ericwdhs
@ericwdhs@discuss.online
- Comment on The Steam Frame Officially Has FCC Certification To Sell In The USA - Steam Deck HQ 1 day ago:
Yeah, but that’s not abnormal stuff. Every anticipated hardware device has people digging into documents, patents, etc. for clues ahead of release, tracking milestones, etc.
Then again, I was an active participant in similar efforts for both the original Steam Deck and Valve Index releases, and I follow a few other tech spaces that see this continually even right now, so maybe my standards for “normal” are way off.
- Comment on The Steam Frame Officially Has FCC Certification To Sell In The USA - Steam Deck HQ 1 day ago:
They were targeting sub-$1000 before things got crazy. If it was going to be exactly $1000 and it sees the 40% jump the Steam Machine did, that would be $1400. I think storage and RAM are a lower percentage of the Frame’s cost which would theoretically push it down further, but then again, that may be countered by the market continuing to get worse. Still, I’ll be very surprised if they price it a ton higher than $1500.
- Comment on The Steam Frame Officially Has FCC Certification To Sell In The USA - Steam Deck HQ 1 day ago:
Obviously, my experience is anecdotal, but I got both Valve-developed headsets at launch, the HTC Vive and the Valve Index, the latter of which I think is still very close to the sweet spot for VR tech 7 years on. I’ve purposely avoided all the Meta headsets.
The stock Vive only using straps for support was indeed a little uncomfortable to wear, but the experience was still compelling enough to use it for hours. I did eventually do the welding mask mod for it that greatly improved the comfort and added over-ear speakers like the Index later got.
Fast forward to the Index, and I still use it off and on. It was comfortable enough out of the box to never modify, and I’ve even fallen asleep a few times in the thing. The Frame further shrinking the front and moving weight to the back for balance can only be better.
I think VR overall is only a failure for those who bought into the hype that it’s an evolution that would eventually replace flat gaming (see the Ready Player One vision). That’s never going to happen because the abstraction that allows you to press a button, move a mouse, tilt a stick, etc. to simulate an action taking much more energy to perform in the real world is a huge convenience we’re never going to give up en masse. It’s perfectly fine for VR to remain a niche, adjacent medium.
- Comment on The Steam Frame Officially Has FCC Certification To Sell In The USA - Steam Deck HQ 1 day ago:
I peeked. It didn’t seem that bad, just memes and shitposts.
I also don’t mind releases taking the “when it’s ready” approach. It’s kind of refreshing actually.
- Comment on Steam Machine LED support on Linux has been merged into OpenRGB 5 days ago:
I’ve never used any of this and can’t find documentation on the hardware sync plugin, so forgive the maybe dumb question. How far can the configuration realistically go? Let’s say my ideal setup is splitting the 17 LEDs into something like:
6 for CPU usage with red as the active bar marking out 50% to ~100% usage and blue as negative space
1 spacer
3 for temperature going up from blue to red
1 spacer
6 for GPU usage with red as the active bar marking out 50% to ~100% usage and blue as negative space
How close would I be able to get to that?
- Comment on Valve says iFixit will keep selling Steam Deck batteries after all. Valve won’t be sunsetting the battery yet. 2 weeks ago:
As far as I understand it, there’s no actual “official” definition. Second-party can mean both:
From the main supplier but retaining a different supplier’s branding (as opposed to rebranding, which makes it first-party again even if the manufacturer doesn’t change).
OR
The buyer, analogous to the second-person point of view (“you”), so in that context, a second-party battery would be one you build yourself.
- Comment on The Steam Frame's "Great on Frame" Page Is Now Live 2 weeks ago:
That’s possible, but I believe that Valve employee’s exact wording was something like “we’re trying really hard to beat the original Index price ($999).” To me that reads like beating the Index price wasn’t a guarantee and that if they did beat the Index price, it wasn’t by much, so I’m assuming the pre-RAMpocalypse price was $900 to $1000. The Steam Machine saw a 40% price increase due to the current market. RAM and storage is a lower percentage of the Frame’s hardware, so I think it’ll probably see a 20% to 30% price increase. That gives an approximate range of $1100 to $1300, but I’m guessing on the higher end to either not be surprised or pleasantly surprised. I don’t think they’re factoring in the (heavily subsidized) Quest 3 price much at all.
