Join the list any time before June 25th at 10 a.m. PT. On that date, the list will be closed and randomized, and you will receive an email with your results shortly after.
All this development time and they cant get unified memory with DRAM VRAM is kinda underwhelming.
Am I the only one that has a computer hooked up to their tv?
8 GB VRAM :(
16 GB RAM :(
8 GB VRAM in the big 26 is a yikes from me.
Steam Deck works well and has 16GB of unified RAM with only 1GB automatically assigned to VRAM.
Having 8GB dedicated should be a huge improvement.
This machine is designed to be played on a 4k TV. Upscaling may help, but it will hard limit the machine in the future.
Just because you connect to a 4K TV doesn’t mean is has to play in 4K.
I’ve connected my Steam Deck to my 8K TV.
Well, at least we now know you have more dollars than sense.
That’s been true for years now! 😉
Why? 4k is already just past the human vision resolution. Anything denser is just masturbation.
Well, not everyone posting here is human.
Yea, a lot of people don’t realise, how stupid 8K TVs are.
4K does make a lot of sense in many cases, especially if you set up your TV for an optimal „cinematic“ viewing distance (roughly 2-2.5m for a 65“ TV, for example) allowing it to fill roughly 30-40° of your field of view, as recommended by the SMPTE.
At 30-40° our eyes have about the resolution of 3-4K (or, technically, a bit less than 100 pixels per degree in greyscale, even less in colour).Meaning, you would need a screen that fills more than 40° of your FOV for there to be a meaningful difference between 4K and 8K. That would translate to a distance of less than 2m to the 65“ TV in the previous example. More like 1m if you want to get the most out of the 8K. That’s about the FOV you get in an IMAX theatre. I don’t think very many people would set up their home TV like that, and unless you are, 8K is just throwing money out of the window.
Isn’t Steam Deck pretty much 720p? That’s a whole different kind of ask than a machine you plug into a TV - many of which will want 4k resolution. VRAM requirements really tend to balloon with resolution.
Native on the Deck is 1280 x 800. Slightly more than 720p, but not by much!
For anyone who wants the numbers: 720p has only 90% of the pixels as the steam deck, assuming equivalent area.
It’s also 6 inches across. I don’t think my graphics card alone could fit in a 6 inch cube, let alone my full PC.
6 inches is objectively a decent size, they should be proud.
It’s definitely a shower, not a grower.
Aw, those are cute and fun, too.
But it’s not a problem in Linux: https://www.techpowerup.com/348178/valve-engineer-improves-linux-memory-management-for-gpus-with-8-gb-vram-or-less
deleted by creator
I mean, it’s still a problem, just less of one. Still gonna be an issue with high texture games that cache to VRAM. But this looks to be a 1080p machine, so I suppose that wouldn’t be too big a deal here, unless the textures aren’t scaled for the resolution (some games do that these days, but I don’t know if it’s common).
AI pushed gaming 10 years back
As did Covid.
I’m not going to post what I almost did, but I’ll just say that I’m mad.
Wait til you hear about all the fucked up shit that isn’t related to video games and is actually consequential
You’re probably right…
As an optimist, I really hope this hardware crunch leads to a greater focus on polish and optimization. I feel like a lot of development studios have let specs inflate to cover being unwilling to focus on building their games efficiently. It can feel crazy when you start comparing specs on games from different studios.
As a realist, I imagine we’re just going to have a lot more cloud gaming services and that may just end up being the norm. I’m still waiting for a AAA publisher to start releasing their games exclusively to cloud platforms, probably first as a pre-release or early access bonus of some sort. I have my money on Ubisoft as the first big one if they manage to keep it together as a company.
As an anarchist, I’ve been looking into selling all my electronics and investing in some farmland.
The wife and I keep tossing around the idea of buying some land and simplifying/becoming semi-sustainable. Unfortunately, even bareland is a premium in the areas we are looking
From experience, if you do, take a very long look at your neighbors. I almost ended up with what I now realize was suspiciously cheap land down the street from a cockfighting operation.
As a realist, I don’t see any way cloud gaming services are an option that customers en masse will be willing to pay what the providers have to charge to make a profit. Stadia was not that long ago, and Google couldn’t make it work under what had to be a softball toss for that business model.
Don’t forget the latency. I can barely tolerate streaming between my PC and Deck witg Sunlight/Moonlight.
