If you already have Ethernet at both ends I cannot recommend enough game streaming. With the right setup it is almost identical to having my computer plugged in physically, and I am very sensitive to input latency.
I can get 4K HDR 120Hz running over gigabit Ethernet without visually sacrificing too much on bitrate, but you can squeeze more bitrate at lower fps or 1440p (obviously) if that is your preference. You can also tune these settings per-game with the setup I have which is quite useful.
Hardware wise, I'm using a Steam Deck as the streaming client in a docked setup (ala Nintendo Switch). It seems to handle everything I can throw at it, and it has the bonus of being able to run simpler games without streaming anything.
I have a third-party (UGREEN) dock providing power, USB and gigabit Ethernet, display (though unfortunately no HDMI-CEC to turn the TV on automatically (I worked around this using a janky automation script)). The official dock has HDMI-CEC but costs ~2x as much with less IO. I'll deal with my jank script.
For software, I'm running MoonDeck for game streaming via Sunshine on my gaming PC. The Steam Remote Play streaming is good, but not quite _as_ good, sadly.
I have a gaming PC and a steam deck. My goal was to use my steam deck as a steam link (their old streaming hardware) w/ a Xbox controller
Both are connected via Ethernet and actually the video quality was very very good, and input lag was completely fine.
Unfortunately there were so many issues. I want a console like experience where I can just decide that i want to pick up a controller and play.
With this setup I have to unlock windows which is annoying. Also often times something gets stuck so I have to walk to the desktop to fix/click around, or it plays audio via PC, or I have to disable HDR, etc.
The issue in your setup is Windows^tm. (what I do) gaming machine's shell profile,
if [[ $(tty) == "/dev/tty2" ]]; then
<insert your steamOS session invocation/args here>; sudo chvt 1; exit
fi
then all you need is some event(s) to trigger changing to tty2 on the target machine. perhaps when a controller connects, or your tv changes input, or you press a button on your tv/tv box remote.
Along with the complexity you mention, a real dealbreaker for me is controller support for couch co-op/multiplayer.
It's the biggest difference and flaw between steam devices and traditional consoles. Even hugely popular multiplayer titles like Overcooked either don't work, or require hours of research and configuration.
This is such a baffling claim? I've had very close to zero issues with couch gaming with my steam deck + wireless xbox controllers. They overwhelmingly just work. Including Overcooked?
I tried using the official steam client on my TV (running some google/android TV OS) which was hard-wired in (100 Mbps) which should be sufficient for 1080p/60 if not 4K/60 but there is some android TV bug that adds an unacceptable audio lag. Video quality was fine. (https://steamcommunity.com/app/353380/discussions/0/62441675...)
Seems like a waste to use a steam deck for this when the TV hardware seems more than powerful enough but if it works it works, and my steam deck is gathering dust anyway. Thanks for the idea.
My TV was cheap so I didn't expect much. Steam link really struggles on it - thankfully I still have the old Steam Link hardware and it works alright. Locked to 1080p though.
Refused to spend more on a TV because I feel you don't get much more processing power for an increase in price. All smart TVs I've interacted with in the last 5 years have been much slower than I would consider acceptable.
While one can always try to see if their "Smart TV" can actually run a streaming client app like Moonlight with adequate performance, it's so hit-and-miss I just assume I'll have to plug in a ~$50 Android TV streaming stick via an HDMI input. I've used the 'Google Chromecast with Google TV' and 'Amazon Fire TV Stick 4k 2nd gen' and was able to sideload the open source Moonlight client app to stream 4K HDR10+ / 60fps from my server PC at 80 to 100Mbps.
It's not necessarily the CPU power, it's just that most of these TVs have wildly varying throughput from crufty driver stacks. The manufacturers don't seem to test them beyond the ability to receive ~25Mbps streams in the usual streaming apps. As long as it does that, they don't care to make it work to the rated speeds the hardware should be capable of. So maybe it has higher throughput, maybe it doesn't. And there's no guarantee what the throughput will be after the next firmware update. Since I want to do game streaming and also have UHD rips that can go up to ~100Mbps, I now just always use 'Smart TV's in dumb mode and run content from an external device.
Also really depends on what codecs are done in software vs hardware on the device.
Speaking from working on the Android/Fire TV devices, they all have at most one hardware decoder, which really limits what the streaming companies can do. My team recently launched a multiview feature on A/FTV and we had to do so much hand holding and device detection work (4K decoder) to try and make the experience good and hide it from others...
Meanwhile the mobile teams, roku, iOS / tvOS / vision pro teams can full send with 4 players because the devices all have multiple hardware decoders... for some reason Android TV devices are along in this category.
I'm actually surprised you're able to support true multiview across diverse hardware platforms at all - so congrats! Consumer streaming sticks, dongles, boxes and smart TVs are a fragmented hellscape between divergent hardware, firmware, OSes, codecs, DRM and apps. Pretty much anything more demanding than baseline '1 stream in 1 app' will have lurking issues on at least one platform with a >1M unit installed base.
The android streaming device market pretty much died when it became a race to zero margin. Arguably, the best Android-based streaming device money can buy is still the NVidia Shield, which is a 10 year old hardware design.
> I'm actually surprised you're able to support true multiview across diverse hardware platforms at all - so congrats!
We had to define a ton of different variables to try to categorize the system, and from that we track playback events (buffering, errors, etc) and if a device family as a whole shows too many issues we kill switch the feature for that device. This is on top of device side watchdogs that kill the feature for a user specifically if we fail to have a baseline playback performance with the software decoder. It's a very hands on feature, but I'm proud of the work our team did!
