sp3ctr4l
@sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on My steam machine arrived! 2 days ago:
Well… no.
Thats… Sony and MSFT raised prices on all of their hardware too, same with Nintendo.
We’re at the point where being a huge player… can only get you priority in the queue for chips and parts.
It can no longer secure bulk pricing discounts.
That’s how bad this is.
- Comment on "I know how devastating it is, and my heart's with all of you": Doom's John Romero responds to id Software reportedly losing half their team 4 days ago:
In all fairness to Romero, and many other heroes/legends of the ‘birth of fps’ era…
These dudes are getting old.
Getting old sucks.
Everything hurts, you’re always more tired than you used to be, you can’t pull 7 all nighters in a row anymore, it might actually kill you.
While the present circumstances are not … exactly awesome, dignified, ideal in any way…
… there would always one day need to be a changing of the guard.
All our favorite studios from the 90s/00s… they’re all mostly gone, they just have the same name sometimes, like the ship of Theseus. People leave, teams get shuffled… and the captains that are still there, are growing gray.
Don’t mourn this.
Be inspired by it.
Do what they did, but with that thing that you always thought they should have done, but never actually did.
It doesn’t have to be any graphically fancier than what they did decades ago… graphics age, gameplay is timeless.
- Comment on 'Being Proud of the Thing We Made Did Not Give Us the Right to Make It' — Dbrand Cancels Its Steam Machine Companion Cube 1 week ago:
The Enrichment Center reminds you that the Weighted Companion Cube will never threaten to stab you and, in fact, cannot speak.
- Comment on 'Being Proud of the Thing We Made Did Not Give Us the Right to Make It' — Dbrand Cancels Its Steam Machine Companion Cube 1 week ago:
99% certain this is what will end up happening.
Its not even a 180.
Its… you used our IP without asking, please go to the back of the line, fill out the form where you properly ask to use, and wait in the queue again.
All they had to do was ask permission first.
- Comment on "We were only three votes away": Stop Killing Games-backed California bill to keep online games playable fails to win over senate committee 1 week ago:
Yes, yes you can. Initiatives are neat, that way… the sword cuts both ways.
- Comment on Valve Gives The Green Light to Install SteamOS On Desktops To Create Our Own Steam Machines 2 weeks ago:
Huh, you’re right, I didn’t know that.
But yeah, looks like the jailbreak process only works up to firmware v6ish… which means you’d have to have a PS5 that hasn’t been connected to the internet since basically December 2022.
- Comment on Valve Gives The Green Light to Install SteamOS On Desktops To Create Our Own Steam Machines 2 weeks ago:
Got nothing to add other than you know this shit better than I do, appreciate the specificity!
- Comment on Valve Gives The Green Light to Install SteamOS On Desktops To Create Our Own Steam Machines 2 weeks ago:
Yes but… they have varying degrees of nonstandard busses and timings and weird, proprietary, basicslly custom hardware, as well as often having weird, propietary implementations of that hardware, that often only work with a bunch of other weird custom drivers on other components…
This is why emulation is hard, you habe to reverse engineer all that shit and then basically virtualize it and then try to map it to actually standard hardware.
Making a linux distro runs into many of thr same things, just, without (as much of) the virtualization parts.
- Comment on Battlefield Studios begin sponsoring Godot Engine development 2 weeks ago:
Its because they basically use a fork of Godot as a mod tool / map editor suite for BF… 6?
Are we on six now?.. I literally don’t even remember.
So they’re probably just essentially paying for a bit of extra help with custom tooling.
Hopefully they’re at least paying for a bit more than the actual services they’re getting, but idfk.
- Comment on Valve Gives The Green Light to Install SteamOS On Desktops To Create Our Own Steam Machines 2 weeks ago:
Well actually no, because consoles tend to have very divergent, oddball architecture, compared to x86_64, where it tends to be fairly to extremely difficult to basically reverse engineer the drivers… because the normal drivers are propietary.
Instead, they seem to have been collaborating with AMD and basically some open source hackers to get FSR4 working on RDNA 3 GPUs… 7000 series AMD GPUs, the Steam Machine, etc.
- Comment on Arma: Cold War Assault Remastered out with a demo and it's open source 2 weeks ago:
I am actually amazed that they open sourced it.
ARMA, old ARMA, is jank as a fuck as an engine, when not running on a supercomputer, but also… it does some pretty insane shit in terms of detail and scale and number of AI/NPC agents active at the same time.
… there could be some interesting patterns in here, maybe not to emulate or use exactly as is, but try to learn from, if one is insterested in having a game that is basically also a big simulation.
- Comment on Steam machine prices are live 2 weeks ago:
Let’s pick Oct 2025 as our ‘pre RAMpocalypse’ time frame.
Data source: pangoly.com
(I removed BestBuy because it is an extremely erratic dataset that basically bounces around the average of others, but makes the graph nearly unreadable)
16GB DDR5 Crucial RAM
Oct 2025: ~$50
Jun 2026: ~$275
2TB NVME M.2 Crucial SSD
Oct 2025: ~$140
Jun 2026: ~$300 (if you remove Adorama)
512GB NVME M.2 Kingston SSD
Oct 2025: ~$50
Jun 2026: ~$200
$275 - $50 = $225
$300 - $140 = $160
$225 + $160 = $385
Thus, the 2TB variant has an effective ~$385 upcharge due to the RAMpocalypse.
