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The low-end Alienware box has specs that don't meet the minimum requirements for Batman Arkham Knight, one of the few AAA titles coming out this year that suppo
by cwyers 11y ago
The low-end Alienware box has specs that don't meet the minimum requirements for Batman Arkham Knight, one of the few AAA titles coming out this year that supports SteamOS. And it costs more than either the Xbox One or Playstation 4, both of which will run Arkham Knight fine. I think Steam Machines are a failure waiting to happen. PC enthusiasts can get a Steam Link for $50 for most of the benefits of this. And people who aren't PC enthusiasts have no reason to buy these over a console.
- shurcooL 11y agoConsoles don't support Oculus Rift though. It might be great to satisfy that need while being lower maintenance than a normal PC.
- mkozlows 11y agoOculus doesn't support SteamOS, either -- non-Windows versions are "on hold." But there's Valve/HTC's VR stuff, still.
- shurcooL 11y agoOh crap, you're right. I forgot about that.
- cwyers 11y agoThe Rift demands a pretty hefty graphics card, and most of these don't have one. Alienware is shipping laptop GPUs in their Steam Machines, and Oculus is particular about how the GPU is connected to the output port: https://www.oculus.com/blog/powering-the-rift/ https://www.oculus.com/blog/powering-the-rift/ I would not buy any of these and expect them to work well with the Oculus Rift.
- greggman 11y agoConsoles do support Morpheus though
- ekianjo 11y agoYou mean only the PS4, which is not "All consoles".
- tracker1 11y agoI have to mostly agree.. I think we're still 2-years from a hardware generation at a cost where generic hardware can support Steam OS (and top-tier games) at a decent price point for 1080p output. I think that Steam Link with their controller is a pretty compelling option though. I also think that the nVidia Shield tablet was also an interesting approach... I'm hoping that the first generation of this hardware doesn't bomb too much... The mid-range systems should have enough oomph to come out over current gen consoles, one niggle is that I'd rather see hybrid or straight SSD drives when you're coming to that level of cost.
- cwyers 11y agoI also feel like Valve has missed the boat by having no video functionality on this. Consoles and regular PCs have Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Instant, HBO Go, Plex... I don't expect them to have all that at launch, but Netflix has shown that they will go pretty much everywhere. Not getting Netflix on board means that they aren't even trying. EDIT: And no optical drives in the Alienware machines as far as I can tell, so no using it as a Blu-ray player either.
- chaostheory 11y agoMaybe a better approach would be to have a 'Steam Certified' badge on traditional PCs instead? Otherwise this vaguely reminds me of an improved version of 3DO's business strategy.
- cwyers 11y agoI haven't seen Valve advance a reason for these to exist outside of their worry at having to compete with Microsoft on their own platform. Which as a reason is completely besides the point for the consumer, which I think is why we have these confusing machines that combine the worst aspects of PC and console gaming.
- chaostheory 11y agoThere would be more of a reason for these machines to exist if there were more apps on Steam besides games. Maybe Valve can do more deals like the one they have with blender?
- lfowles 11y agoThey do have an entire Software category now, although it's mostly tools for game dev. You Need A Budget being the only outlier I can think of. http://store.steampowered.com/search/#sort_by=Reviews_DESC&category1=994&page=1&aff_id=101 http://store.steampowered.com/search/#sort_by=Reviews_DESC&c...
- chaostheory 11y agoYes that's my point. They need more normal apps so that people don't need to leave Steam OS to do productive stuff. They need to be more aggressive in getting them i.e. they won't take a cut of sales
- ZeroGravitas 11y agoAs the prices of hardware falls, the share you're paying to Microsoft increases. Look at the history of MPEG2 licences and DVD players, what was a reasonable cost of doing business when DVD players cost $1000 became unreasonable when they are only selling for $10. The value Windows offers decreases too as it become more and more reasonable to buy a PC for nothing more than gaming, whereas before you'd need a bunch of uses to justify the cost. Would Windows make sense on the streaming box for example?
