Comment on Steam Frame Teardown: We’re Fans. Except of the Fan - iFixit

• artyom@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Streaming to a VR headset involves the headset computing more than just controller tracking.

  Yes but not much. Again streaming games from weak hardware is a whole industry. It’s the point of platforms like Luna, GeForce Now, Stadia, etc. Streaming from cheap Android TV boxes and such. Valve even sold their own cheap streaming box, the Steam Link.

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  • SatyrSack@quokk.au ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Yes but not much.

    Not much, but apparently enough that the minimum requirement is capable of running simpler games locally.

    platforms like Luna, GeForce Now, Stadia, etc.

    Streaming foveated VR is more computationally taxing on the client than simply streaming basic pancake games. You can stream Cyberpunk to your Chromecast because it just involves the server sending a video feed to the client and the client sending controller inputs back to the server. Streaming a VR game involves all those same things, but it also involves extra computation on the client side (controller tracking, eye tracking, headset gyro, and other various spatial calculations) that then get sent off to the server along with the controller inputs. That extra computation requires more client-side processing power than is needed for streaming Cyberpunk to your Chromecast.

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  • Little1Lost@gehirneimer.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Are you talking about game streaming some AAA ultra graphics Unreal game? Because there are a lot of other games that only take a fraction of compute (an extreme being doom) that take maybe even less compute ressources than trying to stream anything. And streaming can take a lot of compute if you ever looked at hardware stats during a discord stream. that would be especially true for something "surroundHD" like a 3D wirtual vorld where a lot of video gets to be stored or its going to be a pain in the eyes turning the head (and that ping will be too high for foveated streaming)

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  • Natanael@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Yeah, the most powerful boxes are on par with the chip in the Steam Frame, aside from RAM and the SSD. The biggest costs are elsewhere. It’s not the chip itself.

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    • artyom@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      The most powerful boxes are using a 10 year old Nvidia Tegra chip. Not to mention the rest of them.

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      • Natanael@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        There are devices more powerful than that. And from what I can tell, you’d cut $100 in SoC cost and lose 75% of the the performance compared to the closest competitors.

        Again, you’re comparing to devices which does not have to do onboard SLAM tracking, which displays a single output image instead of two, which does not need to meet the latency and image refresh rate targets, which does not connect two dual Wi-Fi connections for extra stability and redundance, etc.

        Even if you go for the tightest margin, economics still give you mass market chips with excess capacity because you have to pick chips with enough ports, enough bandwidth, low latency, high maximum CPU frequencies, etc. And then the question is again back to a difference in parts cost between “can only ever stream” vs “can stream AND game locally” that’s just some hundred dollars of parts cost.

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  • rtxn@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Try decoding an AV1 stream from Sunshine without hardware acceleration. It takes a much higher compute performance than you apparently believe.

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