If anyone knows this is steam. I belive them
Why use the word “claims”? They have the Valve Hardware survey to prove the statement.
itt gamers act like anything that doesn’t do ray tracing is literally a commodore 64.
yall got some spoiled child ass ideas about hardware longevity, im over here on a 3gb 960 running most things just fine on lowered settings.
I remember playing a game, I think it was either Spiderman or Control with Ray Tracing on and I was like “wow, these are amazing!” Then I realized I didn’t actually turn it on. My dumb ass can’t tell the difference.
Exactly. One of the benefits of patient gaming (shoutout to !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works) is I don’t need top of the line hardware to enjoy my hobby. I’m sure the GabeCube will run multi-year old games very well.
Between working >40 hours a week and raising a kid I only really care if the game I spent 2 hours a week on is going to run and look good enough. If I have to play on high instead of ultra I’m not gonna have a meltdown.
People in this thread may be hardcore and spend a lot on their game consoles, but Valve’s statement is probably accurate, they’ve got the most data on computer hardware usage.
While people are a bit over the top. A 960 is a decade old and 3gigs literally wouldn’t be able to turn on with a large number of games released this year even on the lowest settings.
It’s objectively out of date. Hell lanythjng ess then 6 gigs frequently crashes or flat out refuses for the most part.
Your literal hard cut off is basically this year with unreal 5. Ue4 games, most proprietary engines like decima, frostbyte or dandelion all will do fine at 3gigs of vram. But they are last targeting last gen consoles as their low end. So your low end is looking back around 6-8 years.
2025 has been almost exclusively full of games that are finally dropping support entirely for that standard and the new standard is 6-8 gigs of vram minimums and 16-24 gigs of available ram not counting system utilization.
Going forward if you don’t have a 6gig card and 16 gigs of ram. You functionally don’t have a computer that can do new high end games. And fuck that’s not even a hard ask. We NEED to move the fuck on from 3gig cards and 8gigs of ram.
Hell a few games are even pushing for 8gig vram/20gig ram as the minimum. But I doubt that’s going to catch on.
Iv also come across a few Chinese games that flat out won’t install if you have a spinning hard drive in your system at all full stop. Not that you can’t install to one, it flat out won’t let you install it to any drive.
At some point we do need to just move the fuck on and accept hardware is out of date. And a full ten fucking years. Is a pretty damn good arbitrary line. Gaming is a very specific work load and it’s getting noticeable how problematic it is in multiplayer games between having allies with shit computers and good ones.
Having 10+ min wait times after your queue cause a random is working off a low end PC and a spinning drive to start a dungeon in an mmo. Is fucked.
I’m still chugging along with a 1070 Ti. Then again, I don’t play many top-of-the-line AAA titles these days. For example, I know Doom Eternal and Dark Ages won’t run on this card unless I mess around with tweaking ini files or something, but I wouldn’t bother.
not to mention the joy of emulation, which older hardware does very well these days
Do you blame them? So many games these days force ray tracing. If your card can’t do that very well, then that game runs like crap.
What games? the overpriced crap pushed by big companies, that massively fails on using UE5, that do look worse than 10yo games with worse performance? Sure popular, but I’d be happy when they fails.
Fuck ea, ubi, actiblizz and all their copy-paste year to year shit!
Indies, too. Not just big publishers/developers using UE5.
Please do tell which games force ray tracing?
Alan Wake 2, Indiana Jones, Doom TDA, Stalker 2 all have no fallback lighting option and won’t work on PCs less capable than a Series S or Nintendo Switch 2.
Which is totally fine. Not every game has to support older hardware. Games are allowed to use “newer” tech.
Worth noting that I played Indy at 1600p/60 on an RTX 2080, which is a card from 2018 that I bought used for 200 bucks two years ago. This card can still run every single game out there and most of them extremely well, despite only having 8 GB of VRAM.
The whole debate is way overblown. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t games that could run a whole lot better, but overall, PC gamers with old hardware are still eating good.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, The Last Caretaker, Squad, anything using UE5 and Lumen.
Oblivion remastered too. Used a mod to turn off ray tracing outdoors only to make it playable on a 9070 xt. Frame rate still dropped to 20 fps if it rained. Never figured that one out. Gave up after one playthrough. It’s embarassing how many bugged quests there still are.
When I was a child and first saw a 3d game, I imagined the lighting to be done by ray-tracing (without the actual name of it, of course).
