy corrupt society in some nonspecific way and must be eradicated. In a way I really can't blame any individual because there's very little in the way of defenses against it but it's sad to see the cocktail of intelligence, arrogance, and fame mean that no one will ever be successful at pulling him out.
Why would Framework "distance" themselves from Omarchy? What's a Linux distro got to do with anything?
The problem is not the distro per se, but the person behind it.
https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...
https://gardinerbryant.com/the-omarchy-framework-thing/
i.e., not a problem.
Unfortunately that is no longer an issue for many people.
Valve most likely cares about more relevant things than idiotic Internet shitfights, such as functional technology, or paying customers.
What would a Framework partnership accomplish? Ship SteamOS as a preinstalled option for their laptops?
That actually would be a cool idea and doable.
You seem to be forgetting the framework desktop which is very similar in form factor to the new steam machine: https://frame.work/desktop
Cool but I wish it had a single big APU chip like the consoles and Strix Halo - and unified memory. PCs are long overdue for adopting this change, and the only reason it makes sense to keep the separate is to make graphics cards swappable.
Considering how big GPU silicon is, when you have both integrated and custom, it'd have made sense to integrate them.
What they're using here is still mostly off the shelf silicon with some tweaks. If they got enough volume, they probably could go for an all integrated APU with unified memory that could keep the GPU fed, but that'd be a very expensive and new thing to develop.
I hope that if this is a success, they'll have the numbers to justify a Strix-Halo like APU with a smaller CPU but keeping the big GPU for the next generation of the device.
> and unified memory. PCs are long overdue for adopting this change
Why? Desktop PCs, especially gaming PCs, have nothing to gain and everything to lose by oversubscribing system memory with GPU workloads. The memory bus typically isn't fast enough anyways, and a modern PCIe x16 can easily handle the bandwidth of a gigantic GPU. The only advantage to unifying everything is latency, which isn't relevant at any framerate under 1000hz.
> when you have both integrated and custom, it'd have made sense to integrate them.
Sometimes, sometimes not. AMD's mobile packaging technology is not world-class like Apple and Nvidia's is. Valve had the experience with the Steam Deck to make the call if a mobile architecture was the right choice, and they decided against it.
Valve doesn't have to make a Mac. This is a gaming device, it's designed accordingly.
All consoles have been using a single integrated chip since the last generation. The memory bandwidth a CPU uses is much less than GPU. Let's say a CPU does 50 GB/s peak while the GPU does 200+
> Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
i'm having a hard time describing the feelings this makes me feel. like i've been stressed, bedraggled and worn down, and suddenly there's a moment where i can just rest
it's nice to be excited about something for once instead of the baseline expectation of a horrible adversarial experience, which is the case for most tech in 2025
it is somewhat depressing that it's this novel to expect a piece of hardware to actually exist to make my life nicer vs the default of being an abomination that tries constantly to extract money and information from me like a fucking vampire
(and i guess, not having used this yet, this also speaks to valve being one of the last companies that i have any trust in to be capable of making a business decision that makes them less money in the short run in order to deliver a better product)
Valve earned a lot of goodwill from me when I set up my docked steam deck as my main media player & gaming device. It required me to do a lot of little hacks. I was doing stuff the device wasn't meant to do, but it never put up road blocks just because I wasn't allowed to do it. Not like when I want to do simple things on my wife's macbook.
An ongoing 'background noise' concern I've had for a while is how PC gaming seems to be centralizing around steam. There's reasons why that happened, but it'd be real nice if 'infrastructure' was able to decouple from their store. It feels like practically requiring steam for PC gaming on windows and certainly on linux isn't a mile away from requiring MS windows, is it much freedom to pick which Seattle based company you run software from?
I don't think there's NO reason to be concerned, but I think it's pretty different considering the decades of history of how Valve acts vs how M$FT acts. Also, many games available on Steam are DRM free or available from other sources and Proton itself is open source.
Valve is also not publicly traded and they have a succession plan of some sort in the event that gaben kicks it, I can only assume whatever he's come up with is sound, he's done a great job of running the place so far.
> There's reasons why that happened
Steam's near-monopoly was earned by simply being the best store. Other stores like Epic don't even include basic features like a shopping cart to buy multiple games at once.
I could go on and on about why Steam is so much better than any other store, but this isn't the place.