- fweespeech 11y agoYeah, you basically are buying a PC-in-a-box in order to get AAA PC games. At which point...why not buy a PC and hook it up to the TV?
- bloaf 11y ago>You are buying a PC... why not buy a PC? Sounds like a DailyWTF error message. That being said, I don't think the goal is to get AAA PC games into the living room. I think it is to get greenlight games into the living room.
- jfoster 11y agoPCs generally don't have a user experience optimized for TVs, without a mouse and keyboard, for example. For all intents and purposes, these are essentially Steam consoles. The only difference from other consoles being the variable specs.
- vacri 11y agoAs an aside, playing around with the Oculus Rift was a good experience in different UIs for different use cases. In a tradition PC game the UI elements are around the edge of the screen, so they don't get in the way of the main view. With the Rift, this simply does not work, as you can't really see the edges unless you strain - UI elements need to be near the centre of view. Skyrim controls worked well here, being a centralised HUD that you pop up when you need it.
- rtpg 11y agoBecause the PC-in-a-box (like the Alpha) is in a much nicer form-factor for being put next to the TV. Probably much quieter too. This is why I almost bought one the other day.
- legohead 11y ago> PC enthusiasts can get a Steam Link for $50 for most of the benefits of this. What are the benefits of SteamOS? 1080p is less resolution than a good PC monitor has.. not to mention most graphics cards can straight up use HDMI anyway.
- cwyers 11y agoIn-home streaming. Lots of gaming PCs are too big and loud to have in the living room, so you can put them in another room and play games on your TV. But the $50 Steam Link does that,you don't need a Steam Machine for it.
- ekianjo 11y agoYes, but with in-home streaming you are going to get some slight delay to transmit frames, and while it may be acceptable for some games, it may not be prefered for others where fast reflexes/inputs/screen feedback are needed.
- jon-wood 11y agoOver a gigabit network its pretty much unnoticeable, I've been playing Portal 2 and Metro 2033 via in home streaming and its not been a problem.
- ekianjo 11y agoSorry but gigabytes network simply bring more pixels at once, it does nothing to remove the latency. It's bandwidth, not speed-related. You still get latency. Whether you notice it or not is a totally different issue.
- Filligree 11y agoNot quite true. Latency is also lower on a gigabit network; it doesn't send more packets in parallel, it sends packets faster, in serial. At any given speed, it takes time for some number of bytes to traverse the wire. Though the minimum on-wire latency at 100MBit is 0.12ms for 1500-byte packets, per packet, typically 1GBit cards also have lower latency internally. (You can multiply that 0.12ms number by the number of intervening switches, plus one.)
- jcastro 11y agoThe existing Alienware Alpha (which is basically what the SteamOS box is) benches about the same as an Nvidia GTX 750Ti, which outpowers both the XBox One and the PS4. It should have no problem matching or exceeding either console's performance, just like the existing Alpha. The debut price is about the same as the PS4/XBone, but doesn't include the monthly fee for multiplayer, and if you look at the long-term total cost of ownership it's cheaper than a console, especially when you consider that in the future you can upgrade to new hardware without rebuying your games, which consoles cannot guarantee.
- ekianjo 11y ago> The existing Alienware Alpha (which is basically what the SteamOS box is) benches about the same as an Nvidia GTX 750Ti, which outpowers both the XBox One and the PS4. It should have no problem matching or exceeding either console's performance, just like the existing Alpha. Except that it runs on Linux, which has less performing drivers than on Windows, and Linux ports are usually far less optimized than their Windows counterparts as well (which is not hard to understand since most games are made with DX in mind).
- jcastro 11y agoSteam Machines don't compete with Windows, they're complementary to existing Windows machines (game streaming); they directly compete with Xbox/PS4. Most Steam Machines are Nvidia based, which makes sense, they have the best drivers, and they're generally 1:1 as performant as their windows drivers. I have a GTX970 in my Ubuntu machine and it rocks, supports my gsync monitor and everything; trumping console performance is pretty much a no-brainer with modern nvidia maxwell stuff...