> Arguably, the best Android-based streaming device money can buy is still the NVidia Shield, which is a 10 year old hardware design.
Absolutely. As an example other devices had good playback at only 360p, but couldn't hit 540p. Shield can reliably hit x2 720p streams.
It's still my daily driver for personal browsing and the device I primarily develop on (also the only 64 bit kernel ATV device currently iirc). The Walmart Onn Pro 4K boxes are the runner up in my experience, they're pretty good.
Steam Remote Play sadly breaks down if anything involving Admin comes up. Task manager, admin prompt, etc.
Sunshine / moonlight can work but you need to run them as admin.
Sunshine / moonshine also have problems with the full DualSense features, you need to be wired, have VirtualHere set up, and even then it might not all work with all clients.
So yes both can work, but both have downsides that can be alleviated with an HDMI cable.
Dualsense's main advantage is the built in trackpad and gyroscope but if you want to play wirelessly you are probably better off switching to the Steam Controller at this point which also has a trackpad and gyroscope. Or if using Windows standard Xbox controller if you don't need a trackpad or gyroscope, as Xbox controllers have first class support.
I just disable UAC. Yada yada bad practice yeah I know. I'm sick of constant slight annoyance due to hypothetical threat. If I get pwned I get pwned; hasn't happened yet lol
> If you already have Ethernet at both ends I cannot recommend enough game streaming. With the right setup it is almost identical to having my computer plugged in physically, and I am very sensitive to input latency.
There still some issues. If your beefy machine has monitor of a different resolution it gets a bit wacky. In the past I had to plug fake HDMI-EDID thing because my main PC is ultra-wide and what will get streamed is a coin toss: sometimes it's ultra-wide made to fit in destination screen, sometimes It's something else.
If game you're trying to stream has a launcher: again, coin toss - might display launcher that is PITA to use from controller or not at all. I recall having to walk to another room to do the launcher steps on the main PC to play on steam deck.
Meanwhile, PS Portal is flawless when connected to 5GHz network.
Back when I actually had a gaming PC, I loved using my Steam Link. I used powerline Ethernet to get a decent connection from my bedroom to the basement and it worked well, rarely stuttering. I could never get the D-pad working on my PS4 controller with the Link, no idea what went wrong but my wired 360 controller was perfect. I would use a handheld wireless keyboard/touchpad for any kb/mouse input. It was great.
I run Moonlight directly on my Apple TV and it's great! Apple TV is so wildly better than any smart TV on the market that I'll always have it be the brains of any TV I own for the foreseeable future anyway.
> can get 4K HDR 120Hz running over gigabit Ethernet without visually sacrificing too much on bitrate,
While I agree game streaming can work well, in practice on a modern game the frame rate will vary if you try to get 4k hdr 120k and I don't believe a game stream can use variable refresh rate. In practice what do you do if playing a modern AAA game? Do you set the frame rate to a locked 60?
I used to do game streaming but ended up buying a 50 foot HDMI cable and USB and ethernet to link two rooms. One advantage of this is I don't need to worry about what frame rate to set the stream at and my Xbox adapter (or any adapter really) can be used natively on USB without worrying about controller compatibility over Ethernet.
With Sunshine (I looked at it ages ago but totally forgot about it), do you have to be logged in order to accept clients? With Steam remote play streaming it won't let me stream unless I'm logged in - which is a problem given that I leave my PC (Windows 10). in my bedroom and I don't want to leave it unlocked.
Steam Link is very oudated hardware which does not support modern codecs.
I have tried both Smart TV and Android Streaming Box hardware to run various setups - both of which are theoretically capable - but in practice fall short compared to the Steam Deck experience (which I already had lying around almost gathering dust)
Not the person you're responding to but I bought the Steam Deck to use mainly as a handheld and docking it is a bonus. The Steam Deck's controller support is the best of the other cheaper options that you could also use to stream.
I find the Sunshine clients to be much better. You can set them up with much more granularity than Steam client, which can help a lot depending on the type of game you want to play. You also have a variety of clients not just Moonlight, for ex, on iPad I can recommend VoidLink which is really well made and handle touch events beautifully, turning the iPad into an actual MS Surface with multi-touch support when streaming Windows.
I actually have an interesting setup to play Civ 4 with the family (best civ game, change my mind): the games are running on virtual machines on a headless servers and we play on iPads using the native touch controls. It's really nice user experience and I was surprised it worked so well on such an old game.
So, I just discovered MoCa Coax in the house, and it's the kind of thing that makes me feel silly, especially since we don't have cable tv. I suppose it's because of the ubiquitousness of "wireless."
what settings are you using? Game streaming from my PC to my steamdeck over ethernet for me feels like absolute shit. The quality gets destroyed every time i rotate the camera even on 1080p
I don’t understand why the Steam Machine is getting so much hate. The form factor is amazing and a huge part of the value proposition. It’s slightly bigger than a box of Kleenex and you can put it next to the TV, on your desk, etc. I’m tempted to get one just to free up the floor space used by my ATX case. The graphics capability seems good enough, most people can live without 4k gaming.
I don't think the majority of ppl are giving it hate tbh - I think it's just a HN thing. everyone I know that is into gaming is excited about it. I would chalk it up to consumer misunderstanding around the pricing, but I actually think most consumers that are interested in buying a steam HW product are fully in the know why there's a chip shortage. I am in the group that is waiting for the price to drop, but I am excited to get mine!