That said, I can understand being nervous. Steam is great because it's privately owned and GabeN is happy with the money he makes from it and doesn't feel the need to enshittify it in order to get more money. But eventually he will die or retire, and someone else will be given control. Supposedly, he's already vetted some people to take the job, but what's to say they weren't merely playing the part and will take it public as soon as they can?
The built in Steam DRM is very weak. Of course that can change at any time, but at least the current catalog of Steam DRM-only games are not really tied down to steam except via law/licensing.
There are plenty of competing stores, they just aren't good. I require a game to be on steam because I like the store and features, but many games are also sold elsewhere.
A couple weeks ago Amazon said something about "we were trying to compete with Steam and even with all our resources nobody noticed" and that made me realize something: ideally, companies with similar products and services compete on features and cost, but nowadays the big tech providers compete more on lock in than anything else. But in the market of video game retail stores the competition _is_ on features and price, because Steam competes on those terms (ref gaben's famous quote "piracy is a service problem"; they're even competing and succeeding against free products)
Plot twist, Valve AI will syphon all your user metrics into Valve's new model. J/k and all joking aside, I feel the same way. Feels like a love letter to gamers
Steam is a service that's been running for >20 years and somehow hasn't been enshittified (although, I suppose when it first appeared it was seen as enshittification). It's worth celebrating, to be honest.
A mainstream desktop PC that supports most games without windows is actually a massive deal in the long term as I know plenty of people who don't like windows but didn't have an alternative
A bit of topic, but I was wondering how much bigger is the steam machine compared to the mac mini m4, since that's what I have and is my frame of reference. Obviously comparing apples to oranges and only talking about physical volume, not features, compatibility, price, personal preferences, etc.
Mac Mini m4: 127 x 127 x 50 mm = 0.8 L
Steam Machine: 156 x 162 x 152 = 3.8 L
That's 4.76 times more volume.
The Steam device has a 110W GPU and 30W CPU. The M4 Mac Mini's peak power consumption is less than half of that. Even with the Apple Silicon efficiency, it can't keep up with high power GPUs in graphical loads like gaming.
Mac Mini will throttle itself after sustained full load, especially with the GPU engaged.
A Mac Mini will start throttling well before the end of a 30 minute online gaming match.
A larger volume for better cooling was a good choice for a machine designed to run the CPU and GPU at full load for hours.
It's also about twice the total TDP and more likely to spend time running at full bore. Bigger heatsinks and fans means quieter operation under load.
The elephant in the room: "will this game run on my Steam Machine?"
This is really the part a lot of people don't understand and not a qestion you even have to ask when you buy/download a game for a console.
Some of the biggest games right now like BF6, COD, or Fortnite, League of Legends, chinese gacha games won't run on this. That excludes a massive part of the market, many of whom would be the exact audience for a simpler, more console-like PC experience. There's also no guarantee that future AAA games will be compatible with this day one (8GB VRAM is very limiting already).
Yeah yeah indies but if people want to play X then offering them Z is not an option.
This will be DOA anything over $500
This is true also for steam deck but it’s a success anyway. COD, Fortnite, LoL players can stay on windows. I’m happy to play newest indie game on my Linux machine
>but it’s a success anyway
That's also debatable. Switch 2 sold 10m units in 6 months compared to the Steam Deck's 4 million in 3 years ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The Steam Deck is niche even among the gaming crowd.
>COD, Fortnite, LoL players can stay on windows. I’m happy to play newest indie game on my Linux machine
This is the mindset that makes the Steam Machine DOA if not priced correctly. No one will pay $800 just to play Hollow Knight in 4k
Worth considering that Nintendo has a massive library of proprietary games they themselves produce (Mario, Pokemon, etc) that Steam does not have.
People buy Nintendo products to play Nintendo games.
You can likely install Windows on Steam Machine if you so wish, and then it would actually be a fairly competent mini PC while having great and silent cooling. However, I suppose most casual gamers aren't savvy enough to tinker and install their own OS.
Linus Torvalds was right. Valve will save the Linux desktop.
...by emulating WinAPI
And nothing wrong with that, the classic Win32 API is actually quite decent, especially the small subset needed for games. And it has the incredible advantage that it doesn't change since Microsoft doesn't care about Windows anymore ;)
The funny thing would be for Wine to then extend the WinAPI, and software beginning to use that extension.
Heh, who cares. I can play games and my OS doesn’t spy on me.
