They really dropped the ball with only 8gb vram, it’s not like GDDR is expensive.
Comment on Steam Machine – Powerful Enough?
KiwiTB@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s fine but ideally would have more vram. Depends on price of course.
AceOnTrack@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
It recently really increase in price, which is probably why Valve doesn’t want to announce prices yet.
AceOnTrack@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
You can check the spot price of GDDR6 it’s nit that expensive. Also valve most likely secured their supply contract and final specs a while ago.
There is no excuses for this.
CafeFrog@lemmy.cafe 3 weeks ago
I’m actually kinda glad it has only 8gb for an odd reason; I hope it encourages devs to optimize their games more so they aren’t locked out of the steam machine market.
trevor@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
I hope you’re right. Games have run like dogshit for at least the past 5 years or so, even with reasonably powerful hardware.
Unfortunately, I’m not very optimistic because of the Unreal Engine monoculture (except for a bunch of blessed indie games). It would most likely be Epic’s job to make their engine not perform like shit, which… 😬
CafeFrog@lemmy.cafe 3 weeks ago
I think we’ll still get unoptimized crap, but it may sway some studios to consider that lower-end market. We’ll never truly know how much of a difference it makes, but it will undeniably be another data point they’ll have to consider in terms of potential profit.
The new Indiana Jones game straight up couldn’t be played past the first level with 8gb of vram (and their forced ray-tracing made it require a beefier GPU to get playable framerates), and I’m always curious if that noticeably lowered sales compared to their projections by locking gamers with lower-end hardware.
That is a setback, and I’m not sure how much can truly be done for a studio that opts for UE, other than limiting their game to an artstyle that requires a lower polycount, and perhaps reducing the amount of assets in areas like they used to do for older consoles, but I too doubt that’ll happen.
strongarm@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Valve have a lot of data on this, I’m sure 8GB is going to be substantially for most of the playable top 10
deliriousdreams@fedia.io 3 weeks ago
I think that data includes the prices for RAM, and the price point they're hoping to sell it at. I don't mind the idea of buying this to literally just put in my entertainment center. I wouldn't even mind upgrading the RAM when it eventually comes down in price or I can save up for it.
But since I already have a steam deck equivalent handheld running Bazzite, I also already have a lot of the peripherals I'd want in order to make this useful for streaming or other services, so it's not a huge barrier to entry for me. The form factor is what I'm looking for too. Without all the stupid LED's and BS.