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Nvidia powering Valve's Steam Box prototypes

humbug said:
I do use Ubuntu, i have Steam on it and am Playing OpenGL games without issue and with excellent performance, so much for AMD's Linux problems....

My problem with Linux / Ubuntu is not hardware support, its perfectly fine. its Ubuntu its self, its still painfully unstable, buggy and lacking serius software compatibility and ease or use.

Ubuntu Developers seem to have a church mentality, anything outside of the every day mundane apps needs 10 independent pieces of software that need the source code editing and then compiled together, i find that talking to some of those developers they are very anti (click install) and don't like pepole who don't believe in hours of programming before getting anything to work, have no business using Ubuntu.
And thats why it will never be mainstream, at least not until that breed die off.
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The thing is Windows will still run more games better and with less problems. You are talking games going back years. I just see SteamOS worringly skewed towards certain hardware for gaming. You need to match your hardware more with Linux than with Windows when it comes to gaming. That potentially increases hardware costs.
When you combine that with the less faffing around with Windows,I am not sure how well SteamOS will do.If Valve wants SteamOS to do well,it needs to be hardware agnostic and run almost perfectly out of the box,otherwise consoles and MS doing more low cost OS deals will scupper it. Why bother faffing around when consoles and Windows PCs are easier to use??

All the SteamBox look like is a prebuilt PC without Windows and with less hardware choice,less games choice,less backwards compatability with games,more lock-ins,more potential issues and more faffing around. Its like the ******* son of a Windows gaming PC and a console with all the worst qualities distilled into one. Its not even cheap too.

The SteamBox exists now. It is either called a SFF Windows gaming PC or a games console.

I have had SFF gaming PCs for years.
 
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I think this is all missing the point. Valve isn't going to dump a generic Linux installation that you have to configure. It's like saying Android phones are like that. Microsoft doesn't have much interest in PC gaming, DirectX is going nowhere, and Valve wants nothing to do with Windows.

Saying that Windows and consoles are easier to use, even before it's out, is just plain puzzling.
 
I can see this working and can see the potential to it. Something small and discrete makes for portability and this appeals. Being able to upgrade parts is a good idea. I will be keeping an eye on these and a serious alternative to the PS4/Xbone.
 
CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
The thing is Windows will still run more games better and with less problems. You are talking games going back years. I just see SteamOS worringly skewed towards certain hardware for gaming. You need to match your hardware more with Linux than with Windows when it comes to gaming. That potentially increases hardware costs.
When you combine that with the less faffing around with Windows,I am not sure how well SteamOS will do.If Valve wants SteamOS to do well,it needs to be hardware agnostic and run almost perfectly out of the box,otherwise consoles and MS doing more low cost OS deals will scupper it. Why bother faffing around when consoles and Windows PCs are easier to use??

All the SteamBox look like is a prebuilt PC without Windows and with less hardware choice,less games choice,less backwards compatability with games,more lock-ins,more potential issues and more faffing around. Its like the ******* son of a Windows gaming PC and a console with all the worst qualities distilled into one. Its not even cheap too.

The SteamBox exists now. It is either called a SFF Windows gaming PC or a games console.

I have had SFF gaming PCs for years.
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Agreed where a GTX 660 upto and including a GTX Titan Steam Box is concerned, i include an R9 260X to an R9 290X in that, its just a very expensive PC awkwardly labeled as a games console.

teppic said:
I think this is all missing the point. Valve isn't going to dump a generic Linux installation that you have to configure. It's like saying Android phones are like that. Microsoft doesn't have much interest in PC gaming, DirectX is going nowhere, and Valve wants nothing to do with Windows.

Saying that Windows and consoles are easier to use, even before it's out, is just plain puzzling.
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If they are using Unix, which they are, the same thing one way or the other will be freely available to everyone outside of the Steam Box, that is the agreement you sign upto when you modify and use Open Source software to further your own means.
So you can have your own Steam Box without buying a Steam Box.

Gregster said:
I can see this working and can see the potential to it. Something small and discrete makes for portability and this appeals. Being able to upgrade parts is a good idea. I will be keeping an eye on these and a serious alternative to the PS4/Xbone.
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As i said before, a little inexpensive gaming / HTPC box nestling next to your TV that has access to a library of very cheap and free OpenGL games would be a good idea and be a real threat to MS and Sony.
Its also something that i would buy.

But CAT is right, that can only be achieved if Steam code in a full range of hardware compatibility, IE Intel and AMD iGPU's (APU's) a GTX 660 to a GTX Titan Box is neither cheap nor small.

Steams success will depend on what the Steam Box is, because that determines where its commenting, as a Discrete GPU box its competing with PC's in every aspect, it will die before it gets to its feet.