2TB variant MSRP is $1349, thus it would be ~$964 pre-RAMpocalypse, meaning that the RAMpocalypse % upcharge is ~39.9%
Do the same with the 512GB variant:
$275 - $50 = $225
$200 - $50 = $150
$225 + $150 = $375
$375 effective RAMpocalypse upcharge.
MSRP of 512GB variant is $1050, thus it would be ~$675 pre-RAMpocalypse, % upcharge of ~55.5%
Obviously this methodology is not perfectly correct, but I’d argue its quite reasonable ‘napkin math’… you could maybe make an index of all prices of all brands of RAM/SSD in exact performance spec matches to be slightly more accurate, but yeah, roughly, the RAMpocalypse made the Steam Machine, on average, about 40% to 45% more expensive than it otherwise would have been.
- Comment on ETA Prime : Steam Machine Hands-On First Look! 2 weeks ago:
Can you clarify what you mean by this?
Are you saying… $10b annually in harware sales?
Using the $1128 price for the 512GB SM + Controller, that’d be uh… ~8.8m units sold annually.
That’s totally absurd, imo.
That’s roughly a quarter of 2025’s PS5 (any variant) console sales numbers.
Valve would have to pivot into basically only/primarily being a hw manufacturer, they’d have to … somewhere between 10x and 100x the amount of money/capital they’re currently using to source components, do assembly and then ship things physically.
They do not have that much money.
Valve has like a total of less than 500 employees, their entire business culture is built around having a very small number of incredibly competent and often multi-domain skilled employees.
They’d have to radically shift the entire fundamental structure of what the company is, to do something like that.
… but perhaps I misunderstand what you mean?
- Comment on ETA Prime : Steam Machine Hands-On First Look! 2 weeks ago:
Its actually not that expensive, for what it can do, and that’s from the Steve directly, in that video.
He does a price comparison to nearest equivalent parts you can actually currently buy for a DIY PC.
He ends up with $979 for the DIY vs $1050 for the 512gb Steam Machine, a 7% difference.
… and also, this video here, from ETA Prime,.that I linked, that is this post, that apparently no one is actually watching, is also full of game test benchmarks, though not as much crazy specific shit as Steve gets into.
It outperforms a PS5 Pro on say, RDR2.
1440p, high/ultra settings, no fsr upscaling, gets ~75 fps in complex/open areas, significantly better inside of rooms/houses buildings.
And, as stated in the main post body… the Steam Machine is going to support FSR4 upscaling either on launch or very soon afterward, so you could use that, not lose much graphical fidelity, and get more frames.
A PS5 Pro cannot run RDR2 at a stable 60 fps, at 1440p.
It has to be locked to 30 fps to run 4K, which it does via upscaling, and a checkerboard rendering technique.
To get 60fps, it has to be locked at basically 1080p, though I think technically it is doing dynamic resolution scaling, so maybe effectively a slightly higher average resolution than that, maybe 1/4 or 1/2 way to 1440p.
A PS5 Pro costs $900.
- Comment on ETA Prime : Steam Machine Hands-On First Look! 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, I’m guessing they’re also uh, in addition to the lottery, going to be attempting some backend strategy to attempt to weed out likely ‘this is a fake account for resellers’.
- Comment on ETA Prime : Steam Machine Hands-On First Look! 2 weeks ago:
… watch the video.
The majority of it literally is performance testing of various games.
- Comment on ETA Prime : Steam Machine Hands-On First Look! 2 weeks ago:
I am totally open to other people having different stances, but at least for myself, worth it.
I already have an OLED Deck with a 1 TB drive.
So, I can get the 512 GB + controller bundle, and just swap the drives.
$1128 for a ‘pc’ that can run RDR2 and Cyberpunk 77 at pretty darn good graphical settings, at 1440p? And fancy pantsy controller?
Good enough, my eyes are starting to go a bit anyways lol, 4K is very likely wasted on me, and I’d love to have a Steam Deck that’s basically easier to hold and lighter, as a control option.
That’d be a steal, imo, looking at it in PC pricing terms… which is the way I’m looking at it, because that’s the way I’ll mostly be using it.
- Comment on ETA Prime : Steam Machine Hands-On First Look! 2 weeks ago:
Yep.
I was initially hopeful that this thing might be surprisingly affordable, due to… basicslly the theory is that the ‘semi custom’ apu was initially intended to be used in a planned but cancel Windows tablet/Surface kind of thing…
But yeah, then, tariffs, rampocalypse, strait’s closed due to raids = shipping costs go up bigly.
I’m pretty sure the way Valve does their internal finances is that that 30% cut of all games?
Sure some of it goes toward Steam server costs, but I think most of it just goes into a giant war chest fund, from which they ‘experiment’, with things like this.
Makes sense to me that they at least want to break even… business wise, that works if it makes more people use Steam and/or increases their reputation as actually innovating in some way.