Until then, I only knew 2d games with no lighting mechanics and just a bunch of pixels for sprites.Some modern games look like absolute dirty brown water trash when you lower the settings a ton
That’s HROT on max settings and it’s fucking amazing!
Yeah when it’s done well and part of the aesthetic, it’s different.
Labyrinth of the Demon King is another one that comes to mind.
granted but i feel like the expectation there ought to be on the dev to not rely on resource intensive post processing gimmicks to make their game not look like trash
True. But it doesn’t change the fact that it is still quite crap for a brand new gaming pc/console
Depends on the price point. Obviously, it’s not going to be competitive with a $2K gaming rig. But if the price is right, I might get GabeCubes for my kiddos as their first “desktop” computers. They should run CachyOS flawlessly, since it’s also Arch based, so it will work great as a desktop computer and a gaming rig.
My midrange computer from 3 years ago should outperform it, I would hope. If not, then it’ll be priced out from what I’d consider buying.
I’m sure it does, considering even my old busted laptop has hit the Steam hardware survey before, but it’s not one of my primary gaming PCs.
Another way of saying this is Steam Machine is slower than about 44 million gaming PCs (30% x 147 MAU, a very conservative number since that’s monthly and number of users instead of number of computers).
The fact that its GPU is slower than the 5 year old PS5’s, and it only has 8GB VRAM, makes me question Steam Machine’s longevity. And it apparently can’t do FSR4 cause it’s RDNA3.
It needs to be cheap.
I’m rocking a 2060 with an astounding 6GB VRAM… And the only game that gave me trouble so far is Clair Obscur. I had to close everything else, and use a mod to optimize the graphics.
I’ll blame the shitty Nvidia drivers for Linux though, cause there is no shared RAM, unlike on Windows. 8GB with an AMD card should be fine -if a bit limiting- for a generation, except for high end AAA gaming I guess.
I just replaced that exact card in my machine last week in preparation for dual booting Linux for the first time (I needed a new NVME as a Linux drive and figured I’d future-proof my setup at the same time with an RX 9070 XT for the native AMD drivers), and the only games that I hadn’t been able to run on medium-high settings had been unoptimized games, bad ports, and early access stuff like Monster Hunter: Wilds and Cities Skylines 2.
IMO 8 gigs is plenty for the average person, all things considered.
Lol with multiple gaming PCs, you are far far removed from the target consumer. Im pretty sure it will be cheap. Unlike PC hardware manufacturers they can do what the console companies do and price at/below cost and make it up in game sales.
It has to be $400 or $500. If they, Valve, really think they’re sitting on a $800 or even a $1,000 machine then they’re lying to themselves.
I saw a really good video from someone who seemed very well-informed do a bill of materials analysis and come to the conclusion that it will be priced between $449 and $599 depending on how aggressive Valve wants to be, with the caveat that the current tariffs and RAM pricing could throw that off. The BOM for it totaled $425, from what I recall. It seemed like quite a bit better analysis than the wild guesses some other people have been throwing out, like $1200, etc.
Here, I found it in my history - someone here on Lemmy had recommended it to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJI3qTb2ze8
I just ordered thebparts for a ~$900 gaming pc that boils down to Ryzen 7500F and Radeon 7600. I’ll believe “priced like a PC” to mean that.
It’ll be a mistake if they just put the tag of 500 dollars on the steam store.
It’ll be much much better if they put a fake price like, 1500 dollars but it’s discounted to 500.
People are dumb enough to fall for that, lol
It needs to be cheap.
However, when comparing to the power of locked up device such as ps5, it never hurts reminds that the supposed GPU processing power of a ps5 doesn’t come for free… even if you’ve fully paid your console. Aside for demos or jailbreaked devices (piracy on console) the only way to run graphics at full potential on the locked ps5 is paying full AAA (which now is settling around 80$/€) for EACH product. There are alternatives in the spending (ie: the Netflix alike from Sony’s store)… but those are only options that Sony allow you to (you can’t run weekly free games from EGS, itch.io… or even web browser games!).
Whatever power you pay for any generic PC potentially cover you in any way: you can play arcade vector games as Asteroid at 4k (or even teorical 32K when the hardware will exists).
The difference Valve could make is showing the topical console gamer customer an easy to use access to it: once they’ll see the light… things may go different also for console-only customers (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo wouldn’t want to lose more customers to Valve’s better deal)
Yes, but mostly because most of the gaming PCs in Steam’s hardware survey are not really gaming PCs but just some piss poor spec laptops that can still run old games. Just having a dedicated GPU puts it in the top half.