The Steam Machine is a victim of RAM prices exploding. It's price is fair considering the price of its parts but also causes it to be in a price segment where I am not sure who it is for.
People that can afford a Steam Machine at the current price point are likely to already have stronger hardware.
A Mac Mini a similarly sized with like half the price with dramatically better CPU. Or if you could get a PS5 pro, still for cheaper with vastly superior gaming performance.
Valve could have started with a premium model for the hardcore fans that are less price sensitive and released a budget version later when maybe the RAM apocalypse has ebbed.
And we don't know yet, but I am hoping for reliability. My gaming PC is a nightmare. Sometimes it works great. Other times, I have to sacrifice a goat to get the thing to work.
Today I had to disable dual band WiFi on my windows gaming machine because PoE2 has this bug when a group of mobs surround you, network latency suddenly spikes, but only if the network card works on dual band... Sigh.
I assume many issues like that will still exist on Steam Machine, as it's kind of unrelated to what's running the buggy software.
That issue cannot be a bug in the game, because the operating system should not allow a game to (by any means) produce that type of behaviour. So it's a bug in your OS, potentially the network card driver.
There are fewer of those on Linux but they still exist.
>I’m tempted to get one just to free up the floor space used by my ATX case
if you're willing to spend a grand just to free up a few inches of floor space I don't think you're going to understand the reaction of the average consumer to prices in the current economic climate
I don’t understand who the target is. I can afford one but I’ve already got a PS5 Pro and it just works. I’ve got a threadripper+blackwell running Linux too, but it gets 2/3 the framerate of when I boot it to windows for games. When I had more time and less money, I would have built a gaming PC that would be better and cheaper than the steam offering. So the market isn’t me.
Who is it? Who wants a gaming machine connected to their TV? Every PS5 and Nintendo owner. Are they the target market? Why would a PS5 owner spend $1100 on a machine that places games worse if at all? So I can FPS with a mouse? DRM doesn’t work. So I can play RTS? No I’m sitting at my desk over my keyboard.
Who wants a Linux PC connected to their TV that doesn’t already have a Linux PC connected to their TV? Who wants a smaller, less customizable box? That you can’t swap out the graphics card when they inevitably become a lot cheaper? Who wants a last gen AMD GPU and not be able to swap it out for a 5080 once things are cheaper again and the 6060 comes around?
Who is this for? I’m not hating on it. It’s not for me and I don’t know who it IS for.
I use Sunshine streaming from my home office gaming PC (4070Ti Super) via 1Gbps Ethernet to a "Google Chromecast with Google TV" streaming dongle running the Moonlight client in our dedicated home theater room. The streaming dongle is powered via a USB-C hub that has an Ethernet port and the HDMI output is plugged into a Denon AVR as an input source.
The AVR outputs to a ceiling mounted laser projector with 150" screen. We run games at 4K HDR10 / 60 fps with no latency I can detect. The key is avoiding wifi and testing actual point to point throughput (I run a local instance of OpenSpeedTest). The streaming stick gets around 320 Mbps which is more than fast enough (it's capped by the Android TV CPU and poorly optimized driver stack).
Ive been using Moonlight on my Apple TV, with a 8bitdo controller connected to the Apple TV. My gaming computer is running bazzite and runs Sunshine as streaming server and it handles basically any game. I did use Steam Remote Control earlier but i found it quite unstable and slow compared to Sunshine which basically just works out of the box. Ive beaten Silk song and Elden ring on the setup. Its just wired 1gb networking. In the future i might upgrade to faster networking to get down the latency but its not really needed as long as i dont stream in 4k (my computer doesnt really do 4k that well anyway). The computer(s) have nvidia and amd gpus, both work just as fine.
I have a very similar setup. On Ubuntu (wayland only) I had to build sunshine for support. There is also always the bootstrapping issue for logging in when locked. Yes, I can physically log in, but I'd like something a little easier. Remote desktop is actually quite a bit of a headache and locked down in annoying ways by gnome.
yea, i wanted as little friction sa possible. I landed on Bazzite so that i didnt need to spend any time tinkering, and the little tinkering i needed to was easy to do with claudes help. Ive used to just use the same a my daily driver (i use arch btw), but i wanted something that "just worked". Really impressed with bazzite for the gaming streaming setup, kudos to that team and their great work.
Oh and i use a virtual display, which was easy to do in wayland.
I have some terrible NixOS hacks on my desktop machine which bridges Home Assistant via MQTT to some configuration around which video and audio outputs should be used, and whether my login manager should automatically log in as my user account running Steam Big Picture or wait for auth before starting Niri. Its certainly not anywhere near as smooth as having a Steam Machine under the TV, and I don't love that I have to run a machine that makes the room several degrees warmer while running, but it does have the advantage of being free apart from the time spent making it work.
I use similar setup (CachyOS, Apple TV, Moonlight/Sunshine), but I play on a projector instead of a TV, which results in slightly higher latency. With that in mind, I connect gamepad via Bluetooth to my PC rather than to the Apple TV to minimize input latency; all single-player games are fully playable without any noticeable lag.
I haven't had luck with mouse, but you can actually connect a bluetooth keyboard to the Apple TV. I use a little handheld unit from Rii and it works great.
For mouse, if you have an iOS device you can use the "Remote" widget on your phone as a mouse, and it works in the Moonlight client well enough to click through prompts etc.
