this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2025
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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.
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.
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.
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?
In my humble opinion, 4k is a bit of a joke. I pick a high as possible frame rate over 4k any day of the week.
With AAA game graphics, 4K is kind of silly.
It kind of makes sense on consoles with fixed hardware when the devs design specifically to hit that target.
On a PC, I think high framerate 1440p is a much more reasonable goal, but frame generation and upscaling are sold to consumers like some magical solution to poor performance instead.
At the moment the only noticeable problem in PC gaming is the existence of spinning drives. Least for multiplayer games.
In a lot of newer games it's become absurdly noticeable. You have a 5 min queue then your stuck waiting 10 mins on top of that cause some dipshit is loading off a spinning drive.
It's gotten to the point iv actually seen some Chinese games literally prevent you from installing the game at all. If you have ANY spinning drive in your system. And prevents if from booting the game if you have one in your system. Because it causes that much of a problem. Endless customer complaints of horrid queue and loading times cause your waiting on people with slow drives.
Hard drives no longer are in the just good enough group for new games. It's been a slow transfer but we are finally starting to see a hard line being draw in the sand. And I don't expect it to slow down at this point.
Yeah I tried playing Dispatch on my TV in 4k, and it sounded and felt like my laptop was going to catch on fire.
Lowered the TVs resolution to 1080p, and the game looks exactly the same and the fans barely even turn on.
That could be an optimization issue though I guess.
4k is 4x the resolution of 1080p, so that's not totally surprising. Good thing you did this too, because I was reading some comments just the other day about people's gaming laptops failing because of repeated/prolongued overheating.
Gaming laptops are notorious for dying from overheating. These things need to be meticulously maintained if you want to use them for their intended purpose for long.
Interesting, thanks for confirming!
Power optimization of chips has long been good enough to make that a completely moot point. Unless you're doing something 100% of the time like crypto mining, or extremely pressed on the price of power, it doesn't matter.
Even top of the line CPUs and GPUs idle at extremely low wattage.
Like running a video game at 4k120 with ray tracing for 4-6 hours straight? Bc that’s the use case, not idle
You're getting a direct use out of that power, then. It's also dependant on the hardware in it. I can run 4k gaming all day and never break 1kw, because I don't use nVidia that just throws more and more power at their problems instead of engineering them away.
(even they still do not idle at crazy power usage, too)
You’re missing the point:
4090 with 7900x3d and 850w psu running games at max will generally use about 550w. The same build swapping in a rx 7900xtx is ever so slightly more economical at around 520w. Getting into pissing matches about brand loyalty (when they’re both companies that will ultimately fuck you over for another cent) is stupid, and doesn’t change that this box, if accurate to advertising, does 80% of the work they do at 140w under load (essentially 1/4 the power of your precious amd, which you’d still be using here btw).
It would matter more for the environment if tons of gamers actually had these GPUs but based on what valve is saying here (and the fact that as others have said they likely have very good statistics on the machines accessing steam) they likely don’t. Most fancy GPUs probably go to crypto farms and llm bullshit, which is dumb and means this doesn’t really matter I guess
It literally uses AMD, so you're just being a fuckwit for saying there is no brand competition here...
I think you just have poor reading comprehension bc I literally said it uses amd?
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)
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.
Depends on Tarriffs. Unfortunately a $500 PC in 2024 can be like an $800 PC now due to Trumpflation.
It would be funny if Steam sold it lower in other countries, and gave the US a special inflated tarrif cost.
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
Steam survey is monthly too and most people don't have two computers
At most they have a PC and a work laptop!
Source on RDNA3 on Linux not doing FSR4? Linux drivers are far ahead of Windows drivers.
https://gpuopen.com/fidelityfx-super-resolution-4/
It's possible they add compatibility at a later time (with reduced performance and/or quality due to lack of hardware acceleration), but they haven't announced anything like that currently
It's not a hard requirement. Gamers have used the SDK to get FSR4 working on Steam Deck. Here's a video of it in action.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95N6-2U5YQo
TL;DW -- It's good to have as an option but not necessarily better than FSR3 on Deck due to tradeoffs. Depends on the game.
Yeah you can hack it in but that's not official, which results in what you see: performance is not so great. That video only shows a small performance loss because FSR4 is only outputting to 720p, but making FSR4 output to 4k (like a normal TV) is a much bigger demand. But maybe some specific optimizations can be made.