The GPU in this is in the 7600 RX range of things. It’s marketed as a 1080p card. Can certainly hit 4K on older titles, and output 4K with upscaling.
Don’t expect miracles from it. It’s PS5 level hardware. But that’s good enough for most of us.
I get your point, but since people claim Steam is a monopoly, then by that logic they have a large swath of data on what counts as a gaming machine to the user base.
I get its not going to compete with a watercooled watt sucker, but that doesn’t seem to be the majority.
As a person that has gamed since 1983: Up until recently I was gaming on a 2013 dell mobo converted to a Core V21 case (that’s a lot of rewiring conversion --thanks dell), and using a CAD GPU.
Then work bought us new laptops with RTX cards. So graphics have improved for me.
Both of those are not hardcore gaming PCs, and this steam machine will probably outperform them.
My point being these were valid systems for gaming by a gamer. Not everyone needs an F1 car to enjoy the ride to work😀
Agreed, the best selling dedicated gaming system of the last few years is the Switch, which has less power than many phones.
It’s PS5 level hardware that is still gonna have lower performance than a PS5 because it has too little VRAM, but hopefully we get PS5 level optimization for the hardware and for linux if it’s successful enough.
12GB seems to be the sweet spot for VRAM, but I suspect the real issue is PC devs not really giving a fuck how hit runs on less than their dev kit.
But then a lot of PC gamers seem to think a game should always run at ultra, no matter how good their rig is.
And I will die on this hill: raytracing has been a colossal waste of everybody’s time and money.
They need to price this properly and all will be fine.
Looks like many do forgot, this is mid-cheap intended machine, not top tier tech race.
Still some depends on price, but I’m hyped for 500€ upgrade of whole 6yo rig, all in one, well build (not like most supermarket prebuild crap). I see flaws in Cube, may need to spend some 100€ extra for missing things (sdd to usb adapters, audio extractor from hdmi to 3.5jacks, extra sdcard for less intense data), still hyped.
Like this is cheap family car talks, Koenigsegg is 2 links to the left.
+1 for Koenigsegg. always have been some of the coolest cars around.
I rarely play the latest games, so that machine would be a good upgrade for me. Especially with the ability to load a different OS that I could use for both productivity and gaming.
Bump it to a bigger SSD and 64GB of RAM and I’ll be happy with it.
I believe I saw that both were user upgradeable in YouTube videos, though I am curious what options they will have for purchase.
if you can find any RAM at a decent price at all
Not an issue limited to the Steam Machine, but yeah…
Well, if you are adding my 15yo Core2Quad in the percentage, of course those numbers come easy.
E8400 for the win! Q6600 is soo out!
There’s also a Q8400 btw.
That’s what is lying around now the the motherboard is not working.
“Outperforms 70% of Gaming PCs” is the sort of statistic you’d only quote if you thought it sounded more impressive than it actually was, and it already doesn’t sound impressive.
(edit: genuinely surprised how controversial a statement that turned out to be?)
It doesn’t read to me like they think it’s impressive. It reads to me like they they are clarifying their market.
A challenge will be how many laptop PC users who game on it because that’s all they have/can afford can be converted into steam machine buyers.
They should just sell at a loss the steam games bought will make up for it. Every consol does that, why not this mini pc.
Because since it’s unlocked hardware, corporations would buy them all as workstations, and they’d never buy any games. At the end of the day, corporations ruin everything.
That’s just waiting corporate and other entity buying powerful PC for cheap. And Valve won’t get any game sales from it.
Just like PS3 being used as supercomputer.
That doesn’t make any sense to me.
Lets waste so much manpower, hours of labor, years of development and vice versa so that we can potentially taint the goodwill of fans by taking loss after loss and relying on them buying games they’ll never play on Steam.
Consoles are a bit more careful than this.
Every console does that and it’s kinda anti-competitive behavior isn’t it?
Definitely makes it harder for new companies to release enticing hardware, so i’d say so…
So the engineer state that it can run ‘all games of the market’. Okay, cool, but at what kind of settings?
Like, it undermines the expectations of what one has when it comes to approaching the idea of having a PC to run games they want to see run flawlessly. I have been there before where I was not satisfied running games at Medium, hell, I wasn’t satisfied when I ran some games at even High. My targeted goal of building a machine, is if it can run at least 90% of games that I throw at it, with optimum performance. Suffice to say, I think I’ve achieved that.