Hell ya! A new gaming OS, linux based, getting console and portable hardware that is well built, it's what I've been waiting for, something that gives you a good console UX but lets you play PC games.
I've had my Steam deck plugged into my tv for the last year and I sometimes use the Linux desktop (just a menu option and it reloads into desktop mode) which has a really nice design is already preconfigured for casual linux use.
I'd look up game review youtube videos and search stuff in between games from my couch. No complaints.
The only downside to SteamOS being linux is the lack of easy mod support. It's either a PIA or not supported.
You have to set it up with the Steam client in Desktop Mode, but you can add arbitrary programs and executables as non-steam games.
As a result, I can open Spotify in the background and have it play music while I game, from the primary SteamOS interface.
Many comments here and on similar posts bring up only keeping Windows for games, and only then for games that require heavy anti-cheat.
Is there a reason there couldn't be non-regulation copies of games that don't do anti-cheat but are otherwise fine. Like metal baseball bats, oversized golfballs, etc. Official, but not allowed in competitions?
GabeN send me a devkit! I make Rogue Stargun VR (roguestargun.com) which should be able to run on standalone
https://mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/115538125708522123
How do I get a devkit? Both Meta and Pico have sent me free dev headsets.
I e-mailed GabeN directly this morning...
Does anyone know the price?
"Steam Machine’s pricing is comparable to a PC with similar specs" [0]
I's say max ~800€ at this point
0, https://www.theverge.com/tech/818111/valve-steam-machine-han...
they have yet to announce the price
In 2026 we should be getting Windows on a Xbox console with the Xbox skinned version of windows. This would be a direct competitor to that since most PC gamers have the majority of their game library on steam.
> the Xbox skinned version of windows
Isn't that what the ROG Xbox Ally devices have? At least that's what it looked like to me. Something like a SteamOS's gaming mode counterpart for Windows.
Yes, the xbox skinned version of windows is in the ROG Xbox Ally
And iirc it performed worse than SteamOS due to all the Windows bloat.
If MS even bothers to make another xbox this is what it will be.
> "SteamOS 3 (Arch-based)"
Holy shit, it's the Year of The Linux Desktop, for real this time. It's happening. It's actually happening.
A standard Arch Linux/KDE[0] PC for every home, in a polished, vendor-supported package. Like Apple, it's a single standard hardware/OS pair, so, FOSS' fatal hardware-support hell might well be made obsolete. The vendor is a household name corporation. There's an incredibly fortuitous (for Linux) market dynamic at this point in time, of "commoditize your complement"—the dynamic that Valve has incentives to invest massively in giving away a nice thing for free, because that does bad things to its competitors. And Steam is... the killer super-app to end all killer apps.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteamOS
This is real life!
If hype is to be believed, Omarchy is also pushing a lot of devs to Linux.
Any devs that find the visuals, keyboard driven workflow, or cult of DHH appealing enough to try Omarchy are likely already Linux users.
Linux has been a great platform for devs for a long time. This is exactly why WSL exists, and why MacOS has a native Linux container[1] tool.. because Linux was eating their lunch in this user segment.
[1]: https://github.com/apple/container
I've been using MacOS as my daily driver for 20 years exactly because it had the best mix of (what I used to say a while back), "Linux that works, and ain't ugly"
OrbStack has solved all the issues I had with running containers on macOS. It's just a wonderful piece of software that just works. (Not arguing vs container, just specifying another option)
The only thing that crock of shit is attracting is grifter bucks.
Omarchy is free.
So? That doesn't mean D14HH isn't receiving "donations" for his "work".
The body is really simple and appealing but as these are rare nowadays I wish they'd consider squeezing an optional optical drive inside or perhaps maybe some external one that would stack on top.
Aren’t external optical drives quite cheap and only require a USB connection? You could consider that instead and stack it on top.
The PC looks pretty cool in a small form factor case. And since it runs ArchBTW, you can run a bunch of other games too outside of Steam. Wondering how the pricing will be...
What's the cost? Doesn't seem we can buy yet.
It's glorious. The year has finally come. It's nice to feel excited about tech sometimes, especially when the company isn't completely horrible, and more competition! Great! Microsoft's move really, Sony and Nintendo are doing pretty okay!
W shadow drop.
Dave2D has additional info. User upgradable RAM and SSD, but not CPU.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=356rZ8IBCps
it's meant for 'high-end' gaming but doesn't come with a lan connection(?)