There’s a lot of companies thinking about it that are big enough that they don’t have to profit immediately. I think they’re mostly waiting to see Geforce Now raise prices and enshittify more. My prediction is we’ll have the various datacenter providers giving more deals on compute to make use of wasted cycles, maybe leading to various services renting that compute and dynamically tuning quality based on current cost. I.e., high performance gaming during off-peak hours and degraded performance during AI peak hours. Time limits will definitely become more frustrating.
Google might jump back in then if they didn’t have to run the service. For them, I think they exited because they established that they’d have to actually support the product if they wanted it to grow and there is nothing they hate more. Part of me feels like the dystopian future we’re heading to may be publisher based subscription passes similar to xbox game pass but more focused and providing drastically less value.
I think I’m out though, I don’t have to buy a battlepass for the chickens and if support ends I get to make curry.
Fellow anarchist here, I’ve been accumulating used hardware that’s on the older side to Frankenstein together a homelab/cluster, brush up on self-hosting foss, and increase my personal tech sovereignty.
Man, I feel ya there, I think I have Lenovo’s entire 2015 enterprise portfolio. There’s a channel called Hardware Haven on youtube and I realize I may have gone too far as whenever there’s a new video on old tech released it’s for something I already have in my basement.
AI did a number to gaming, but truthfully, gaming technology was probably about to stand still anyway. Barely any studios can afford to make a game that’s so technologically advanced that it pushes our current hardware to its limits.
Oh please, plenty of games push my top tier hardware to its limits!
It’s just that they do it by not bothering to optimize their software.
The handful of companies that can afford to spend $100M+? Sure. There are only so many of those, and plenty of them go bankrupt after spending that much.
And the GPU makers were already approaching a plateau around the first RTX cards.
Node shrinks have dried up. Games got use to those handing them major leaps.
Gaming isn‘t standing still though, it‘s reverting. You can‘t get the same hardware you got 5 years ago for the same price anymore. Hardware ALWAYS got cheaper until recently. This is truly unprecedented.
Would be nice if it pushed back 20 years before steam become so popular
Rough timing. My entire gaming PC cost less than this and is much more powerful, judging by the specs. But I built it out with 32 GB RAM and a few terrabytes of SSDs and NVMe before the current silicon panic, and just upgraded the GPU last year before the prices increased.
I don’t see how there was any way of winning for Valve on this with the current market. It’s not worth the cost, but there’s also likely no way they could make it cheaper.
It’s not worth the cost.
For those of us with already existing hardware, but Gamer’sNexus showed that a system built today with comparable specs costs about the same.
If you’re building a system today you’re staring down the exact same Sam Altman shaped wall that Valve is.
I literally spec’d out a much more powerful system in another comment here for around $950.
It’s only equivalent if you absolutely need a micro/mini PC.
Apparently they were originally intending for it to be around the $750-800 range for the base model.
You do also have to factor in that it’s about a 6 inch cube, though, so it’s no surprise that the specs are underpowered.
but there’s also likely no way they could make it cheaper.
Valve ceo owns an entire fleet of mega yachts, i’m sure there’s a lot of room to cut profits there and make their products cheaper
How long ago did you buy that? Because things have changed.
Yeah, I’m fully aware. Did I not say I built it out before the current silicon panic?
The build was rolling as I caught sales and I didn’t get all the parts at once. It was up and running from parts bought late 2022 and 2023, but I upgraded my RAM from 16 GB (2x8) to 32 GB (4x8) in 2024, and upgraded my GPU in 2025 (RX 6700XT to RX 9070). The additional SSDs and NVMe were bought between 2023 and 2024 as well (system currently has 4x 1 TB SSD, and a 1 TB NVMe).
There is a way to make it cheaper, but it involves multiple homicide so I don’t think it’s going to happen.
It will most likely sell out constantly for the next year, they will be fine.
Yep, easily. Valve hardware isn’t subsidized by the manufacturer like traditional consoles, so they make money even if not a whole lot of them are sold.
Just my GPU cost that much 3-4 years ago, it’s overkill now but I got it for VR and sold my VR stuff after 2 years. That for an entire system could work depending on performance. I’m betting new consoles would be around the same price if they were released this year.
I got lucky I think. Bought two Sapphire Pulse RX 9070s last year for myself and my wife’s rig, close to or below MSRP. Mine was $600, wife’s was $540. We had 6700XTs previously, only reason we upgraded was because I was having issues with performance on E33. We plan to pick up Solasta II when it drops which is also UE5, and had some existing games with a bit of performance drop (like 40k: Rogue Trader) so decided the upgrade was warranted.