If someone gets a Steam Machine and find that it cannot run that particular game someone buys the Steam Machine for at their preference, you’re going to see refunds flying around.
The Steam Machine development should’ve never went in with the concept of “just run games”, they should’ve went in with the concept of “run games and run them well”.
I have some of the same concerns with the Frame. It is a stabdalone headset, but also just runs Steam games; it’s not its own ecosystem like a Quest which has different versions for the headset vs what you stream from PC. But I haven’t seen much hands-on stuff other than a physical hardware breakdown; never anything running on it.
Like, how well would it run Half-Life Alyx vs how well it might run something like Gorn? How is it gonna handle informing users what games would actually run well in standalone vs PCVR streaming?
They are expanding their “steam deck verified” system to cover the Steam Machine and Steam Frame. I have to assume that they will attempt to make that distinction, because I agree, there should be a Steam Frame Platinum (for streaming) and Steam Frame Silver (for on device) or something.
I do hope they take this into account.
I think the goal was 4K at 60 fps, but likely varying level of “detail” like you can probably do it with lower detailed settings rather than ultra or epic or what-have-you.
Also while employing FSR3, which requires cooperation from the game.
Just keep in mind that those targets are with FSR.
That’s great info, I had to read up on it
FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) is an open-source technology from AMD that improves gaming performance by rendering games at a lower resolution and then upscaling the image to a higher resolution, with versions also including frame generation to increase frame rates.
8 GB of VRAM and 16 GB of RAM … those are the specs of my almost 15 years old legacy machine. I doubt that the Steam Machine outperforms anything made in the last 5-10 years.
These figures just haven‘t gone up all that much over the last decade. Sure, you can get 128GB of RAM and 24GB of VRAM if you‘re willing to pay for it. But if you don‘t want to spend upwards of $5000 for your PC and you‘re maybe not that experienced, you might just look for a gaming rig from a vendor you‘ve heard of before and get 16GB RAM and 8GB VRAM even in 2025 with current-gen hardware.
I agree, I think it’s all about affordability and ease of use. If they can sell them for a nice price (somewhere around the price of a PS5 pro) and they’re easy to use I don’t see a reason why they wouldn’t sell. Hell, I might even buy one myself. I have a very old gaming pc (close to 10 years old now) and even though I’ve replaced some parts over the years (ram, GPU, storage), the core of it is still very outdated and it might almost be cheaper to switch to something like this then to upgrade my existing pc.
I’m always amazed how much you get taxed for prebuilts. This thing is at least $1k more than what I spent (with a similar config), and the CPU is still worse than the one I got lol.
Your own time to research, build, debug, service, and troubleshoot your own build is a tax as well.
Sure, doesn’t really take that long to research and build it though, and in my experience if you get a prebuilt, most people aren’t gonna like get it serviced or troubleshoot it with CS unless there’s something seriously wrong with it. They’ll likely just live with minor annoyances.
The only significant benefit IMO is if you really end up needing to RMA something (like if the motherboard is shot), you can just RMA the entire thing instead of figuring out which part is messed up. However, I’ve had mixed experiences RMAing laptops before, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just as bad for desktops.
It’s definitely not worth $1k+ IMO. If I spent $1k more, I could’ve gotten a 5090.
Are we looking at the same link? The one I see is listed for $1099, so I’m not sure how you managed to spend $1k less.
Though anything with an Intel Ultra CPU should go right in the garbage, but that’s a different issue.
It’s configurable. The base model is $1k. Upgrading it goes upwards of $3k (dunno what the max is).
I doubt that the Steam Machine outperforms anything made in the last 5-10 years.
It’s all about the price… and the very recent years weren’t exactly kind in relation for price per performance
Must be nice to have such awesome 15yo machine, as my 6yo still have only 4gb vram (1650s).
If You had enough coins to buy top top tier 2010 rig with 8gb vram back then, You surely had much to upgrade it in 2015, 2020, and also did nice 5090 upgrade this year too! Who cares single 5090rtx do cost 4-6x than whole Gabecube is expected to cost.
Having industry market is awesome, You can find something ultra powered for Yourself, and I can do find some budget for myself too.
Ngl, I’m slightly jealous You’re in the top 30%, even top of the top of it these 30%, that article is NOT about.
Yeah, I admit, it was quite expensive. I never updated one single bit of it, except switching to a 1080 one or two years after buying it, though.
Do you think RAM is the only thing that factors into performance?..