It is truly amazing how far Proton/Steam OS has come along. I recently installed it on some old AMD hardware I had lying around, hooked it up to my TV and everything just works - zero problems. I look forward to checking out this Steam Machine!
> Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
What a refreshing thing to hear in 2025... :D
The one with the front panel replaced by an Eink screen really looks cool https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/202...
>Valve won’t necessarily sell any of those extra panels, but says it’ll release the CAD files so you can design and 3D print your own.
"One USB-C and four USB-A ports."
I'm confused...
But will it be able to run GTA VI?
Truly the only litmus test for any gaming system released from now until 2027.
This is exciting. I can't wait to get rid of Windows altogether. I only put up with it for gaming purposes.
They haven't mentioned it anywhere, but non-upgradable CPU/GPU/RAM/SSD would be a massive deal breaker.
Also why announce it without a price?
While it's a dealbraker for me too, locking the spec is how Valve can make a stable hardware target for devs with the "Steam Deck Verified" program, which they've also announced is coming to this box. This is one of the main reasons the specs for the Deck have remained almost identical since launch as well, Valve have said as much in interviews.
I expect to see this and the Deck try to follow locked hardware revisions every few years, just like a console, to allow the verified program to work effectively.
This product is so not aimed at those of us already building our own gaming boxes, but I'm guessing more a way to tempt those who have only ever owned gaming consoles into the Steam ecosystem.
> https://www.steamdeck.com/en/verified
FWIW some early access previews note the box does have a socketed M2 SSD and what looks like upgradable RAM.
Maybe this will have better luck this time, and who knows, studios might finally care to do at Steam OS native builds.
Maybe they'll pull a Cyberpunk, and just add a "Steam Machine" setting to their Windows version when you run it in translation.
I'd prefer that. It's easier for developers, easier for me, and only harms the already-negligible market of curmudgeonly native pundits that probably don't use Steam in the first place.
Then eventually they will suffer the same fate as OS/2 "runs Windows better".
Don't build castles on kingdoms ruled by other overlords.
Valve is cooking. Their work is paving the way for an open computing ecosystem that is gonna be lit.
Sorry… expandable via microsd? They’re terribly slow and unreliable, just cattle-chute us to using ssds over usb like consoles
Does this suddenly become the best supported ARM desktop?
[off-topic rant]
Two companies, both (quasi) monopolies in their field.
Company A built its fortune by exploiting people.
Company B built its fortune by building (somewhat) decent products.
Company A developed a very advanced approach to hiring: specific questions to assess a candidate’s psychometric profile, screens to weed out bad choices, and a laser focus on the "top 0.1%".
Company B made it very public that hiring well is vital and encouraged every employee to think about it and participate. They even published an Employee Handbook years ago [0]
Today, many startups copy Company A’s playbook: crafting advanced questionnaires, trick questions, and trying to detect behavioural traits in their candidates.
No startup (that I know of [1]) has adopted Company B’s strategy.
Take your pick on who Company A is. Company B is Valve.
[0]: http://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/Valve_Handbook_LowR...
[1]: I kjnow of one that <<pretends>> to
I love Valve games and I love that they are spending their resources in areas I care about and that feel underserved by other companies, but I don't think the moral comparison is so clear cut. They were also pioneers in micro-transactions, loot crates, software distribution tax, and turning Counter-Strike skins into a speculative frenzy.
I have to admit, I never got into micro-transactions and loot craetes. I did play CS, but never cared about skins and focused on head shots - I am ignorant in this aspect.
I'm surprised they went for ARM in the desktop, but for x86 on the handheld. Does this mean the handheld will move to ARM aswell?
>Semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T
the desktop is also x86, the VR headset (Frame) is ARM
The only thing I'd like to know, if the CPU/GPU will be replaceable? The specs say "Semi-custom AMD Zen 4" and "Semi-Custom AMD RDNA3", but I don't see "soldered" anywhere, so I guess maybe they'll be switchable? If not with off-the-shelves components, maybe Valve will offer their own upgrade kits in the future?
RDNA 3 is going to hold this machine back. DLSS is far and away better, but Nvidia's apathy towards Linux has made playing on something like Bazzite a worse experience. Nvidia has little reason to keep investing in Windows gaming drivers given the AI race, so seeing DLSS 4 or something on Linux is a pipe dream.