We’re both gaming on Linux, so the performance and stability with AMD was preferred, no question.
yeah I’m fine with my DDR 4 32 gig laptop. I bought it before I became homeless and the thing is good for what I need.
I’m still on 32 GB DDR4 as well, running a Ryzen 5600x and RX 9070 GPU. I was planning to potentially upgrade to a new mobo/CPU/RAM this year or next year, but I just have no reason to upgrade now, between the prices and the fact that I’ve had no issues even with recent UE5 games like Expedition 33 at 1440p/UW and in some cases up to 4k resolutions for slightly older stuff. It runs everything just fine for my purposes, and the whole system is really power efficient for the performance, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it hit above 350w total power.
Gamersnexus shows a comparison with the Steam Machine getting 93 fps on Resident Evil 4 remake at 1080p with “priorize graphics” setting, while my GPU (Sapphire Pulse 9070) hits 275 fps on the same settings. Can’t complain.
Back when the Steam Machine was first announced, I liked the idea, but wanted something cheaper (I assumed $650 - $800) so I got a $375 off-brand mini gaming PC for the living room with a Ryzen 8745HS (780M iGPU, roughly 2x SD compared to 3x for SM), 512GB SSD and 16GB of DDR.
The model I bought is not available now, but similar specs are going for close to $600, so the price is still roughly proportional. The machine I got cut every corner possible, and for example, I never could get Bluetooth to work reliably with my controllers and ended up getting $20 8bitdo dongles for each controller.
The SM, on the other hand, is a more refined hardware and OS combination where everything just works and that Valve stands behind, and where games will be tweaked and certified for that specific hardware. I am enjoying my mini PC, but I’ve put a lot of time into customizing and troubleshooting to end up with games that still stutter at 4K. For anyone who just wants to game instead of tinkering, SM is likely worth the current price.
First - THANK YOU for the heads up! I was hoping when I got the dBrand Companion Cube notification just after midnight.
https://dbrand.com/shop/limited-edition/companion-cube
Second - Anyone notice the controller bundles save you $20 over buying the controller individually? Not so sad my controller reservation is AWOL.
Woah 830 comments, somebody should monetize that engangement
This item is not available for purchase in your region
I kinda expected that… same thing with the steamdeck, only way to get one is to go through a scalper
Oh well, I got 2 PCs already way more powerful than this…hard pass.
The sad part is that Valve really did price all the parts for pretty much as low as they could go:
It’s a brutal time to be releasing hardware like this.
GPU prices, RAM, SSDs, all inflated through the roof.
This should have been the price of a PS5 Pro, with the performance of a PS5 and it’s not even that.
I still want the Frame, but only because my OG Rift died a couple of months back. I really don’t want to have to go crawling back to Meta for a Quest 3 when I see the price of the Frame, but I’m not optimistic. They really need a reduced spec Frame that just does the streaming portion. With RAM and GPU prices as they are, that would at least make some sense.
I’ll be buying the Frame no matter what.
I also had the OG Rift but since I moved to Linux it’s been nothing more than a paperweight.
I could go to Meta, but I honestly don’t want to do that to myself. The way I see it, the Frame is the only way I get to keep a small amount of privacy and dignity in this world which increasingly has neither.
So I’m saving up my pennies.
If valve made the frame as it’s going to be and an index 2 that was the index but lighter with all around improvements but was still wired only with no battery pack, which would you buy? Standalone inside-out, or next gen pcvr with lighthouses?
I don’t think I can even answer that question. Inside-our tech has really evolved since the old days and I couldn’t say hardware was intrinsically better or worse based on that like I could at the time.
Have you seen PS5 Pro prices lately? $900?
Mental innit? First gen I’ve ever seen where price of hardware went up…
The price does spook me about the Frame, but I may get it out of desperation no matter the cost because like you said, there’s no way in hell I’d buy a Meta product. I absolutely loved my Quest 2, before Meta pushed all that metaverse shit and made the thing unbootable.
I’m REALLY hyped for the frame. Local processing PLUS streaming from a main rig that isn’t tied down to meta and doesn’t spy on you AND has native Steam integration!? Ouaauahhhhhyessssssfuuuccckkaahhhh
This is overpriced for the hardware.
Building one is so easy guys, don’t fall for this sort of thing. The GPU is amazingly underpowered.
Build a computer - buy a cheap cpu, a 5700, and 16gb of ram. You’ll be fine with that.
I see that the controller bundled already sold out in Japan.
Not suprised after seeing the deck’s price hike. Thanks AI…