- Comment on The Steam Frame's "Great on Frame" Page Is Now Live 2 weeks ago:
I’m an Index (and Vive and OG Controller and Link and Deck…) early adopter too, and it helps to remember this is all part of the same effort building on itself. Valve’s hardware division was much less mature in the Index days. Don’t forget that only a few years before, they basically developed all the tech for the Vive themselves, but still needed to partner with HTC for the manufacturing side. I’m glad the new stuff has better push.
- Comment on The Steam Frame's "Great on Frame" Page Is Now Live 2 weeks ago:
The Index also didn’t have what’s basically a full ARM device inside, but yeah, I still think anywhere from $1200 to $1500 is most likely.
- Comment on Deck: Does anyone have an idea or way of estimating how many Steam Deck are in use? (Speculation) 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, the inverse problem also exists, multiple users on a single device causing that device to get over-reported. This is most commonly seen with cyber cafes in Asia. The effect is present all year (and is another reason to expect the actual Deck percentage to be slightly higher), but it spikes every February as Chinese cyber cafes get busy over Lunar New Year.
- Comment on Deck: Does anyone have an idea or way of estimating how many Steam Deck are in use? (Speculation) 2 weeks ago:
As I understand it, the survey flags a random sampling of logged in Steam user accounts to run the survey on each month. For each selected user, the survey prompt then pops up the next time they’re online on the device they’re online with as an offline device can’t receive the survey notice.
Let’s say I game with my desktop 20 times per month and my Deck 10 times per month, but I’m only actually connecting it to the Internet 2 times a month for updates. In that scenario, it seems the desktop would be 10 times more likely to get the survey even though that doesn’t reflect the actual usage spread.
- Comment on Deck: Does anyone have an idea or way of estimating how many Steam Deck are in use? (Speculation) 2 weeks ago:
See my other comment here. I’m in the “active Deck user, but not as main PC crowd.”
- Comment on Deck: Does anyone have an idea or way of estimating how many Steam Deck are in use? (Speculation) 2 weeks ago:
@thingsiplay@beehaw.org Does this work like Reddit tagging?
I have a Steam Deck I would consider to be in active use, but it’s a secondary system for me, and the times I’m using it most heavily are done without Internet. I don’t believe it’s ever been counted in a survey, and I imagine there’s a bunch of users in the same situation.
The same kind of thing used to happen with VR headsets before they switched it to counting any headset used in the last 30 days (determined by whether the driver was launched). I always used to get the survey when mine wasn’t plugged in, and it always annoyed me to not be counted in the VR userbase. Lol.
- Comment on Has anyone here got their Steam Machine yet? 3 weeks ago:
I just did some testing.
The game ran a quick benchmark and set stock settings of 1080p, medium preset, FSR scaling, and quality scaling mode to yield a steady 60 fps with about 70% GPU usage. The frame generation was enabled, but there was enough horsepower for it to not actually be used. The picture was a bit grainy however.
With both FSR scaling and frame generation disabled still at medium and 1080p, it’ll play around 45 fps.
I would say the optimal settings are close to stock, but you’ll want to upgrade from FSR 3 to FSR 4 released recently on Proton Experimental. This will probably be unnecessary later when FSR 4 gets rolled into the regular Proton releases. The game looked much less grainy with this.
To do this, on the Steam page for the game, you’ll want to go to Settings (the gear icon) > Properties > Compatibility > enable “Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool” > Proton Experimental. Do note the settings in game are currently hard coded to say FSR 3, so you won’t see it mention running on 4.
There’s probably more tweaking that can be done, but that’s kind of getting away from the point of this thing. I have a beefy PC and would still be happy to play it as above.
- Comment on Has anyone here got their Steam Machine yet? 3 weeks ago:
Nice. I already have that one. I’ll check it out in a few resolution-settings configurations later tonight.
- Comment on My steam machine arrived! 3 weeks ago:
I feel sorry for anyone that doesn’t have at least one area they are enthusiastic enough about to splurge a little in. Still, can we really call it consumerism when Valve releases hardware so infrequently? Seriously. 11 years between controllers? 7 years between VR headsets? 6+ years expected between handhelds?