I have a 20m fibre optic cable, these things are great. Thinner than a standard cable. They are unidirectional, but mine has a dedicated copper line for CEC. 4k 120hz is no problem.
I also have a Pulse Eight CEC adapter in the chain, but I had to swap its included HDMI cable for full bandwidth.
Since I've switched to Linux I haven't had a chance to set up the software side for CEC though, does anyone happen to have recommendations?
I bought the same adapter and use it with Bazzite, which has a `toggle-cec-sleep` you can run that just set it up. Now when I press a button on my keyboard, the PC starts up and the TV turns on. It's magical.
What I've heard, for some reason, you can get CEC and working when you use a displayport -> hdmi adapter with the right chipset inside. So theoretically, get the right adapter, plug it on the side of the computer and you might actually get CEC signal decoded as a new kernel device.
> It turns out that a _very_ long HDMI cable, a Steam Controller 2 and Bazzite on a second drive was all I needed to get a comfortable couch gaming experience.
Yes, it does turn out that if you already _have_ a capable gaming PC, you can use that instead of buying a Steam Machine. Who would have thunk it.
It feels like people don’t understand what the value prop of the Steam Machine is, maybe because they’re mixing it up with existing functionality and previous hardware attempts for ”streaming” games. That’s obviously not what this hardware is about.
One of the better tech investments I’ve made is in a 20 metre Thunderbolt cable from Corning. It’s surprisingly useful- if you have a monitor that takes TB input then your computer can be stored in a small closet next to your router/switch, where you can’t hear it. Alternatively if you just need a quick 10Gb Ethernet link between two computers with USB4 or TB3/4 that it would be complicated to have next to each other, you can use it for that as well.
I really hope Corning eventually make a TB5 cable.
Interesting idea! I'm currently using Parsec to connect to a computer in a closet (due to noise/heat). It's low latency, sure, but a direct Thunderbolt connection would be lower!
You didnt need the corning one, though, that's an electrically isolated cable, maybe thunderbolt can't go far unless it is media translated to optical, but I am unsure.
10+ gigabit serial connections (Thunderbolt, USB 3.2/4 DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.1, etc) are limited to 1 or 2 meters on passive copper cables. You need optical for anything longer (or a hot, power-hungry transceiver, like for 10GBaseT ethernet)
Used to use moonlight/sunshine to stream to my steamdeck hooked to my TV, but switched over to just using a long HDMI cable and a wireless controller. Have everything hooked up with Home Assistant, so when I start the PC in a specific automation, it will automatically switch output to the TV and start steam in big picture (steamdeck) mode. Works fairly well. Using a normal distro (Fedora), so no dual boot shenanigans.
If something goes wrong, either get out of the couch (duh!) or remote with moonlight :-)
I have a setup where I use a HDMI-over-Ethernet extender [0] to play games in my living room from my homeoffice desk setup in the bedroom. Funnily, the computer and TV are just 1m apart, but separated by a wall and I didn't want to drill (it is a rental). Luckily it is new construction, and all rooms have CAT7 ethernet outlets (most rooms even have two). I use a female-to-female ethernet coupling in central fusebox to bridge those cables together (they need to be directly connected, switching is not possible). So the signal travels around 30-40m over ethernet even though the devices are literally back-to-back against a wall.
HDMI-to-Ethernet extender cost around 50€, but is limited to 1080p@30, 720p@60 or 1080p@60 in "low quality mode" (macOS lingo) - which is enough for me. Low quality mode is still good enough for games. As you just read, my computer is a Macbook Pro so it is not AAA games anyway. I think there are now extenders that can do 1080p@60 on regular HDMI quality.
Linus Tech Tips did a video a few days ago where they built a DIY Steam box for the same price. What they came up with was a decent improvement on the GPU but not a massive upgrade. Kinda suggests Valve isn't necessarily selling them at a loss but the margins are probably near zero.
DisplayPort still doesn't have anything as good as CEC. DDC/CI exists and bizarrely enough has existed for much longer than CEC (since the DVI port era), but DisplayPort Alliance has never bothered to standardize it and iterate on it.
For example, some monitors crash if you read any value from the monitor, so you can only blindly send brightness or volume levels. Some internally use 255 instead of 100. Some have crappy flash and you will wear it out by sending values constantly. Etc, etc.
Yet HDMI is more widespread and both cables and equipment tends to be cheaper, which is surprising considering a USB-C to HDMI dongle needs actual hardware, while its basically just passthrough for an USB-C to DP.
It's also quite nice that HDMI keeps basically all the logic and signaling the same as VGA (blank periods, EDID etc.), so actually making use of the signal is much easier.
Yes lol same! I was using Sunshine/Moonlight before, it does work great but then I got a 4K 120Hz HDR TV that only has 100Mbps ethernet, a weak video decoder that can't really handle AV1 at decent FPS, weak network stack that can only hit like 80Mbps, and a "Game Mode" that only triggers with external cables.. unfortunate. I also looked into Steam Decks and other docks but none of them actually support the full bandwidth either network or video that it would take to get those specs either. Even with a direct ethernet connection between the TV and PC and lower quality, it still has a noticeable input lag.
So I ended up getting an long HDMI 2.1 fibre optic cable and a long USB-extender for the controller dongle.. works great. It just sidesteps a whoole lot of annoying problems and limitations all over the stack.
EDIT: To quote GamerNexus, “ Using the Puck outside, we were able to get around 146 feet (44.5m) away with direct line-of-sight before it completely dropped out. In a house, you’d lose connection much sooner due to walls and obstacles. Still, it’s an impressive range.”
