Steam Machines Prototypes: Intel CPU, NVIDIA GPU

[entropy]

http://store.steampowered.com/app/41070/

Serious Sam 3 for windows mac and Linux.

http://croteam.com/

Serious Sam 3: BFE - running on Linux!

I'm damn sure brosis wanted to have a source for the claim that
the use of WINELIB is strictly forbidden by Valve.

Edit: BTW http://croteam.com/
The 90's called and want their website back.

[Gps4l]

Source please? Yeah, I used google, unsuccesfully.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/41070/

Serious Sam 3 for windows mac and Linux.

http://croteam.com/

Serious Sam 3: BFE - running on Linux!

[AJSB]

@AJSB You talked about "beat the crap out of PS4". Of course a 500 USD machine should beat the crap out of a 399 USD one, else it would be very surprising. Whether the machine is subsidized or not doesn't matter to the buyer (and from the behavior of Microsoft and Sony so far, I think neither Xbone nor PS4 are subsidized in any major way).

Certainly Valve will have ways to make Steam OS more appear attractive, but I think they will use only methods that don't affect their bottom line much, e.g. additional free DLC for Steam OS users.

Besides the price of the components, someone needs to assemble and test all this, perform distribution, customer service/warranty, etc. which all cost money. I don't think you can sell a machine for much cheaper than the sum of its component prices on Newegg.

About NVidia, some people in other forums are speculating that they gave Valve the 300 cards for the Steam Machine prototypes for free. But that's not a good long-term business strategy. I consider it even questionable that Steam Machine vendors will get any significant additional discounts.

Well upfront, SB will be a much better deal that "will beat the crap out of PS4"...i was a bit too fast and didn't explained in detail what i meant with that...and English is not my natural language...

The *1TB* *SSHD* for starters beats in that department what is offered by competition...*500GB* *HDD* in a PS4...REALLY ?!? It's not even the issue of speed....
...New KillZone is rumored to be 50GB !!! There goes 1/10th of HDD space in a single game !!!

16GB DDR3 + 3GB DDR5 also beats the competition....PS4 will use only DDR5...that's good...but still is only 8GB *for everything* including the graphics.
OTOH, SB will have a total *19GB* of RAM with 3GB of those of DDR5 type dedicated to graphics only....and i really don't think that in practice a PS/Xbone will ever use even 3GB for the graphics.
(and let's not even talk about the "pathetic" Xbone RAM specs )

Then we have the gamepad, that i have big hopes for it and is raising some eyebrows in Redmond and in Tokyo

Then we have a online service that is *free*...PS4/Xbone are , AFAIK, paid for.

Then we have local Streaming that for several reasons beats, IMHO, online streaming.

Then we have a machine that is easy to upgrade and evolve...PS4/Xbone ? closed systems.

Then we have that the SB is truly at core a PC...i'm not sure but i believe that if we want , we can run in it any Linux program....PS4/Xbone ? don't think so

[chithanh]

@AJSB You talked about "beat the crap out of PS4". Of course a 500 USD machine should beat the crap out of a 399 USD one, else it would be very surprising. Whether the machine is subsidized or not doesn't matter to the buyer (and from the behavior of Microsoft and Sony so far, I think neither Xbone nor PS4 are subsidized in any major way).

Certainly Valve will have ways to make Steam OS more appear attractive, but I think they will use only methods that don't affect their bottom line much, e.g. additional free DLC for Steam OS users.

Besides the price of the components, someone needs to assemble and test all this, perform distribution, customer service/warranty, etc. which all cost money. I don't think you can sell a machine for much cheaper than the sum of its component prices on Newegg.

About NVidia, some people in other forums are speculating that they gave Valve the 300 cards for the Steam Machine prototypes for free. But that's not a good long-term business strategy. I consider it even questionable that Steam Machine vendors will get any significant additional discounts.

[brosis]

Use of winelib or wine is forbidden by Valve. How could you forget that? Serious Sam 3 is a native port.

Source please? Yeah, I used google, unsuccesfully.

Open source drivers suck with gaming, we all know that. However, if AMD or NVIDIA were to put full development effort into Linux like they do with Windows, this could be solved quickly.

They don't, they suck only on specific areas. Yeah, the progress could have been overclocked a lot, that was the sense of all my previous posts.

[AJSB]

Firstly the PS4 is only 399 USD, so a machine for 500 USD should better be faster.

And hope is the only thing you can have right now. Even the mid size Steam Machine's components add up to 1000 USD on Newegg. Major potential for cost saving exists only in using a slower CPU or GPU.

1st of all Pallidus was talking about SB cost AT LEAST 700 USD.
I talked about 500 USD...*none* of us was talking about 399 USD.

PS4 is 399USD because it's price is subsidized.

Granted, Valve can't/shouldn't sell SB with subsidized prices...but can sell with marginal/symbolic profits (...and as for 3rd party SB OEMs, i'm sure some will take their chances with AMD APU and can sell SBs with a nice profit)...

We are also forgetting a possibility:

Customer pay 500-600 USD upfront...and get *AT ITS OWN CHOICE* from Steam catalog maybe some AAA games for *FREE* (doubt about it) or several (5-10 AAA titles)at 30% discount price (more likely).
(I didn't pulled 30% from out of nowhere...IIRC, it's Valve's cut in each game sell or a close value to that)

Anyway, i still think 500 USD is possible w/o using those game promos...Xbone would not be sold at loss and costs that, IIRC.

