A better "Steam Machine"

[Boss of Nubs]

Writing on mobile, pulling most of this from a twitter thread I wrote (@bossofnubs).

 

Unpopular opinion: The Steambox (and steamos) were badass, they needed more work but the concept should be brought back. Amd going after the new intel NUC with better hardware options at better prices, brining usff gaming pc's back into your living room. 

 

With the performance of pcie GEN 4, the upcoming nvidia cards, or even newer amd cards (for a even lower price point) building a device/ecosystem to directly compete with major home consoles. Hell if it can run windows you can already play xbox games.

 

People will argue with thing like steamlink and game streaming becoming a thing this would be less and less of a viable option. I feel otherwise. With the growing popularity of linux support for games, and better options for windows "emulation" a dedicated system makes more sense.

 

Game streaming services will take much longer than most people think to get an "in home" like experience (see the stadia flop). Local streaming still requires a fairly powerful pc, and thats not including the fact that most people have a 4k tv in home, which raises required specs for a quality gaming experience. 

 

I personally dont see a reason we can't get an option from AMD similar to Intel's new NUC for a lower price, whether it's an High power APU, or a performance grade mobile CPU, an option to match a system like this with a gpu of your choice will give you flexibility of choice and cost range. A system even around the high $700 range still outweighs a $500 console, and having to pay $50 yearly for online access, and an average of $60 a game. Even if we brought that down to $40, with the option of using xbox game pass with windows 10, steam sales, humble bundle among many other service the cost of ownership would come much lower than the majority of consoles.

 

 

Please leave feed back, tear apart or praise, start a productive discussion!

 

 

 

Less important sidenotes feel free to skip 

 

STREAMING! I personally love sharing my gaming experience on twitch/mixer, with nvec (new) offering very high stream quality for minimal performance impact (compared to x264) being able to wire up peripherals and run a stream off a device you can get a lot of players around would bring a refresh of content to twitch.

 

VR. Most people have living rooms that have more open space than most other rooms in there home, so a device that you could run VR off of would be that much better.

[Mira Yurizaki]

AMD has to convince someone to build it for them. At the moment, the only thing AMD builds are CPUs and GPUs. They don't offer anything that resembles entire systems. Intel on the other hand, does make their own systems (on top of being an actual hardware manufacturer) which is why they can do something like build NUCs. So even if AMD has a NUC-like solution, I doubt it would be any cheaper.

 

Also using game sales as a point of "lower cost of ownership" is missing that console games do also get sales, and Humble Bundle also does console games. This is on top of the fact that since console games still have physical media, the possibility of the used market is still around. Ultimately though, game cost is a moot point because given enough patience, you can buy a game at whatever price you're willing to pay.

[WereCatf]

6 minutes ago, Boss of Nubs said:

Please leave feed back

You're not giving any reason why specifically Valve/Steam should do this. You can just buy one of the billion different small-size PCs on the market, slap a Linux-distro of your choice on there or Windows and POOF -- you're all set.

[Boss of Nubs]

1 minute ago, WereCatf said:

You're not giving any reason why specifically Valve/Steam should do this. You can just buy one of the billion different small-size PCs on the market, slap a Linux-distro of your choice on there or Windows and POOF -- you're all set.

I'm not specifically saying valve or steam should do it I just think the concept should be brought back in a better way. As steamos is still supported and it's free there's nothing really they would have to do other than marketing, which I understand is a very big and expensive thing. With PCs packing more power into a smaller and smaller form factor I feel like it's time to revisit the idea of an accessible living room PC.

[Boss of Nubs]

Just now, Boss of Nubs said:

I'm not specifically saying valve or steam should do it I just think the concept should be brought back in a better way. As steamos is still supported and it's free there's nothing really they would have to do other than marketing, which I understand is a very big and expensive thing. With PCs packing more power into a smaller and smaller form factor I feel like it's time to revisit the idea of an accessible living room PC.

Windows or even a barebones system would do just as well if not better on the windows side.