I think this machine will be decent for most people, but it's no-one with a 3080 is going to be looking at this and thinking "this is worth it", as it's probably coming in at about $750. The question is whether it'll have power parity with whatever the next Xbox is.
I thought DLSS4 did work on Linux, and a quick glance at r/linux_gaming seems to say the same.
I agree about RDNA3 holding it back; given its specs I’m hoping its significantly cheaper than $750.
Unless AMD/Valve pull a rabbit out of a hat it'll also be missing FSR4 which needs RDNA4, and is AMD's pretty-damn-close catch up to DLSS.
Given the memory configuration it seems extremely unlikely that it's socketed. It's certainly not AM5.
You mean "16GB DDR5 + 8GB GDDR6 VRAM" or something else? I took it just as they didn't want to put VRAM next to the GPU for some reason, rather than them actually being linked somehow. Maybe I misunderstand.
Soldered, not upgradable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWUxObt1efQ&t=591s
Shame, but makes sense. Thanks for finding it out for us!
You happen to know if the same is true for the RAM? Video seems to mention soldered CPU and GPU only, I skimmed the video but didn't see it mentioned.
I'm seeing conflicting info on the RAM. Some are saying its soldered, others are saying its replaceable.
It might be because the gpu ram is soldered but the cpu ram is replaceable?
Pretty much all (non-Apple) computers in this form factor have a soldered CPU and GPU (and of course soldered VRAM), and slots for DIMMs and M.2.
Unless you made a typo here-- Apple's equivalent to this is Mac Mini, which has soldered CPU, GPU and RAM (and also the SSD as its not soldered, but it's not standard).
Yes, that was my point, Mac Mini solders components that are not soldered on most other computers of that form factor, but a socketed CPU or GPU would be extremely unusual.
> I don't see "soldered" anywhere, so I guess maybe they'll be switchable
Unfortunately that's quite a logical jump...
Yeah, I mean my comment is all speculation, guesses and opinions. Given the limited information, some jumping is required, if at least in order to ask questions :)
I mean, honestly, do you ask the same question about a PS5/Xbox? At a certain point, just build an upgradable PC. I'd equate this product more to a home console than a PC at this point
I do not, my expectations are also way lower for Sony and especially Windows (still, happy PS5 owner here). I already have a PC, thanks for asking!
Steam specifically pitches this as a console+PC so I thought asking clarifying questions about the PC part of the product made sense.
> CPU Semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T up to 4.8 GHz, 30W TDP
> GPU Semi-Custom AMD RDNA3 28CUs 2.45GHz max sustained clock, 110W TDP
> RAM 16GB DDR5 + 8GB GDDR6 VRAM
All of those seem a little low (at least judging by power usage) when compared to your average tower gaming PC build, but modern parts are pretty power efficient and given the form factor (and hopefully reasonable price) it seems like it's gonna be a pretty good device - definitely enough for most indie titles, all e-sports titles, even AA/AAA games with some upscaling/framegen, although I predict that your average UE5 slop game will wipe the floor with it. That doesn't reflect badly on the hardware, just how the devs use the engine in some cases, but at the same time being able to use it as a regular SFF PC is nice as well, actually a good reason to buy it compared to most consoles.
No external power brick. Instant buy.
Is that actually a benefit? I'd say for better cooling, it's better to put the brick outside.
I’m just not seeing the market for this. Why not build a better steam deck dock instead?
I've been looking at getting a Bee-link box to run as a TV computer and plex server. I'm definitely holding of buying until I see the pricing on this!
HDMI 2.0 is a bit of a bummer. No Dynamic HDR, VRR, or eARC.
If they can make it play Microsoft Flight Simulator then that'd be pretty enticing
I bet they decided to crash their skin market in part because too many people were exploiting the Steam Deck loophole to take the skin money out of the system.
Now people will need to give Steam real money to buy their new devices.
Really I think it was otherwise. Dropping prices mean that more transactions happen on their market place. And them selling games or hardware allows them to realise their liabilities as my understanding is that money in wallet on Steam is not yet revenue.
This is likely the push i need to fully ditch windows and go install linux on my PC. Can't wait to preorder!
When's the preorder?
I am hyped for the improved gyro controller. Gyro aiming is so good that after some time it became way better than my mouse aiming.
How much?
I thought it is very easy to burn and SD card. Since when can you use it as storage expansion?
These links open the Steam app on my phone and crash. :(
Forcing the use of the steam app for 2FA is such an ass move. Keeping this as a reminder of Valve still being a corporation with interests that can shift to the worst in a single day.