At NewEgg...

1TB SSHD is 100 USD, GTX660 with 3GB DDR5 is 235 USD (with 2GB is 200 USD but they said it will used 3GB in all Video Cards, AFAIK, so i use the one with 3GB at 235 USD for calculations), CPU 120 USD, 480W PSU from 13 USD (i know...but i'm using one for 7 years and nothing burned/damaged so far ), Case from 15 USD (bare w/o PSU), MoBo from 50 USD...

YES , it passes barrier of 500 USD (but not by much) but these are prices for *single units* and NOT BULK PRICES...

...not to mention that Nvidia/Intel are more than willing to enter in this market successfully after been marginalized by AMD from PS4 and Xbone so they might be *very* sympathetic to Valve and cut a nice deal with Valve...

...and no, i didn't forgot price of gamepad but i'm counting again with the savings in the bulk prices to cover it and that it will be included at cost with each SB...and that Valve can sell it w/o SB to anyone and have a bit of extra profit in those units sold w/o SBs...


PS: Oooops....i forgot 16GB DDR3 at 1600mhz...130 USD.
That will push price a bit up but still not impossible...i have no clue how bulk prices can go low in these kind of deals...in a worst case scenario, it will 600 USD and Valve will do the discount in the games.

[chithanh]

Mark my words:
There will be SBs at 500 USD that beat the crap out of PS4...at least i hope so

It's perfectly possible with GTX660 and i3 (maybe some i5 in special considering bulk prices) achieve that value.

Firstly the PS4 is only 399 USD, so a machine for 500 USD should better be faster.

And hope is the only thing you can have right now. Even the mid size Steam Machine's components add up to 1000 USD on Newegg. Major potential for cost saving exists only in using a slower CPU or GPU.

[mmstick]

Serious Engine was native up to version 2 (Serious Sam, second encounter). Afterwards, they removed the rendering plugins and left just directx backend.
That means, SS 2 and up all - are ports. Ports will always run slower.

I also don't know how SS3 was ported, we should probably ask Icculus. Does it internally run parts of winelib?

Finally, I am going to repeat myself third time: MESA does not offer functionality of OpenGL4 (yet) and offers only partial functionality of OpenGL3.
Shader optimizations and dynamic clocking are present. This means - titles that do not depend on OpenGL3(partially)/4 features, will get exactly same or very close performance on open driver.
If Valve would foresee that using open driver will reduce their partnership cost A LOT and would ship AMD, explicitly requiring AMD to fix the open driver, MESA would get OpenGL4 very fast.
Thus fulfilling the requirements of (even current) titles, that demand OpenGL3/4 features.

If Valve invests in Nvidia partnership instead, the driver advancements will only be available for nvidia blob, thus putting Intel, AMD (any) and even nouveau in further disadvantage.
Keep in mind - Nvidia (blob) could have used any propositions from the open driver, should the partnership have happened, by trivial copy-paste.
Thus, Valve would have Linux platform optimized much more efficiently than by relying on (currently more featurefull, yet) closed driver.

And I am not living in any denials, I have not contradicted your statement of OpenGL4 tier games performing slower on MESA. Had Valve seen the potential, this driver would have the chance to perform much faster - at level of being acceptable.

Use of winelib or wine is forbidden by Valve. How could you forget that? Serious Sam 3 is a native port.

Open source drivers suck with gaming, we all know that. However, if AMD or NVIDIA were to put full development effort into Linux like they do with Windows, this could be solved quickly.

[brosis]

The game engine of crysis, is being ported to Linux.

Serious Sam 3 does openGL too, so what's your point ?
I did not run it through wine, It was running native on Linux.
For this game I could use a faster vid card, then the one I have.

But go ahead and live in denial.

Serious Engine was native up to version 2 (Serious Sam, second encounter). Afterwards, they removed the rendering plugins and left just directx backend.
That means, SS 2 and up all - are ports. Ports will always run slower.

I also don't know how SS3 was ported, we should probably ask Icculus. Does it internally run parts of winelib?

Finally, I am going to repeat myself third time: MESA does not offer functionality of OpenGL4 (yet) and offers only partial functionality of OpenGL3.
Shader optimizations and dynamic clocking are present. This means - titles that do not depend on OpenGL3(partially)/4 features, will get exactly same or very close performance on open driver.
If Valve would foresee that using open driver will reduce their partnership cost A LOT and would ship AMD, explicitly requiring AMD to fix the open driver, MESA would get OpenGL4 very fast.
Thus fulfilling the requirements of (even current) titles, that demand OpenGL3/4 features.

If Valve invests in Nvidia partnership instead, the driver advancements will only be available for nvidia blob, thus putting Intel, AMD (any) and even nouveau in further disadvantage.
Keep in mind - Nvidia (blob) could have used any propositions from the open driver, should the partnership have happened, by trivial copy-paste.
Thus, Valve would have Linux platform optimized much more efficiently than by relying on (currently more featurefull, yet) closed driver.

And I am not living in any denials, I have not contradicted your statement of OpenGL4 tier games performing slower on MESA. Had Valve seen the potential, this driver would have the chance to perform much faster - at level of being acceptable.

[AJSB]

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.

Ooooh i bet they will !!!