I used a Raspberry Pi 4 as a Steam Link for many years. It was only 1080p60 and had a touch of input delay, but it wasn't terrible. It actually got better with bug fixes over the years.
Optical cables have gotten very good and cheap recently. I was able to move my desktop into another room and run outputs / usbs to both my office and tv for under $100.
I have my LLM/gaming PC tucked in a rack in my basement:
- 100ft DisplayPort + USB cables going to my home office's monitor
- 100ft HDMI cable going to the TV on the wall in my home office
- 30ft HDMI + USB cables going to my receiver in the upstairs gaming/tv room
Works great. I can control/game from any of the three screens, and I also have Moonlight to sometimes control the PC remotely either in the house (bedroom) or externally via Tailscale.
I have an old Steam Link lying around, but I never have a use for it anymore, so while I can understand that there is an audience for Steam Machine, if you are capable, and have a dedicated gaming machine, a couple of long active/fiber HDMI+USB cables is all you really need.
I have moonlight and sunshine and also drilled through the other side of the house with a long fiber optic HDMI cable. Best of everything lol
Also a Bluetooth dongle in my attic about 40ft USB cable. Works great for home assistant too and Bluetooth devices like plant sensors outside the house over ble
Bonus points if you do tailscale and jetkvm or wake on LAN and can moonlight from anywhere.
Why not just dual boot into windows for your gaming needs? It works out of the box more than Linux (if you ignore all the ads, windows updates, and so on). Alternatively stream over local wired connection using apollo
Does it really, though? I haven't used Windows as a daily driver in forever, but I'd have trouble believing that my Linux Mint desktop isn't less hassle than Windows (e.g. the ads, windows updates etc you mention)
Speaking of Steam and controllers - is anyone else annoyed by piss poor compatibility of PC games with Steam onscreen keyboard. I can count on one hand games with seamless integration, where it popups after moving to input field.
The manual Steam/XBox + "X" shortcut always shows the keyboard, but games like to ignore submitted value. My favorite example is Dark Souls character creation screen, it is the only place in the entire game you can and need to enter text, and it is faster to walk the 50ft and back, than to get it working.
That hasn't been my experience on SteamOS and Bazzite. Generally the keyboard pops and you can enter text, occasionally you do need to do it manually but even then text still works. On my GPD Win Mini I actually have the opposite problem. It brings up the on screen keyboard when I want to use the built in one.
Isn't that a consequence of it being a fairly open platform and no certification gatekeeper before a developer can release/update their game? The platform isn't specifically steam or where mouse/keyboard is unavailable or inconvenient, it's generally what they think most of their target market will be using which is likely a generic windows desktop. I don't think developers or valve themselves would want to set up certification and enforcement to say "you must have X in your game otherwise you can't release on steam", especially for the wide range of categories of criteria you could possibly think of, and someone out there will want a way to do text input on their steering wheel for a driving simulator. PC gaming casts such a wide net it's likely an impossible task.
EA still hasn't made its EA account malware SteamDeck compatible. I have to spend 30 minutes every few months to enter again my EA account credentials (nowadays I use a dock and a hardware keyboard).
How do you expect Dark Souls, a game made before the Steam controller, to signal to Steam to open the onscreen keyboard?
Modern games probably have something in the newer steam APIs for controllers, but without that explicit support, there was not a preexisting game API for notifying your host machine that you need an onscreen keyboard.
That can't excuse the onscreen keyboard being nonfunctional though. Steam is already middlemanning control APIs so it should always just work to inject keypresses.
My problem is that in weird cases, the Steam+X shorcut doesn't work for me. I added firefox on my steam deck as a "game" in steam so I could open it without going into desktop mode, and sometimes invoking the onscreen keyboard will bring it up and then immediately close it. I have to quit and restart firefox.
Does anyone have a proper (and not overly expensive) solution for also moving input devices somewhere else? My main device is not in the same room as my TV.
I run 25 meters AOC HDMI, the problem was to pull it through pipe in the floor to the living room - those connectors are quite bulky. Some AOC cables come with mini-hdmi and, an adapter to the full size, but it wasn't available for HDMI 2.1 at the time. Works flawlessly. To switch between display on the desk and living room I run a small DIY java app in windows (shouldn't be a problem to run it on Linux), MQTT + home assistant as a remote app. I didn't play with CEC.
More interesting is a USB setup at this distance. I picked Ethernet - USB 2.0 converter and a simple USB hub with external PSU in the living room, $30. This enables BT, xbox360 dongles, keyboards. I didn't go with USB 3 as its expensive and unnecessary.
EDIT: It's easier to find under 'usb extender over ethernet', and I double check mine ATEN UEC260 costs closer to ~100$ now, way more expensive compared to what it used to be. It requires a dedicated CAT5 cable, it cannot go through any networking devices.
Depends on what you mean by “proper” and the exact layout you are trying to work around.
I can state from experience that drilling a hole through a wall, installing brush plates on both sides to make it look neater, and passing display and input cables through, works pretty well and costs very little. I was using wireless input devices, but still had input cables through the wall with the other end of the wireless link plugged into them, as the range limits of the devices' radios was problematical otherwise.
If you sometimes need to use the machine in its own location as well, then you need a screen there with the pair set to mirror the same output and a local set of input devices, sharing/switching audio output might be a touch more faffy.
Less practical if the device and screen are not near enough to the joining wall, or are in rooms that don't share a wall, of course.
