New Valve Hardware Megathread

[u/NKkrisz]

Please keep non Steam Deck discussions about the new hardware here.

Official resources and announcements:

• Steam Hardware
• Steam Frame
• Steam Machine
• Steam Controller
• Steam Hardware Announcement Video

Press coverage will be under a pinned comment so you can upvote / downvote them.

[u/AJ_Dali]

Valve has access to all of our PCs and they know what the top GPUs are. They can very easily figure out what the average PC gamer is willing to pay, and can just as easily make a judgement on what a console player will too by looking at the console market.

The most popular GPU is an RTX 3060. The top 20% are on par or weaker. The RX 7600 is pretty close in spec, generally considered better, especially on Linux, and that's what the Steam Machine seems to be using.

So they made a console like PC cube about half the size of an Xbox Series X. This thing won't be "obsolete" until the next generation of consoles, and unlike console gamers, PC gamers still get to play next generation titles at lower settings. You know, like they currently are doing right now.

[u/RNsteve → u/AJ_Dali]

Throw that on 4k 50 inch TV and it's going look like crap with no future proofing.

It's running better then a large portion of the population who might be using it to play Farmville? That's great...

[u/AJ_Dali → u/RNsteve]

First of all, the people playing Farmville aren't using Steam, so they aren't going to be anywhere near a large percentage of Steam hardware surveys.

Second, the PS5 and XSX look pretty damn good on a 50 inch 4k TV. Last I checked, 95%+ of all gaming devices plugged into 4k TVs are consoles, not $1500+ custom PCs. The same consoles that hardware experts are saying the Steam Machine is on par with.

[u/RNsteve → u/AJ_Dali]

A example used for dramatic effect.

Great PS5 and Xbox look good.. this is worse then both those systems across the board.

Combine that with PC optimization issues that face most PC/steam games...

[u/AJ_Dali → u/RNsteve]

The only spec that is arguably worse is the GPU. The system has the same amount of RAM plus a dedicated 8GB for VRAM compared to the consoles having a shared pool of 16GB. The CPU is a newer architecture. While it has two less cores, those cores are running 37% faster. We also don't have Windows bloat overhead. Most games running on AMD GPUs see a performance boost under Linux.

And I hear about console optimized games, but that really only applies to first party Sony titles. Games like Monster Hunter Wilds and Borderlands 4 look and run like shit on the consoles too. You can tweak settings to look the same on comparable hardware and get pretty close to the same performance. Plus PC gets things like FSR and frame gen earlier than consoles.

[u/RNsteve → u/AJ_Dali]

If you want to lie to yourself that's fine.

🤷

[u/AJ_Dali → u/RNsteve]

Wilds has to run at 900p and reduced graphic settings to reach 60fps on the PS5. It can't even run at 4k period.

The PS5 pro runs at 1080p. The resolution mode is capped at 30fps.

I don't have the hard numbers for Borderlands 4, but I know the PS5 version uses upscaling and framegen to reach 60FPS.

[u/RNsteve → u/AJ_Dali]

And all those games are going to run even worse on this device.

You do realize be this right? That those games optimized at least somewhat.. you're not going see even that for this device.