As an inexpensive little APU box with lots of great inexpensive or free games, its competing with the more established more expensive Game Consoles, there it can carve out a market for its self.

My worry for it is Nvidia are really drilling for this, and they don't have any APU's, to be in the Steam Box they have to use discrete GPU's.

Whats the deal between Nvidia and Steam? that is what will determine its success.
 
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I can't see it taking off my self. If it's going to run the latest AAA titles at a decent eye candy level, then it's gonna need the hardware to match and that's where it's going to be reaching pc hardware prices. May as well buy a pc or next gen console. I reckon it's going to be an indy machine. PC gaming is apparently on the rise according to an article i read, but a lot of this was due to facebook type games. I'm thinking valve want to tap into this market so potential buyers can play these simple low cost indy games. I'm doubting EA are going to be onboard, so that's already a huge segment missing from the games library, unless EA lease their software license out to be used on Steam-os. As much as i like valve/steam, i think this is destined to fail, or never truly take off like gabe and his crew are anticipating. I will be giving Steam-os a try along with the controller. Let's just hope it doesn't end up being labelled Steam-pos :p
 
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teppic said:
Three things - OS X is a poor gaming OS, the OpenGL drivers are likely poor, and the coding isn't necessarily as good.
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Rroff said:
TBH a lot of games that get ported to OSX are done in programmer's spare time and/or if theres a bit of a lull in workload for the company and compatibility and just getting it running in the first place are a higher priority than performance.
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It's mostly OpenGL support and the companies that do the porting.

I play plenty of games in OSX, and ones that are properly ported ( Blizzard, Aspyr, and Feral) are all top notch.

Sadly OSX has been stuck with just OpenGL until now, with the new OS version in 2-3 weeks finally bringing in Support for at least OpenGL 4.1.
People have already reported improvements across the board, and latest GPU drivers built into OS X have improved substantially compared to last year and before.

NVIDIA even release up to date drivers for each version of OS X 10.8 ( mountain lion) after the latest patches and upgrades.

Apple themselves have improved NVIDIA and AMD performance for OpenGL, and OpenCL.

If people originally created the games in OpenGL, it would be far easier to get it to OS X and Linux though.

Bad performance in OSX is mostly down to lazy devs. As with the Max Payne 3 port just actually being a Cider port, this is the worst thing you can do, even Wine runs better than Cider is the majority of cases.

On a note of GPU's, since OSX 10.8.3 you can install any NIVIDA 5xx card and higher and it'll instantly work, the same for some AMD 6xxx card, and most 7xxx ones.

I'm using an EVGA GTX660 3GB Superclocked + card in my Mac Pro and it was simply plug and play.
 
When Valve ships its own prototype version of a Steam Machine later this year to 300 beta users, those folks are getting relatively tiny and powerful gaming consoles. At very least, it'll have an NVIDIA GTX 660 (all the way through Titan), and anywhere from an Intel i3 CPU to an i7-4770. All prototypes come with 3GB of DDR5 RAM and a 1TB/8GB Hybrid SSHD for storage.
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Did we skip DDR4?:confused:
 
Gregster said:
Has to be a typo for DDR3 ram. 3GB is an odd number though and I think that is possibly wrong also.
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They are talking about GDDR5 as in on the graphics card (GDDR5 is equivalent to DDR3, and is what the PS4 has which the fanbois always wrongly go on about). They have 16GB DDR3 I think.
 
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Gregster said:
Has to be a typo for DDR3 ram. 3GB is an odd number though and I think that is possibly wrong also.
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Probably as AFAIK the intel CPUs only have dual DDR3 memory controllers and I don't think you can bypass that and do it via the motherboard like you used to with LGA775 CPUs. (Which would have seperated the memory sub-system and allowed them to implement whatever speed they wanted).
 
Dread to think of the price tbh. even a "basic" 4670k and 660 its gonna be more expensive than a console. Yea ok it will outperform the console easily but who would buy one for the price if a mainstream console can do it for less?

I dont want to be submissive about it because I genuinely hope valve succeed with this and it becomes a hit.

Apparently its all sort of open source so they even supply the cad files for the box so you can make your own and the software too. If valve do this then they truly are for the gamers and not in it just to make money. I really like Valve as they seem to genuinely listen to their customers and try to make things that they want. Exactly how a company should be. ocuk are like it too in many ways.
 
Theres also the ability to stream games that you can't play natively due to support or your hardware though that will depend on having a decent speed, low latency internet connection :S
 
ubersonic said:
You would be surprised how many peoples gaming rigs just consist of games and Firefox. If that's all you need then an O/S that does it better will always have a use.
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Plus you can always run Windows XP/7/8 in a virtual machine at near-bare metal speed for any apps needed (though not Windows gaming really), instead of dual booting.
 
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