But being a loss leader would simply be too dangerous, too risky. They are small fries compared to the major console/pc hw manufacturers, and I am very sure the last thing they would ever want to do is owe some outside actor a lot of money.
- Comment on Valve Adds FSR 4 Directly To Proton Experimental and Steam 2 weeks ago:
Ahem, double post but holy shit:
lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/71039901
Steam Machine price reveal and oh also it will be able to use FSR4.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to steamdeck@sopuli.xyz | 24 comments
- Comment on Valve Adds FSR 4 Directly To Proton Experimental and Steam 2 weeks ago:
For a while, AMD had been kind of… non commital about this… I think they just genuienly did not know if it would be a software/hardware engineering problem they could actually solve.
In that time period, a whole bunch of random opensource people were basically trying their damndest to reverse engineer a seemingly accidentally leaked version of an AMD driver that at least made some of this maybe technically possible.
By the time the OS reverse engineers managed to basically build an unofficial driver that did actuslly work, though maybe not with the greatest performance… well, I’d guess AMD basically copied some of their homework, and then did their own thing.
- Comment on Valve is so behind on Steam Controller orders that some won’t ship until 2027 3 weeks ago:
I mean… even if they’re not moving a lot of units, its still broadly a good problem to have -> considerably more people than you thought, want to buy the thing you sell.
The extremely obvious capitalist response to that would be to raise prices on that thing.Win win, right? The extra profits go toward more capex to make more future production.
… But they haven’t done that.
They haven’t done that because they care about their image more than their profit margins on this particular product.
And/or because in the current environment… basically, the cost/reward on spending more capex isn’t worth the reputation hit.
The capex spending to meaningfully ramp up production would be so expensive, that it’d end up being a net loss, in terms of reputation damage.
… At least this is my semi-informed guess.
- Comment on Valve is so behind on Steam Controller orders that some won’t ship until 2027 3 weeks ago:
Well, on the one hand… having more demand than you can actually fulfill is the kind of problem most busineses would like to have…
- Comment on Steam is ending the physical Steam Gift Cards at retailers! 4 weeks ago:
1] Makes sense, just in general.
2] Makes more sense, when these cards are a part of the case they’re currently fighting in New York.
If the gift cards … stop physically existing as potential ‘money’… well then that somewhat weakens the idea that Valve is pemitting the proceeds of alleged gambling to be functionally redeemable as a valuable physical object / semi-money.
Another whole big angle of the New York AG’s case is that Valve has just known the secondary market for Steam Items and Steam Giftcards exists, and has done nothing about it.
They’ve previously countered that they take secondary markets seriously and have put a considerable deal of effort into finding and shutting those down, and well now, if they’re also just pulling the plug on physical cards, that further makes them look like they’re not just belligetently and openly refusing to comply with the law.
- Comment on Any desktop-mode tips for a new Steam Deck owner? 4 weeks ago:
Yep yep!
I lost my main PC a while back, and have just been daily driving Bazzite on my Deck, with a dock, keyboard mouse, etc.
Works great!
- Comment on Stop Killing Games-backed bill that'd bar publishers from switching off game servers without thinking of players passes California State Assembly vote 1 month ago:
I’m going to keep repeating that Ross Scott needs a statuette/bust of an upright arm gripping a crowbar, labelled ‘For Meritorious Service In The Defense and Preservation of Video Gaming’.
- Comment on Valve make adjustments to Steam tags, and they settled the Vampire Survivor-like argument with Bullet Heaven 1 month ago:
Ahaha, and Kenshi still avoids meaningful classification.
Oh yeah sure, sure, its an open world sandbox survival rpg.
Sure, yep, just like all the others.
Hahahah!
You could apply Wuxia and Samurai and Cult and Animals to it, arguably also Xianxia.
Oh and they’ve apparently reworked some older tags, so we would also have Consversation and Difficult.
I believe they coined their own aesthetic as ‘Swordpunk’, but it’s currently just got ‘Steampunk’ and ‘Post-Apocalyptic’… sure, that’s kinda close, why not.
- Comment on A security researcher says Microsoft secretly built a backdoor into BitLocker, releases an exploit to prove it 1 month ago:
Fucking called it.
lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/57648015/22620272
Its gonna be really funny in a few years when we learn that TPM2 / Windows’ Specific Implementation of SecureBoot has a backdoor for the NSA, just like how the Kinect did.
They never had any legitimate reason to fuck with bootloader as hard as they have been.
- Comment on Canned Lord of the Rings MMO now formally cast aside, Amazon claim they've still got a game "that does justice to Tolkien's world" in the works 1 month ago:
I’m sorry, Amazon Games Studios and Embracer Group bring you ‘a game that does justice to Tolkien’s world’?
That might be the haughtiest, most of out of touch, delusional idea I’ve ever heard.
- Comment on The Cemu Security PSA and Why RetroDECK’s Approach Suddenly Makes a Lot of Sense 1 month ago:
Hilariously I switch from EmuDeck to RetroDeck a while ago, solely because I really like its uh, ESDE theme or whatever that is.
Now I can tug on my suspenders and pretend this actually an extremely prescient security/architecure based opinion/decision, lol.
