Steam Machines Prototypes: Intel CPU, NVIDIA GPU

[brosis]

Nope, They couldn't make any use of open source drivers today or or in foreseeable future. Opensource driver for todays top bracket of GPUs simply doesn't exist. Even r600 series opensource driver, for older models, the best we have today for somewhat powerful GPUs, is not competitive with binary blob in terms of functionality or shader performance. If by "support" you mean, write open source driver from scratch for different' company's GPU -- well they are not a hardware company and I don't believe it's possible to do in a year. And I doubt they could provide incentive large enough to force AMD or NVIDIA put large amounts of human recourses into such task, or even make this task attractive for them.

As a huge contractor, Valve may have made arrangements on target future platform of their choice. Todays opensource driver, especially r600g is quite apt in terms of performance and functionality. Only some improvements had to be made to SI driver and that would be achievable, if Valve would secure a contract for a batch of cards. The fglrx blob is even today quite inefficient (slow 2D, slow response, slow kernel support) and is not future-proof(Wayland would minimize the overhead a lot, GL ES missing, Wayland integration missing). I am not talking about nvidia or Valve writing drivers here.

The cooling solution is the most critical part to create useable systems for a living room - small cases often require high spinning fans, would really like to know what tricks they want to use. a titan with 250w max + cpu with 84w + board, hd (lets count 16w) would be 350w and that in a small case, i want to see/hear this...

Cooling is not big deal. Take copper or riffled case, few good large heatpipes here and there and stirr a large slow rotating fan to the mix. Thermal waste up to 500W can be easily battled by conventional cooling, upwards there is water cooling available - since long time also as standalone, hands-free.

[Kano]

Are you really sure you read that the prototype case is only 12x12.4x2.9"? With 2.9" you can not really use huge cooling solutions and for water cooling there is absolutely no spare place. Btw. i dont get how you can use a fullsize pci-e card with that, low profile cards are usally only up to gt 640 available. Maybe they turn em 90 degree?

[brosis]

Are you really sure you read that the prototype case is only 12x12.4x2.9"? With 2.9" you can not really use huge cooling solutions and for water cooling there is absolutely no spare place.

Take a miniITX case (like e-OTONASHI) made of riffled sides, insert a low-profile or PCIe 90degree adaptor card, insert a large, highly efficient cooling block with large slow rotating blowing out fan (Scythe big shuriken is a nice example), finally drop 6-8 heatpipes going from CPU to GPU via this block. The 10x10x1.5" space is sufficient to house a very high efficiency custom cooler together with fan. The cooling area will be similar to that of modern high-end GPU plus CPU. Sure, its technological challenge, but nothing of impossible. Ofc at 500w+ waste it will be difficult. The limiting factor is always total cooling area of the cooler that will need larger surface for efficient convection. All hardware will OFC be custom made in custom form factor.

Btw. i dont get how you can use a fullsize pci-e card with that, low profile cards are usally only up to gt 640 available. Maybe they turn em 90 degree?

You can't, but they were partnering. Large enough batch and one gets Titan in a the playcard format. But they will just have to downclock it. It won't be loud, but it will surely be barbecue-friendly.

[stiiixy]

The SteamBox is meant as nothing more than an officially sanctioned device with which you can expect a reliable product to just work. Or at least get the fastest updates if something's wrong! That's support and the expectation as a consumer who's forking cabbages would expect. You get some extra feature's thrown in to the SteamOS like the streaming to telly deal (sounds like a software thing, anyway). As far as I know, nothing's stopping any of you from running an integrated AMD unit with SteamOS (or Mint, or Red Hat or whatever with the Steam Client overlay). Steam are being pretty damn open about wtf you can do with their stuff. The more they can give to people to as they please their way means more customers. They dont really have to do this. You just have to meet them 3/4 of the way in order to access their/your content. Give and take. They're mostly giving from what I can tell.

And sure the i7 might be overkill, but mayhap Intel offered Valve a price they couldn't refuse. IT happens all the time. Take for example how MS react to companies threatening to go linux. In come hte sales teams and cut a better deal. Mayhap Intel i7 stocks were building up and this can clear the warehouse? Or maybe it's just sales and propaganda! Regardless, it might still yet be a cheap way to get a fully funtional i7+TITAN PC with the added benefit of being consoley. I'll likely still prefer my AMD-based OpenELEC machines for a while yet. Maybe Steam can come up with an ultra-lowend base (just iGPU) for the casual gaming market and do away with the likes of Ouya-nah.

Until then, I'ma just gonna wait and watch everyone else's crazy idea's about this device fly by!

[LinuxGamer]

Nice try Canonical looks like Valve Wins this one Steam OS FTW!!!!

[Bathroom Humor]

A comment on another website just reminded me of another big price reduction at play here, and one I'm sure they will advertise:
Steam costs nothing extra to use online. The OS and the service are both free of charge, and many of the games on there are also significantly less expensive than modern console games, and they have big sales all the time (Sony and MS are playing catch-up here). So you could actually expect to pay far less for the steam machine over its lifetime considering you won't need a "steambox gold network account" that add to the price over time for the premium online service. Accessing the Internet, including game servers, are free by default. And some very popular Valve games are free to play as well.
If they advertise this point well enough, this could be a big draw I think.

[Bathroom Humor]

Nice try Canonical looks like Valve Wins this one Steam OS FTW!!!!

This picture and this post. I literally laughed for 10 solid seconds.
I normally give people on such forums as these the benefit of the doubt, but you clearly have a 'creative' point of view.
I mean, even on the most superficial level, your post has no relevance to the article in the slightest. And the image... the conveyance is completely lost to me. My brain hurts trying to wrap around it.

[liam]

Theoretically. AFAIK there's (currently) no way of using both integrated and dedicated graphics at the same time.

David Herrmann, Dave Airlie and probably others have finally merged support for both render and modesetting nodes. This should allow you to do what you want.


To the board:

Why is anyone supposing that Steam OS is using xorg? Why wouldn't they just write the interface atop of sdl? We're talking about a large interface so windowing doesn't seem like something they'll need.

[madjr]

The specs look so extreme that it is hard to believe that you would use that rig only for Linux. I do not know a Linux game that would require such expensive gfx cards, ok maybe a GTX 660, but never a Titan. A i5-4570 is a good gamer cpu, but the highend gfx cards are most likely not needed for the living room with just a full hd tv - ok, you could use 2 of em if the multihead feature would be better (games like kf need manual adjustments for that). Those steamboxes are definitely no competition to the 400-500$ systems you will get from sony/ms soon, the minimum price seems to be more like 800$+. Ram is not that expensive anymore but more than 8 GB are most likely not required - most games run with 32 bit executeables anyway. .

This is a message to developers that they want AAA in their machines and on SteamOS. That a game like Crysis4 (or HL3 ^^)will run very well on these.

with crappy specs you're not going to get those studios or even some of the OEMs interested.

However, the "bulk" will be medium console like specs.

[johnc]

To the board:

Why is anyone supposing that Steam OS is using xorg? Why wouldn't they just write the interface atop of sdl? We're talking about a large interface so windowing doesn't seem like something they'll need.

Xorg isn't a window manager so I'm not following your question.

But otherwise yeah, they could probably skip a whole window manager / shell setup. Is that how XBMC does it?