PC Gaming

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😀

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.

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It's objectively out of date.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At some point we do need to just move the fuck on and accept hardware is out of date.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 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.

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.

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.

54% of all steam users have 16GB RAM or less. 66% has 8GB VRAM or less. 80% of players have 8core CPU or less. 70% of people have a CPU with a 2.3 Ghz to 2.69 Ghz core or less.

70% is not so hard to beat.

E8400 for the win! Q6600 is soo out!

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.

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.

This thing has 1/6th the ongoing utility cost of a spec’d out gaming pc (assuming 850w psu and something like 4090 and 7900x3d). Granted it’s not much to run a pc like that, like 15-20 a month, but running this thing will cost like $2-3 at most. Its power supply is 43% smaller than a ps5s.

Not gonna be the deciding factor for most people but something to consider. Does 4k120 really matter vs 4k60? Do you really need to turn every slider to ultra? In a world that is boiling with energy costs that are ever increasing?

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)

Exactly. The price needs to be roughly on par with consoles. A bit higher due to massively the reduced cost of games on PC, maybe.

I'd reckon anything above $700€ makes this whole thing dead in the water.

SteamOS in desktop mode is still pretty great for productivity, im pretty sure you can set it to automatically boot into desktop mode too.