I had to install the app to try and work around a problem with Steam, and then had the same problems just browsing. You can probably disable that behavior, but I ended up just uninstalling the app entirely.
The support experience was so bad that I got really soured on Valve, and can't even get excited for these announcements now.
If I uninstall the app, I’m unable to login to Steam due to 2FA.
Opening them in a private tab circumvents that behavior (at least for me)
For this to truly become a console replacement, Steam needs to mint agreements with Netflix, Spotify and Discord.
Netflix and Spotify could live as a 'game' application in the store. Spotify also is fairly easy to plug into Steam's overlay music control (currently via Decky plugins).
Discord just needs integration with the Steam Friend List. I know Valve wants Steam Friends to compete with Discord, but that ship has sailed every since 2020 (and frankly, the entire decade before that when they let it languish).
This project is a gaming console dream.
Compact and looks nice, no qualms about displaying it in the living room, with customizable front panels.
Optimized to just barely hit 4K 60 fps as cheaply as possible.
Controllers designed to avoid stick drift, easy to charge, and featuring low-latency wireless connections.
Stream from a Steam Machine to a Steam Deck or a Steam Frame if you have one; the Steam Machine enhances your other purchases further.
Instantly supports everyone's libraries of dozens, if not hundreds, of games acquired over the years.
And you can just use it as a desktop computer if you like?
Give me the Gabecube!
> HDMI 2.0
The HDMI Forum yet again rearing it's ugly head by continuing to block GPU manufacturers from implementing HDMI 2.1 in the Open Source drivers
Yup. This really needs to be fixed. There have been on-going bug reports on it for years. AMD just needs to move the hdmi 2.1 stuff behind a firmware binary blob already like NVIDIA does. It's so annoying not having full quality HDMI. It's the only think keeping me from using Linux on my current gaming PC that is hooked exclusively up to my TV... Either that or TV's need to start having Display Port.
This is a big miss for me. I can’t use my TVs 120Hz VRR mode without HDMI 2.1.
I realize the Xbox Series X is beleaguered at this point, but apart from playing games that are on Steam but not Xbox, I can’t see why I would prefer the Steam Machine.
"Luckily," the hardware won't allow for 4k@120Hz on visually cutting edge games anyway.
Is this the end of Windows for gaming?
I don't think there is an end to Windows gaming. It's the de-facto standard PC gaming platform. If there is a real end to its reign, it will be in decades, as in, at least 20 years.
I guess right now the GPU is too weak. And ofc even if the hardware steps up, there are always root-kit games gatekeeping :(
The beginning of the end.
Oh, c'mon. I've been waiting for that machine for years. So much that I bought the Steam Deck out of frustration b/c it was so close.
Two weeks ago I got tired and built a mini-ATX gaming PC with a RTX 5080.
Way to go Steam nonetheless. I can get 100% behind a Windows-less gaming future. I may even buy this for a 2nd screen or for the kids.
I mean the specs seem okay but at least your computer will out-perform it. Just install steamOS: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/65B4-2AA3-5F37-42...
> There's an LED strip, y'all!
I've never seen marketing embrace southern culture like this.
I love it, y'all!
I just need more RAM. 16GB is unfortunately not enough for me.
With some luck it would be easy to upgrade ourselves.
Wonder if there is a good remote with voice input to use for YouTube and Kodi so I can replace my shield TV.
I haven't had any problems with my shield since the update that killed it about 3 years ago.
Or maybe I've just gotten used to it?
Are you having issues with yours?
My Shield is 7 or 8 years old at this point and still going strong. Was very much hoping for something like this from Steam just in case something were to happen to it.
What on earth is this abomination of a website? My locale is Greek and I'm presented with an auto-translated page in which most sentences don't make any sense. And I don't think it's AI slop, it's too bad to be even that. It feels more like google translate from a decade ago, translating everything word by word. FFS, go to fiverr and hire an actual human that knows how to translate stuff.
Oh, and of course you're presenting greek text, as awful as it is, but didn't think to check if the font you're using supports greek at all.
I'm sure it's the same for lots of other languages. sigh
i18n is hard.
Been waiting for this
Video games were the only reason for me to use Windows, now that Steam solved this problem no reason to look back anymore. I am also not big fan of multi-player games, so not being able to play games with anti-cheat system buried deep into their binaries isn't an issue.
