Gaming 2023

[Beany]

Thing to remember is that the Steam Machine is specced like a beefed up Steam Deck, not a dialled back PC gaming rig.

Still, as a telly gaming box that you can stream from your main PC on (And play games locally too - it has enough grunt for that, just not the latest AAA stuff) that has a nice design etc ain't to be sniffed at.

Price will matter though. They haven't announced that.

[Matty]

I'll probably get me a controller.

Steam Machine looks good for those who want PC gaming without the hassle. I reckon £500.

[Mito Man]

It doesn’t seem to be upgradable though? I don’t know if it will be in a weird area where you have the limitations of a console in that it’s not upgradable and will really suffer in a few years time, games for it won’t exactly be optimised either and then you’ve got VR for it which could really suffer.

[Beany]

You could say the same about the Steam Deck, the way people have used it is to go through their back catalogue and catch up on their older games, or stream from their main PC.

It's got a lot more GPU grunt than the Ryzen 8945 I've got on my current telly PC, for example.

Looks like storage and RAM (I think) are upgradeable, but nowt else - CPU and GPU and BGA packages.

[Mito Man]

Yeah but steam deck and handheld consoles in general can get away with low specs. You tend to play indie games, 2D stuff, classics on them. When you get on the PC or TV you want the latest and greatest usually.

[Beany]

I don't think that's necessarily true; I'd expect this to very much be a 'secondary' system for most, and a casual gaming system for those who aren't into PC gaming as it stands - IE they might play a bit of age of empires on the work laptop or something. Most people I know literally can't afford to play the latest and greatest because a GPU that can run them costs £500 and most of the people I know are still rocking old 3080s or 4070s, etc.

Anyway, I think what's more interesting is the timing. Microsoft are repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot with Windows 11, and their push to make Everything A Fucking AI Agent, which no-one wants, and I'm seeing more and more relative 'normies' - people who are a bit nerdy, but not full blown nerds, trying out the likes of Linux Mint on old laptops, to see of they can live with Linux on their main PC now that Linux can game well - a Steam Machine might well be a no-brainer for those.

Interesting times, at worst.

[Mito Man]

Microsoft is fucking awful, gets worse every year. I would say the way it tries to sign you up to copilot and 365 is proper malware levels of annoying now.

[Beany]

They're talking about turning the OS into an agentic system - that is, everything is an AI tool. Presumably connected to cloud AI.

Good lucking getting that past Cyber Essentials, ISO 27001, GDPR, Risk Ledger, etc....

[IanF]

I keep seeing the Meta Quest Xbox advert and think it’s a shame they’ve not allowed it to link to the console but only cloud gaming..I’d have been interested otherwise

[RobYob]

The thing that makes me slightly uneasy about Steam Machine 2 is that "4k 60fps" claim which has quite a whiff of marketroid BS.

AMDs FSR scaling needs to take a collosal leap forward from its current ugly state to be acceptable imho.

[Matty]

SteamOS still has the huge hurdle of anti-cheat. If it could overcome that somehow, I reckon many, many people would ditch Windows as an OS and switch. Alas, too many games at the moment rely on it witch cripples its range.

The thing that makes me slightly uneasy about Steam Machine 2 is that "4k 60fps" claim which has quite a whiff of marketroid BS.

AMDs FSR scaling needs to take a collosal leap forward from its current ugly state to be acceptable imho.

I mean, anything can get 4k @60fps if you turn the detail down far enough.

[Beany]

Apparently Valve are 'in talks' with AMD on that subject (FSR4)

[simon_g]

Yeah but steam deck and handheld consoles in general can get away with low specs. You tend to play indie games, 2D stuff, classics on them. When you get on the PC or TV you want the latest and greatest usually.

The PC handheld space is a bit of a silly pissing contest over specs and making the latest AAA stuff playable. I'd actually like a lower spec Steam Deck if could be slimmed down and/or have a bigger battery. Stream anything more demanding off the PC if I'm at home.

Companies like Anbernic doing the retro gameboy-shaped emulator machines have also been putting out out beefier ones using smartphone chipsets and running Android. Do that but SteamOS and I'm in.

[Mito Man]

Microsoft is fucking awful, gets worse every year. I would say the way it tries to sign you up to copilot and 365 is proper malware levels of annoying now.

Had enough, installed Mint on my ancient laptop to see if I can live with it. I’m really not all that into tech and computers but looking at task manager with no programs runnings it was using 5.1gb of ram at idle. That’s a pretty unacceptable waste of resources IMO.

After installing Mint its using a more reasonable 1.6gb but still seems high to me?

Happy though, just general Firefox browsing and it’s like I’m on a new £2500 PC

[Beany]

Welcome to the dark side

Give some simpler games a try in Steam. Yes, Steam just works on most distros these days. I'm assuming an older laptop won't have a chunky GPU in it, but for shit like Hollow Night, Rocket League and some older stuff suitable for the hardware, you'll be surprised by how much Just Works (tm). Which is, like, almost all of it.

https://www.protondb.com/

[Mito Man]

Yes from what I see almost everything is compatible and it will only get better with the new Steam machine running the same software. Only thing is I think I’ll have to keep my desktop PC windows - from what I’m reading Linux doesn’t play well with force feedback wheels. Also I’m pretty comfortable now with using Fusion360 and don’t want to relearn another piece of compatible modelling software. Have to explore some software which bins all the bloat and AI nonsense.

Holy shit how nice is it to have a taskbar that actually just asks what you want it to do?

I’m definitely going to convert my main laptop now but still deciding between pure Linux or dual boot. Need to try out some other programs I use with Wine or create a virtual machine and see how well it plays out.

[Beany]

I'd recommend against dual boot, generally - Windows (usually, but to be fair, not always) has a nasty habit of fucking up the boot sector when doing big updates, 'fast boot' doesn't play nice with fuckin' anything etc.

Virtualbox is probably the quick and dirty way to get a quick Windows VM up (use https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft ... on-Scripts to re-use your valid Windows license ) although your milage may vary with stuff like Fusion360 - a bit of reading from people who have made the move before might get you a guide to making it work better in WINE than through Virtualbox though.

[Mito Man]

Ah cool, yeah I’ve heard good things about Virtualbox. Will give it a go tonight.

[Mito Man]

So current WiFi speed is 500mbps and I’m downloading Windows from Microsoft at a whopping 1.2mb per second and it keeps stopping completely. Been at it for over an hour now Reading online this is a common issue…

[Beany]

I have vague memories of that being something something Realtek being cunts and not doing drivers good, and later kernels having it fixed or improved at the least. Realtek are not the best industry partners for open source

It'd be worth going to the update manager, have a look through kernels, and look for the highest numbers ( I think mints latest might be 6.11 - it may come with 6.8 by default? I don't use mint ) and choose to install it. Reboot, give it a few minutes (apparently Mint can take a few minutes to sort itself out sometimes) then see if the problem remains.

if it craps itself, I think if you hammer F10 during boot, it'll list off the kernel versions you can use - just use the older one (lower number, IE 6.8, not 6.11)

If it doesn't crap itself, but doesn't fix the problem leave the newer kernel in place - it'll generally be subtly better.

God speed, soldier.