Valve Reveals Steam Machine and Frame Requirements, Advises Developers That “Optimizing for Lower Spec Machines Expands Your Audience.”

I have little faith the GabeCube will succeed. For me it's too little too late. The steamdeck didn't really have competition, but the Steam Machine will compete both with consoles and gaming pcs.

If it wants to cater to the casual gamer, it better be cheap, the rumored target was around $700, that's PS5 Pro territory which is so much faster, that was a hard pill to swallow but with the current ram prices we'll be lucky if it retails at $999. And it's not like they can afford to subsidize the price, especially if they want to open the platform to other OEMs as rumored.
 
Regarding the headline ... Tell me your new gaming device cannot compete with similar market products without telling me its performance will be worse. The statement is pure marketing spin. If you cannot compete in a market, re-frame the discussion to ensure your product is seen positively and your competitors are seen negatively.
 
I want GabeCube to succeed, but as the days and info come and go, my faith dwindles. However, the Frame still looks very promising, and depending on price, I may very well work on getting one.
 
I think the Frame could be the real Gem
I had the Oculus Quest before Facebook bought them, would not have bought it otherwise. Then my wife won the Q2 in a contest and gave it to me. Talk about full on Metaverse, quite unsavory. Looking forward to ditching that ecosystem for the Frame. I'll also close out my Facebook account where I have not been active for 10 years.
 
I want GabeCube to succeed
I think it has a good chance of succeeding because developers will finally have a minimum spec PC they can confidently target and optimize for. It should get the people hanging onto their Core 2 Quads and Nehalems to upgrade and stop bitching about AVX2 requirement in games. That really gets on my nerves because we should've had AVX-512 support in games by now but the stragglers make progress impossible.
 
I think it has a good chance of succeeding because developers will finally have a minimum spec PC they can confidently target and optimize for. It should get the people hanging onto their Core 2 Quads and Nehalems
LMAO anyone still using those likely does not have money for a modern upgrade. Or if they do, they have been saving a loooong time. I want the valve hardware to do well because it is the first time it seems truly possible that millions of PC gamers could migrate away from microslop.
 
I have little faith the GabeCube will succeed. For me it's too little too late. The steamdeck didn't really have competition, but the Steam Machine will compete both with consoles and gaming pcs.

If it wants to cater to the casual gamer, it better be cheap, the rumored target was around $700, that's PS5 Pro territory which is so much faster, that was a hard pill to swallow but with the current ram prices we'll be lucky if it retails at $999. And it's not like they can afford to subsidize the price, especially if they want to open the platform to other OEMs as rumored.
imo, $700 would be fine, if it fully supports FSR 4 & 4K upscaled gaming

but unfortunately there are 2 issues here
  1. 8gb vram — will be the limiting factor in many scenarios. high quality resolutions will definitely overflow 8gb
  2. 6nm navi 33 — is not the full RDNA 3. it has some features cut back from navi 32 & navi 31. hope this doesn't impact fsr 4 upscaling
by contrast in january (CES) 2028, AMD (& Microsoft) will have
  1. Zen 6, RDNA 5 unified APU (128bit Lpddr5x + ps5 pro performance)
  2. FSR 5 / Diamond / Amethyst etc
  3. 3nm
  4. much more powerful RT / PT / RR etc
  5. no VRAM limitations because of unified lpddr5x memory
so effectively the window for valve is just little more than a year. after that new RDNA 5 apus will make the current proposed steam machine obsolete
 
Maybe the measure was wrong but I'm a 4k gamer. And it seems that FSR with 4k gaming... in star wars outlaws (not exactly the most demanding of games.) using high quality takes less video memory (less than 8 gig for sure) to run at 4k?? Less upscaling meant more vram use. And that was with everything else maxed... but I need to double check that after I get some work stuff done.
 
Maybe the measure was wrong but I'm a 4k gamer. And it seems that FSR with 4k gaming... in star wars outlaws (not exactly the most demanding of games.) using high quality takes less video memory (less than 8 gig for sure) to run at 4k?? Less upscaling meant more vram use. And that was with everything else maxed... but I need to double check that after I get some work stuff done.
once you get any kind of nanite like (or open world) technology involved then memory requirements balloon

most playstation ports consume memory
forza horizon 5 has a memory leak which causes it to consume more vram if you keep playing it for some time

but it is game specific. if valve can validate which games/settings/scenes work for 8gb vram then that should provide some assurance
 
LMAO anyone still using those likely does not have money for a modern upgrade.
Some people have a weird principle of hanging onto hardware until it dies, even if they can afford something better. And I guess turning down/tweaking settings to run modern software on such old hardware turns them on.
 
if valve can validate which games/settings/scenes work for 8gb vram then that should provide some assurance
They will probably implement a warning message to the effect of "This game is not optimized for Steam Machine" for VRAM intensive games. Developers could also implement Steam Machine detection in their games and warn the user of bad experience if someone insists on running settings too high for Steam Machine to handle.
 
imo, $700 would be fine, if it fully supports FSR 4 & 4K upscaled gaming

but unfortunately there are 2 issues here
  1. 8gb vram — will be the limiting factor in many scenarios. high quality resolutions will definitely overflow 8gb
  2. 6nm navi 33 — is not the full RDNA 3. it has some features cut back from navi 32 & navi 31. hope this doesn't impact fsr 4 upscaling
by contrast in january (CES) 2028, AMD (& Microsoft) will have
  1. Zen 6, RDNA 5 unified APU (128bit Lpddr5x + ps5 pro performance)
  2. FSR 5 / Diamond / Amethyst etc
  3. 3nm
  4. much more powerful RT / PT / RR etc
  5. no VRAM limitations because of unified lpddr5x memory
so effectively the window for valve is just little more than a year. after that new RDNA 5 apus will make the current proposed steam machine obsolete
AFAIK RDNA3 does not support FSR4, much less 4.1.
 
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