[Sauron]

I still think it's stupid to package and sell a PC as though it were a console. Unless you are willing to invest into getting developers on board with your standardized hardware and get them to develop native games for your operating system then you're just selling a prebuilt and sub par compatibility.

3 minutes ago, Boss of Nubs said:

the growing popularity of linux support for games

That's not a thing. What we have now is better compatibility layers to sometimes get Windows games to run on Linux. There are still very few AAA titles being produced that are natively compatible with Linux and if you're going to sell a prepackaged experience that's not good enough.

7 minutes ago, Boss of Nubs said:

most people have a 4k tv in home

Not really, but even if they did if you expect whatever $500-700 NUC-like box to be able to smoothly and consistently run 4k games for the next 5-6 years you're deluding yourself.

9 minutes ago, Boss of Nubs said:

A system even around the high $700 range still outweighs a $500 console, and having to pay $50 yearly for online access, and an average of $60 a game. Even if we brought that down to $40, with the option of using xbox game pass with windows 10, steam sales, humble bundle among many other service the cost of ownership would come much lower than the majority of consoles.

You can do this right now, just build a $700 pc. Not sure why we need to revive "steam machines" as a concept to get these benefits.

10 minutes ago, Boss of Nubs said:

STREAMING!

Has nothing to do with steam machines specifically... and I don't think nvenc works on Linux.

12 minutes ago, Boss of Nubs said:

VR

Again, nothing to do with steam machines specifically and if you want to keep the price and size small you won't really be able to pack the punch you need for decent VR. Also good luck making it work on Linux.

[Sakkura]

19 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Again, nothing to do with steam machines specifically and if you want to keep the price and size small you won't really be able to pack the punch you need for decent VR. Also good luck making it work on Linux.

VR isn't especially demanding compared to 4K. But I agree with the rest, especially the VR+Linux combo. That's a niche within a niche.

[Sauron]

8 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

VR isn't especially demanding compared to 4K.

It kInd of depends on what you consider acceptable for VR - 4k 60Hz is fine for me on a monitor, on VR I would want a resolution that is pretty close to 4k at at least 90Hz. Still, we're talking about a midrange SFF machine here at best so even if your standards aren't as high we're still cutting it close as the years go by.

[Mira Yurizaki]

20 minutes ago, Sauron said:

It kInd of depends on what you consider acceptable for VR - 4k 60Hz is fine for me on a monitor, on VR I would want a resolution that is pretty close to 4k at at least 90Hz. Still, we're talking about a midrange SFF machine here at best so even if your standards aren't as high we're still cutting it close as the years go by.

Are we talking about 4K per eye or 4K total resolution?

 

If it's the latter, then 4K 90Hz is potentially less demanding in an optimized VR situation than a 4K 60Hz monitor. Foveated rendering and VRR will drop a lot of details that you're not really going to see anyway, making the render easier to do.

[Guest]

Honestly with most e-Sports titles they can run on anything, just use whatever. I personally cant justify a desktop simply because my laptop is powerful enough to play any game I like anyway. I don't care about high graphics or ultra-high frame rate, I just care about the gameplay. 

[Sauron]

9 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

Are we talking about 4K per eye or 4K total resolution?

 

If it's the latter, then 4K 90Hz is potentially less demanding in an optimized VR situation than a 4K 60Hz monitor. Foveated rendering and VRR will drop a lot of details that you're not really going to see anyway, making the render easier to do.

Fair enough, still relatively demanding.

[steelo]

1 hour ago, Boss of Nubs said:

VR. Most people have living rooms that have more open space than most other rooms in there home, so a device that you could run VR off of would be that much better.

They have standalone VR units now...I fail to see why you need a compact PC powerful enough to run it. I think we are close to the point of being able to put together a 'tiny' PC not much larger than a smart phone and capable of playing full console titles. I use a $30  rpi3 running a streaming service called 'Parsec' to play PC games on my TV in my living room. It's not perfect, but works relatively well for games like Civilization.

 

I'm anxious to see how much of an improvement there will be with the next gen ryzen (7nm?) apu's.