With usbip you can run a USB device remotely as if it is local. You could use this to, for example, access a printer remotely (Wireguard would also allow you this). I went for fiber in my home, through the walls mostly. Also still some legacy twisted pair (esp. PoE).
I think the options are dependent on your setup. For example if you have a smart TV running Android, you could run https://www.virtualhere.com/usb_client_software on it to connect a dongle or controller attached to the TV through to your main device.
I do this with my Nvidia Shield and Xbox One Controller.
> Can't people see any usecase for the steam machine?
The only problem with the Steam Machine is the price tbh, and that's mainly Valve having a really bad luck with timing once again.
Having a custom-made "Steam Machine" for the past 3 years thanks to ChimeraOS, it really changed the way I play for the better. I can play on my couch with my son and wife, and it made my wife (who wasn't really into gaming) buy a Steam Deck and enjoy my 500+ library instantly.
Now, I can play CS2 in my office, my son can play Astroneer in the living room and my wife The Witcher 3 next to him. The Steam ecosystem is simply amazing, it's a real shame Valve had to launch their machine during a worldwide component crisis.
>The only problem with the Steam Machine is the price tbh
It's not just the price, it's more like the hardware that is dated on arrival(weaker than a 2020 PS5) and customers are expected to use for 6+ years into the future when more and more new games are demanding RT.
Is not a problem for Nintendo to ship dated HW, sine one it's cheap, and two, since developers will walk through fire to optimize games for the Switch but that's because they're Nintendo and they ship tens of millions of Switches while Steam Boxes will not sell in such numbers to warrant this level of extra developer effort.
Good if you're only intro playing older games or are willing to stomach a lot of upscaling and low graphics setting or must have a just-works linux PC, but given the price and performance this isn't gonna be a mass appeal product.
>and that's mainly Valve having a really bad luck with timing once again.
You know the saying "you make your own luck? Or the saying "luck is opportunity meets preparation"?
So, no, it's not bad luck, it's that the problem with Valve is they just take forever to launch a product. Which is fine for stuff like Steam or games that you can keep delaying and delaying until you get it just right exactly the way you want it, but HW has a limited shelf life where it's most valuable and once you lock in a BOM, you're on the clock to get it out the door and need to haul ass. See the titanic efforts Microsoft put into launching Xbox and Xbox 360 on schedule, it was a rootless bloodbath, as all consumer HW is, but if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
So there's no bad luck here, just bad preparation on their part. Valve could have easily launched this earlier if they just spent less time trying to engineer everything from scratch with custom parts just to fit the HW inside a cube as small as possible just to flex their HW design skills, and instead just focus on quickly getting the HW in another boring VCR box into consumers hands ASAP the way MS did it with the first Xbox.
The whole point of the Steam Box is the Steam ecosystem centered around just-works Linux emulation of windows games, not the box being an engineering and design marvel, so speeding so much time on perfecting the form for a first gen product, was pointless endeavour that cost them the product launch.
I would say they got it all right with the Xbox one. Then the series came out and is a good example of what valve is doing with the steam machine. AAA Games will be optimized for the steam machine (and consequently for the coming shortage in memory components) with power players in custom rigs getting the full 8k, hdr 4.0, DLSS 6.5 etc
No, it wasn't a GPU problem, it was semiconductor manufacturing and package assembly and soldering issue, that a lot of the electronics of that era suffered, from the early PS3(YLOD), to early Wii, to Macbooks and gaming laptops.
They all ran very hot back then in that 90nm era and since the industry switched to ROHS solder around 2005-2006 but the fabs hadn't yet mastered a realizable assembly process with the new solder, so early device it would lead to CPUs and GPUs desoldering off their ball grid array from the heat and the weak solder, until these kinks were ironed out over the years via 65nm die shrinks to lower power usage and better packaging and soldering techniques had evolved.
So this isn't an issue Valve could have faced as they weren't using brand new innovative HW using new manufacturing techniques, but older components that were already tried and tested. They were just too slow and lazy and prioritized form over function.
> AAA Games will be optimized for the steam machine
I fully doubt it. It's a niche product that won't sell well and game devs are stingy in the current industry market plagued with mass layoffs for cost cutting.
And the proof is in the pudding when you see how badly some AAA games run even on top end PC HW. Studios just don't put in any optimisation effort anymore and just ship Unreal Engine defaults.
Have you looked at what sort of FPS it gets on the games you want to play? Overall it's performance is... Quite poor even on the lowest settings for lots of games
The world is full of beautiful indie games, I barely play AAA games. But even then, I wouldn't consider it as a PRIMARY pc if you have budget for something more. It's a great secondary pc.
That's what I mean by "market", I don't think they are targeting the global segment
Yeah totally it just comes down to if you're able to play the "games you want to play". But I definitely think there will be some disappointed buyers who don't quite realize the limitations
If the benchmark has the words "RT" on it, like a lot did, you can safely throw them in the trash. That's people benchmarking the device in the same spirit as people who thought the Steam Deck and the Switch 1 could do 4K. Worthless.
Okay but we aren't talking about a handheld device here. You should not need to literally put it on handheld graphics settings to get decent performance.
Also this thing is literally designed for running on TVs and everybody uses their TV at 4K resolution...
>If the benchmark has the words "RT" on it, like a lot did, you can safely throw them in the trash
More like you can throw the console in the trash if you can't run current day games on it well, when those games mandate RT.