- Comment on My steam machine arrived! 3 weeks ago:
Well, I never claimed it filled a necessary niche. It’s a luxury good by definition. I just don’t mind having multiple options, redundancy, and overlap in hardware roles even if that means some of it gets underutilized. That said, I’m not planning to keep the thing under the TV indefinitely. It’s going to justify its standalone performance at least occasionally.
- Comment on My steam machine arrived! 3 weeks ago:
I think you’re just not seeing outside the bubble of the use cases that make sense to you. I already have great daily driver PCs currently running a mix of Bazzite and CachyOS (and Windows, ew), and I have built a couple SFF PCs before, so I’m no stranger to all of that. I can’t speak for anyone else here, but part of why I find the Steam Machine compelling is it covering the opposite end of that spectrum to a degree other SFF options haven’t reached.
- Comment on My steam machine arrived! 3 weeks ago:
Lol. Don’t assume I’m going into these purchases on blind fanboyism, and don’t confuse “niche” with “bad.” I just have very good experiences with their hardware going all the way back to the OG Controller, Link, and the Vive (which I consider theirs more than HTC’s), and that informs decisions that follow.
- Comment on My steam machine arrived! 3 weeks ago:
Just tested it. Yes, it does. It woke it from sleep and also woke it from shutdown.
CEC, on the other hand, is behaving weird for me. That’s probably a software issue Valve will soon patch or an issue with my TV. I have a 2017 4K Samsung that I will never connect to the Internet and have never bothered to update. I’ll just keep its remote handy in the meantime.
- Comment on My steam machine arrived! 3 weeks ago:
“Not that much smaller” is doing some heavy lifting. Every SFF build or mini PC compromises something, price, size, thermal performance, whatever. Physics necessitates it. It’s perfectly fine for you to not value size so much that a 3.8L case isn’t compelling to you over let’s say a 6L ITX case (or the 8L you really need for a discrete GPU), but it’s also okay to feel the opposite.
- Comment on My steam machine arrived! 3 weeks ago:
Repairability isn’t an absolute scale, and smaller form factors need to make more compromises in modularity. It’d be silly to judge this on the same metric as a fully modular desktop PC since it’s not trying to be a substitute for that use case.
- Comment on My steam machine arrived! 3 weeks ago:
Lol. Thank you.
- Comment on My steam machine arrived! 3 weeks ago:
I got mine yesterday. Copying my thoughts from a comment in another thread:
Don’t mind my essay here. TLDR: I love this thing.
I got mine yesterday. It’s the 512GB with no controller since I already got the controller separately and the 2TB version felt like an especially bad deal.
I was initially on the fence about the price and reserved just to get into the queue to make the actual buy decision later. I was expecting more people to have thoughts on it out before my spot in the queue came up, but I ended up getting my purchase email very quickly on 6/30. I let the email sit for a day but ended up deciding to pull the trigger for a few reasons:
One, I’ve owned every first-party Valve device so far, and all of them have been more than the sum of their parts. Two, I wanted a HTPC, travel, and LAN party PC that’s a bit less restraining than a laptop. Three, being a bit of a performance snob has been distracting me away from actually gaming and I wanted to get back into the no nonsense side of PC gaming again. And four, I don’t mind spending a little extra money advancing Linux, repairable hardware, etc.
I feel like I have to acknowledge reviews from the PC space have been largely negative, but they seem to be undervaluing a lot: the form factor (a 6" cube is still tiny compared to almost all other SFF builds), performance per volume (almost the entire cube is a heat sink), and the benefits of more standard performance targets we’ve already seen with the Deck.
As for first impressions, the device is packaged well, and unboxing was very satisfying. I did have some trouble getting my controller paired since it was already paired to my existing desktop PC and plugging it in directly wasn’t enough to get around that like I expected, but looking up how to pair it to multiple PCs got me past that.
I spent a few hours testing a mix of light to demanding games, and I’m more than happy with what it can do. I haven’t tried gaming beyond 1080p yet, but I’m going to be very selective about when and how I do that. 512GB is proving to be plenty of space for what I’m playing at any one time, and I think that would still be true if I didn’t have other devices acting as additional storage.