When Steam Pass?
not everybody has to be Apple, but the ugliness of this page (and the others) is astounding
What's ugly on the page? I think it's perfectly fine, you can find all the informations etc.
I'm still waiting for Steam Deck 2! Come on!
>HDMI 2.0
So no 4K 120 Hz ?
Can I use it as a jellyfin server?
Can I use it as a jellyfin client? Does that... make sense?
I bought a new tv (samsung s90d) and I haven't found have a great way to watch my jellyfin media. This tv doesn't have a jellyfin client in the samsung app store.
I feel like I'm being stupid here, would love some suggestions :P I've got a local jellyfin server running on a home server in the basement.
yeah it's just a Linux x86 desktop (Arch Linux) -- although, you'd likely want to make sure Jellyfin's hardware acceleration works well with AMD APU (last time I checked the AMD was under experimental)
i am ditching my ps5 for this, go valve!
it's meant for gaming and doesn't come with a LAN connection. sad lol.
I wonder if AMD have bothered finishing the gfx drivers for this before release.
"Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?"
It might be PR speak ... but for me it is working.
Will it be able to play AAA games with shitty DRM such as Battlefield 6?
Not being able to play these huge titles on Linux really sucks!
Look at it this way: Not having to play those money suckers leaves you more time for all the awesome indies out there!
It is not a DRM problem, you can run many EA games on Linux with no problems, it is an anti cheat problem, which can not be solved by Valve, it has to be done by EA.
Correct but the customer doesn't care whose fault it is, they just want to play the latest games.
To the HL3 faithful, this is your reminder that
NOTHING
EVER
HAPPENS
This is the speculated-about gap in the Steam store events, then?
One more nail in the coffin of the xbox hardware business. Ouch.
Unless MS opens up Xboxes for actual gamers (which won't happen). Pity, as Series X is very capable
I really hope that we'll be able to put Windows on this.
The landing page says "Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?" so I'm assuming you'll be able to do whatever you want with it. Similar to the Steam Deck.
I hope we can, too. I really hope we don't.
"Over six times the horsepower of Steam Deck" ≈ RTX 3060 Laptop?
Why does Steam/Valve care so much about Linux? I know as devs we all would prefer to use Linux/Unix. But developer experience isn’t a good business justification.
It's because Valve's entire business model is currently reliant on Microsoft not being emboldened to try and lock down software downloads to only occur through the Microsoft Store.
15 or so years ago, Microsoft started making moves in that direction and Valve immediately started trying to build and sell Linux based gaming machines in order to try and protect themselves somewhat from Microsoft. Those Linux gaming machines (Steam Machines 1.0) were a massive failure because they were expensive, and had very very limited game support.
Valve then spent around a decade improving Wine, building Proton, and designing the SteamDeck, which was a great success for them and is now making lots of people take Linux seriously for gaming. Now they're moving up the value chain and trying to make Linux the go-to place for PC gaming.
They've still got a big battle ahead of them, but already Linux users are around 4% of active Steam users, and the Linux experience is rapidly improving. Meanwhile, Microsoft seems to be bleeding goodwill, and is actively pissing off a huge amount of their Windows audience while simultaneously giving up on Xbox, so this is really perfect timing for Valve now.
>I know as devs we all would prefer to use Linux/Unix.
That's not true. In the 2025 SO survey, both Windows is the most used OS for developers, for both professional and for personal use.
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-operating-...
You can basically tailor the OS specifically for the device and remove unneeded bloat. Also the threat of Microsoft and Windows as mentioned by other users. The introduction of the Microsoft Store with Windows 8 basically kicked off this whole move for Valve. While it took over a decade of work, its paying great dividends now.
The business justification is called commoditizing your complement. https://gwern.net/complement is a good article about it.
Probably to keep MS from locking down gaming on Windows and cutting out Valve as distributor.
Add to that, Windows isn't usable on 10ftUI or really anything that is not fully-controlled (think ATMs) or desktop with kb/m.
Probably because Steam doesn't want to sell an Xbox and Microsoft won't license Windows to be rebranded.
For starters, they can't really customize Windows for the devices they release.
why wouldn't you use linux when you are shipping your own, custom, purpose-built device?
They don't want Microsoft to be able to use its control of the OS to push them out. It's not the Valve needs to control the OS, it's that they don't want a company that views them as a competitor to have said control. Linux ensures that they have protection from that.