A lot of AAA games have started mandating RT since 2025, like Doom the dark ages for example, and the number of games doing that will only increase moving forward as devs just take the easy way with Unreal Engine, instead of optimizing for performance with baked in lighting like it's 1999. So the already mediocre performance of the console will only get worse and worse over the years in the upcoming games.
I like Valve, but there's no need to larp for Valve and run defense for them when they make mistakes, like with the steam box.
Not disagreeing with you about lighting, but there is a differnce in older games that make RT optional. They use RT as a "ultra high quality" shadows/reflection graphical option. So there's no point of having a high performant, low quality RT option.
This isn't the case with games that require RT. Doom Dark Ages can even run the RT entirely in software, implemented in AMD's Linux drivers: https://youtu.be/R5G2bYiA1hk
So I think it's fine to ignore benchmarks that mention RT, meaning it's basically testing the game at "ultra quality" settings.
>Doom Dark Ages can even run the RT entirely in software, implemented in AMD's Linux drivers:
Running RT in Software doesn't mean it's free, it just draws the performance penalty from the rest of the system.
And the demo in the youtube link you shared shows this. Like sure, it's playable, but it looks like game from 2009. It looks fine for playing on a small handheld device like the steam deck, but not on a 27"-60" monitor/TV.
Sure, but it's also running on a GPU that's almost 10 years old and wasn't even high end at release. So I think it's fine performance for the hardware.
> You cannot play two different games at the same time with your 50ft hdmi cable.
Why not? The use case of the Steam Machine is that it gives a great out of the box PC gaming experience for the living room (which is great for most people), not that it enables things impossible to configure on a PC (it's just a PC itself).
I am suggesting that having a PC + a Steam Machine, you can play 2 different games at the same time from 2 different people.
With a 50ft cable from one pc, you can play at most 2 instances of the same game using Nucleus coop on Windows (so, not SteamOS), but you cannot play 2 different games without an enormous effort (it is technically possible to do the same of what Nucleus coop does, but that doesn't exist yet)
Train your brain to not "need" it. Brains are malleable whether someone diagnosed and labeled them or not. Concentrate on something else during those cut scenes, read a book, study the clock or thermometer or cat or leaves on the trees. Imagine a scenario where the power fails and you can't play games. Anything which doesn't enslave you to technology.
Being a slave to a malformed brain is better than being a slave to technology?
How about it's wheelchairs for disabled brains. Yell at a person with two broken legs to stand up. Yelling louder isn't going to heal their broken bones.
There's a potential meme image demanding to be made.
One shows the steam machine user playing a game with resume feature in just 2 panels. One sitting down and pressing the controller, the next playing.
The other half of the comic has 10+ panels. One sitting down. One facepalming. One standing up and turning on the pc elsewhere, one sitting down, one opening steam link one staring at the screen waiting for the pc boot, one facepalming, one going to the pc to launch steam, one sitting down, one waiting to connect to steam big mode, one waiting for the game to launch because no resume feature.
My PC runs proxmox (multiple gpus) and a remote in homeassistant triggers a shutdown and start command for the streaming VM (bazzite booting into gamescope). Instead of picking jellyfin on the firetv stick I select moonlight.
All very achievable, I have a setup with a wireless keyboard to the htpc, and a script that wakes up my desktop with wake on lan, ssh's in and starts sunshine if I start moonlight.
Booting the htpc can be a pain; personally my best solution has been wake on lan via phone. I've also used universal remotes before cec was reliable, and I had to control the screen separately.
Mine is moving my Razer laptop from my office to next to my TV and picking up my controller which is slightly annoying but at least I can play games at a good FPS which the Steam Machine cannot do
My gaming PC motherboard recently sh*t the bed. It was over 10 years old and I’ve beaten that thing up quite a bit. It’s Zen 1, so new MOBO basically means like 70% new PC. Before the price was announced I figured I’d look into a Steam Machine because I also want a well-supported Linux box for coding. I already have a PS5 Pro - which turned out to actually be a decent investment because the price has been increased multiple times since I bought it. When I saw the price of the Steam Machine I just *sigh*’d. Reviews are saying the Steam Machine barely stacks up against a base PS5. Excuse me, WHAT!?
Was considering just getting a MacBook Neo to tide me over until I can build a proper PC and they just jacked up the prices. I’ll probably still end up getting one but I just gotta wait a bit longer.
I’m currently surviving on a 2012 iMac my mother in law asked me to get the files off of for her and she gave me the computer itself. Installed Ubuntu on it and it’s…fine…but it doesn’t even have an SSD so it can be rough at times.
It’s ridiculous. I’m a software engineer, and I can’t even afford mid-level technology anymore (not American so I don’t have the ridiculous salary like some).
Thankfully my M1 Max Mac Studio from a few years ago is still going strong and my employer pays for that anyway. It’s also for work only. Though I suspect not gonna happy when either 1) I need an upgrade for local LLM developement for the AI projects coming down the pipe or 2) he sees the API bill because he can’t be arsed to make an upfront investment.
>the Steam Machine barely stacks up against a base PS5
People keep saying this as if the PS5 competes with a gaming PC. It doesn't.
Please tell me when you can run Firefox on your PS5 (specifically Firefox, for good ad blocking. Or Brave if you want, it's just a PC). Please tell me when you can run a minecraft server on a PS5. Please tell me when you can run Factorio on a PS5.
For your actual problem though, look at refurbished business laptops. AMD really boosted what $500 gets you there.