- ekianjo 11y ago> Steam Machines don't compete with Windows, they're complementary to existing Windows machines (game streaming); they directly compete with Xbox/PS4. I hope you are joking, because branding-wise the Steam Machines are a clear mess and completely confusing for people who don't know how to read PC specs. Hell, you have Steam Machines planned with only Intel HD graphics and also called "Steam Machines" just like the Alienware Alpha and the Syber ones, while power-wise they fall in totally different categories. That's the best way to kill your brand, at least 3DO never did that kind of mistake. > they're generally 1:1 as performant as their windows drivers. No, this is clearly false. I don't know where you get this impression, check almost every benchmark out therefore for Borderlands 2, CS:GO, Witcher 2, Bioshock Infinite and almost every other AAA game out there, you will see that the Linux performance is clearly behind. I'm a Linux gamer as well but at least I don't pretend we are at the same level as Windows, because that's a clear lie at this point. > trumping console performance is pretty much a no-brainer with modern nvidia maxwell stuff... It should be, but many ports on Linux are far from being optimized (some rely on OpenGL 3.x to maintain compatibility with AMD while it's clearly less efficient than OpenGL 4.x calls) while console ports are much more likely to be tested thoroughly on a single hardware based and optimized for it.
- jfoster 11y agoWhere are the specs? All I'm seeing is "NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX GPU 2GB GDDR5 graphics and Intel® Core processors." Which spec doesn't meet the minimum for Arkham Knight?
- bau5 11y agoSo it has less space than a Nomad?
- an_account_name 11y agoBut it does have wireless! http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ip...
- valgaze 11y agoIt seems like the big gripe with consoles is that there's a performance ceiling and the supposed benefit of a PC is that there simply is no ceiling. The game can look as rad as you want to pay for. But consoles have something that PCs don't-- a floor. If a kiddo buys any piece content for their xbox or whatever, the darn thing will run guaranteed and be pretty OK. The same definitely not true for new a piece of content on a PC. PC's might not have a performance ceiling but they probably need a baseline floor. MAYBE these Steam Machines can help rectify it for down/middle market.
- adamc 11y agoThat's all true. If that was the only factor I might stick with consoles -- however, PCs have something else: A much more diverse collection of games. I'm interested in Steam machines largely because I would like to play PC games in a more Xbox-like way. The fact that it will result in more games running on Linux is also a plus (for me).
- zamalek 11y ago> Alienware There's your problem right there. "No true gamer" would ever take Alienware seriously as there is a massive brand markup. You are paying for the logo on the box. The stuff in the box is obsolete when it hits the shelves. Look at practically any other brand if you want to see competent pricing. Alienware are good business machines (as they do have unmatched post-sales support). They aren't gaming machines, not even at a basic competency level. It's a big pity that Valve partnered with these extortionists, it's no good for the platform.
- ZeroGravitas 11y agoI don't think Valve will be crying themselves to sleep if you buy a $50 dollar streaming box and a $50 dollar controller, and then continue to buy games on their service, instead of spending an extra $300 dollars (which will mostly go to the people producing the hardware) to get a system that's less reliant on your internal wifi. Either way it's a beachhead for them in the living room, and as computing devices become smaller, and cheaper over time, (and Linux game support increases) they're better and better positioned. I'm kind of adjacent to the demographic for this thing. I don't have a high-end gaming PC, but I have Steam installed on my Mac laptop (Mac and Linux support are basically the same in Steam) for mostly indie/classic/old games. Notably, you can't stream Steam games from the Mac currently (though I don't think there's a fundamental technical reason for that, edit: hmm, the info page seems to suggest I can stream games if I update to Yosemite). If I didn't already have a Wii U for living room gaming, I'd probably buy one of these boxes. I might still, depending on how useful the hardware is for other purposes.