Comment on Steam Machine
AceOnTrack@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
I’m a bit concerned about the vram situation. 8Gb is not a lot nowadays, particularly if you start adding stuff like ai framegen and stuff which these types of machines tend to need further down the line.
An extra 8gb wouldn’t have killed the profit margins.
Would it be safe to assume their processor/gpu magic that brought us the deck has advanced enough since then to compensate?
I’m no hardware guru, but wouldn’t it be possible to use a swap file or other methods to simulate extra ram if optimized and efficient enough?
As a deck owner, it’s not that powerful, you’re never going to drive it at full settings on most modern games, so the size of the vram does not matter all that much.
Also, the GPU already does the cache work itself if the vram is full anyway, and GDDR is much faster than regular DDR, which is why you see stuttering on 8gb GPUs when texture resolution is pushing the limits.
With the spot price if GDDR6 modules it’s frankly disappointing to only see 8gb.
It seems to just be a 7600m laptop GPU which comes with 8Gb. I don’t think this is a custom chip like SONY uses but, just off the shelf stuff AMD sold for a discount.
Rooster326@programming.dev 3 days ago
I see you haven’t checked ram prices lately…
AceOnTrack@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Bulk pricings has increased sure, but not to the extent consumer price did. Capitalism, ho!
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Given that they’d have locked in the supply at least half a year ago, though, it would be funny (though unrealistic) to find out they contributed to the price hike 😂