In fact, Valve reports that the Steam Machine is “six times as powerful” as the Steam Deck, and while this is mostly marketing speak (“power” is a vague and complex concept in gaming tech, and isn’t a linear spectrum), it’s not unfounded.
The Steam machine APU can perform 6x more operations per second than the Ste Deck APU.
This isn’t vague, nor complex. The reasons why the Steam Machine APU is more capable is complex, but the results are not.
Quit making mountains out of molehills
On the subject of treating compute like magic, as the author does:
People who grew up in the iPad generation cannot fathom understanding the intrinsics of anything beyond direct input - > output. For those privileged few, a pez is indistinguishable from a tiktok video, they only go as far as understanding that action - > dopamine. It’s a wild généralisation, but after 10y educating the “elite” is one I cannot refute with the data points I have.
lol Calling the Steam Deck, the Ste. Deck sounds appropriate 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻
Oh my god the child journalist can’t even get the successes of console generations right and I’m supposed to care about his analysis?
Nintendo became much more experimental with its hardware—an approach that would eventually pay off with the Nintendo Switch.
“Eventually”? It paid off handsomely with the Wii in 2006, a full decade before the Switch. Literally Nintendo’s first big experiment with console hardware since the Virtual Boy in 1995 was a runaway success.
The Wii sold 101 million units, the Xbox 360 sold 84 million (and eventually copied the Wii with the Kinect) and the PS3 sold 87.4 million.
It took me a whole minute to find this information and the journalist didn’t even bother.
Also don’t just throw this out and not explain it.
Granted, Valve’s first attempt at a home console was a bit of a blunder
What?
Do you mean Steam Link? Wasn’t really a console, was it? The Deck is closer to a console and it certainly hasn’t been a “blunder.”Oh, the earlier Steam Machine?!Do you know anything about what you’re writing?
Nintendo‘s experiments with novel features has paid off very often. The N64 brought an analog thumbstick and a new controller layout for 3D games. Wii was more radical with motion controls as the default input. The DS with dual screens, pen input, stereoscopic screen, wireless networking, was super innovative as well. All of these were super successful.
The Wii U and GameCube were the only less successful consoles of the last 20 years for Nintendo.
Legitimately! It’s been Nintendo’s whole thing and they’ve been amazing at it.
With handhelds especially, they have been wildly successful experimenting since the original Game Boy in 1989. Which makes the Switch’s “eventual” success mentioned in the article even more short-sighted.
The interesting thing to me about the GameCube and Wii U is that they were followed up by incredibly successful hits. The less successful consoles had to walk so their more radical follow-ups (the Wii and Switch, respectively) could run.
Steam boxes never really got off the ground, pretty sure they were pre link.
Original steam machine came out in 2015. This is why big picture mode was introduced. People liked them but they werent a big seller, and was generally considered a flop. Apparently enough of a flop that some people don’t remember it.
A lot of people forget stuff easily. Remeber PSTV? While not a crazy or amazing device PSTV was pretty awesome (to me) before they nuked it, just another in a long line of forgotten tech.
Im surprised I never heard of that. Playstation was my console of choice for several generations before I switched to PC. I used to really pay attention to everything they did.
I think they are talking about the first steam machine from 2014 not the link
Thank you! I genuinely was like “help me out here journalist, explain yourself”
Ehh, x86 SoC consoles will always have an advantage vs x86 SoC PCs, because PCs need to treat iGPUs as PCIe peripherals rather than co-processors, which has significant performance penalties and a low ceiling due to bottlenecked heat dissipation.
The Steam Frame should get you worried about x86 consoles, because if devs start publishing native ARM builds for desktop then this whole accidental iGPU performance moat goes away.
Buuut it should also get you excited about ARM consoles.
Personally I am for the Steam Machine, mostly because of its size and that I could also use it for another purpose than gaming, and the GPU seems decent enough for casual gaming (I’m not looking for Ultra settings at 4K, 240 fps, etc)
I read conflicting info regarding RAM upgradability. 16GB nowadays is the bare minimum IMO, I’d rather bump that to 32GB or 64GB, at least if the price can come down.
So long as it doesn’t follow the trend of stupid prices, more actual competition is only a good thing.
Whatever happens, the biggest hurdle isn’t the price or the hardware, or even the operating system itself. The biggest hurdle are the available games that work out of the box, specifically the most popular multiplayer games. I don’t think Sony has to worry anything, because the Steam Machine is still PC hardware and that is usually more expensive than a comparable game console. Usually.
the Steam Machine is still PC hardware and that is usually more expensive
Yeah I mean until you account for 1 year of Playstation subscription needed to play online, not to mention the much higher game prices.
Agreed. But when selling the console, most people don’t have the full picture in front of them.
How dare you. /s
Don’t you know PC gaming is so cheap you can buy it from a hooker in Tijuana for zero pesos?
The world would be a better place if all consoles died.
As much as I enjoy PC gaming, I also appreciate the turnkey experience of console gaming, especially with kids.
SteamOS (or similar) gives you the same “turnkey gaming” experience.
as much as i appreciate the convenience, it’s far from 1:1
How so?
launch tweaks, protonup-qt, decky plugins, the list goes on. there’s a number of things you need to understand before you can have a truely seamless experience on steamos in the same way you can on a bespoke console.
Who told you that? You don’t need any of that. All you do is log in and click play.
Yeah, how dare some people enjoy their entertainment in a different way than I do.
It’s nothing to do with “different” and everything to do do with exploitative, expensive, and wasteful. They’re nothing more than overpriced DRM machines.
Holy shit.