I feel like all my expectations above have been validated, and now I’m really looking forward to getting the Frame. I want to make a travel backpack or suitcase with foam cutouts for the whole set.
- Comment on Has anyone here got their Steam Machine yet? 3 weeks ago:
Got any particular games you’d like tested? I got mine in yesterday, and I’ve got a pretty big library of games to throw at it.
- Comment on Has anyone here got their Steam Machine yet? 3 weeks ago:
I’m in the same position, but I actually decided to proceed with my purchase. See my other comment here for details, but the short answer is that I still think the base model is a good value for what it is and fills some niches my beefy PC can’t.
- Comment on Has anyone here got their Steam Machine yet? 3 weeks ago:
Don’t mind my essay here. TLDR: I love this thing.
I got mine yesterday. It’s the 512GB with no controller since I already got the controller separately and the 2TB version felt like an especially bad deal.
I was initially on the fence about the price and reserved just to get into the queue to make the actual buy decision later. I was expecting more people to have thoughts on it out before my spot in the queue came up, but I ended up getting my purchase email very quickly on 6/30. I let the email sit for a day but ended up deciding to pull the trigger for a few reasons:
One, I’ve owned every first-party Valve device so far, and all of them have been more than the sum of their parts. Two, I wanted a HTPC, travel, and LAN party PC that’s a bit less restraining than a laptop. Three, being a bit of a performance snob has been distracting me away from actually gaming and I wanted to get back into the no nonsense side of PC gaming again. And four, I don’t mind spending a little extra money advancing Linux, repairable hardware, etc.
I feel like I have to acknowledge reviews from the PC space have been largely negative, but they seem to be undervaluing a lot: the form factor (a 6" cube is still tiny compared to almost all other SFF builds), performance per volume (almost the entire cube is a heat sink), and the benefits of more standard performance targets we’ve already seen with the Deck.
As for first impressions, the device is packaged well, and unboxing was very satisfying. I did have some trouble getting my controller paired since it was already paired to my existing desktop PC and plugging it in directly wasn’t enough to get around that like I expected, but looking up how to pair it to multiple PCs got me past that.
I spent a few hours testing a mix of light to demanding games, and I’m more than happy with what it can do. I haven’t tried gaming beyond 1080p yet, but I’m going to be very selective about when and how I do that. 512GB is proving to be plenty of space for what I’m playing at any one time, and I think that would still be true if I didn’t have other devices acting as additional storage.
I feel like all my expectations above have been validated, and now I’m really looking forward to getting the Frame. I want to make a travel backpack or suitcase with foam cutouts for the whole set.
- Comment on Steam machine prices are live 5 weeks ago:
I think the size is a selling point for a lot of people actually, especially outside PC enthusiast circles where we’ve come to expect big cases and whatnot. I’ve got a visual for a 6" cube on my desk right now, and it’s crazy how small it feels. All the “equivalent” small form factor builds I’ve seen proposed are still legitimately several times bigger at best when comparing volume.
Paired with the Frame’s virtual screen and controls, it might be a great travel gaming PC solution with better ergonomics than a laptop.
- Comment on Steam machine prices are live 5 weeks ago:
It’s worth remembering that most discussions like this are dominated by enthusiasts (including both of us) whereas most people in general are not enthusiasts.
In my experience, most people don’t actively play more than 512GB worth of games at once, and you can add to this with spare microSD cards or other PCs on the network. Steam makes transferring game installs to the main SSD from elsewhere rather painless.
Even as a bit of a data hoarder myself, I only really go beyond 512GB to: 1) keep pace with multiple friend groups that like entirely different game genres I need to all keep available at a moment’s notice, and 2) maintain games modded outside the Steam workshop that I may not play that often but still want to not have to set up more than necessary.
- Comment on Steam machine prices are live 5 weeks ago:
I doubt $700-$800 was going to happen even before prices went crazy. Some time ago, someone at Valve stated they were trying to beat the Index’s $1000 launch price in a way that implied that if the Frame had beaten that price, it wouldn’t have done so by much. The Frame probably won’t see the 40% price jump of the Steam Machine, but it won’t be 0% either.