A few miles? My closes server is in Paris, and im in Barcelona. I get a minimum of 30 to 40 ms of lag, fine for slow games, but if you are playing something multiplayer and there is another 40 -> 100 ms lag on the server connection things quickly go downhill.
I did a USB extension and fiber optic DisplayPort to game on my old rooftop deck. It was very nice.
The first cable I bought was 150ft! Too long! Really hard to coil.
I've been on sunshine/moonlight mostly these days (updating to Apollo/artemis is in progress), but I do sometimes wire my desktop to my patio with this cable & wireless input devices these days. That spot is pretty sun exposed so it needs a real sweet spot, where-as the streaming just works anywhere & is easy, but sometimes it's nice enjoying the flawless low latency.
I tried this years ago when I got my first 4k TV. The cable was not even 50', more like 15', and the picture would green out and artifact horribly at the worst times. The solution eventually ended up being Moonlight running on an Nvidia Shield TV Pro, and the gaming PC shoved somewhere else where I didn't have to listen to the fans.
1. Can't wake up your PC with controller. Workarounds with custom scripts and WoL are ridiculous. They also don't solve having to log in afterwards and starting a game.
2. Because of missing HDMI-CEC, you have to switch to PC output manually on TV
3. Same issue in opposite side. PC stupidly uses TV output even if TV is off. If you want to use the PC without TV, you gotta disable TV output. What's that, you can't see display menu so you can do this? Yeah because that menu showed up on your TV that is off, since it's set as primary display, which is needed for games to launch on that screen.
For first issue, you gotta walk to your PC to turn it on, login and launch game.
For 2) and 3), it's easiest to plug in cable in TV when you need to and plug it out when you are done.
I don't know why there isn't a consumer product yet solving this without hassle.
You're not wrong but those aren't insurmountable. Of course the Steam Box is a better experience, but I built a remote starter for my PC and a dumb little Go program to switch the displays and disable some devices.
End result is I tap maybe two shortcuts on my phone and the computer is on and switched to the TV.
Do you have a script which bypasses login screen and switches input on TV too? I don't think so. Anyways my problem is that it takes a programmer to solve this even partially.
Autologin is trivial to set up on most operating systems. There are solutions for using CEC to control your television as well. I'm not a programmer, but I was able to set this up with minimal issue.
If you don't want to have to solve these problems, that's fine, but please don't parade around as if these are insurmountable, unsolvable problems.
If you already have Ethernet at both ends I cannot recommend enough game streaming. With the right setup it is almost identical to having my computer plugged in physically, and I am very sensitive to input latency.
I can get 4K HDR 120Hz running over gigabit Ethernet without visually sacrificing too much on bitrate, but you can squeeze more bitrate at lower fps or 1440p (obviously) if that is your preference. You can also tune these settings per-game with the setup I have which is quite useful.
Hardware wise, I'm using a Steam Deck as the streaming client in a docked setup (ala Nintendo Switch). It seems to handle everything I can throw at it, and it has the bonus of being able to run simpler games without streaming anything.
I have a third-party (UGREEN) dock providing power, USB and gigabit Ethernet, display (though unfortunately no HDMI-CEC to turn the TV on automatically (I worked around this using a janky automation script)). The official dock has HDMI-CEC but costs ~2x as much with less IO. I'll deal with my jank script.
For software, I'm running MoonDeck for game streaming via Sunshine on my gaming PC. The Steam Remote Play streaming is good, but not quite _as_ good, sadly.
I have a gaming PC and a steam deck. My goal was to use my steam deck as a steam link (their old streaming hardware) w/ a Xbox controller
Both are connected via Ethernet and actually the video quality was very very good, and input lag was completely fine.
Unfortunately there were so many issues. I want a console like experience where I can just decide that i want to pick up a controller and play.
With this setup I have to unlock windows which is annoying. Also often times something gets stuck so I have to walk to the desktop to fix/click around, or it plays audio via PC, or I have to disable HDR, etc.
The issue in your setup is Windows^tm. (what I do) gaming machine's shell profile,
then all you need is some event(s) to trigger changing to tty2 on the target machine. perhaps when a controller connects, or your tv changes input, or you press a button on your tv/tv box remote.Along with the complexity you mention, a real dealbreaker for me is controller support for couch co-op/multiplayer.
It's the biggest difference and flaw between steam devices and traditional consoles. Even hugely popular multiplayer titles like Overcooked either don't work, or require hours of research and configuration.
What do you mean? I have 4 DualSense controllers connected to my Steam Deck for couch co-op, and Overcooked works just fine with them?
Xbox controller support on the Steam Deck has worked seamlessly for me with 0 extra setup, I'm not sure what you're talking about?
Streaming has been ok, but I've had the same issues as the parent commenter, with the stream dying for whatever reason every hour or so.
This is such a baffling claim? I've had very close to zero issues with couch gaming with my steam deck + wireless xbox controllers. They overwhelmingly just work. Including Overcooked?
>require hours of research and configuration
more like couple seconds on protondb https://www.protondb.com/app/448510
I tried using the official steam client on my TV (running some google/android TV OS) which was hard-wired in (100 Mbps) which should be sufficient for 1080p/60 if not 4K/60 but there is some android TV bug that adds an unacceptable audio lag. Video quality was fine. (https://steamcommunity.com/app/353380/discussions/0/62441675...)
Seems like a waste to use a steam deck for this when the TV hardware seems more than powerful enough but if it works it works, and my steam deck is gathering dust anyway. Thanks for the idea.
My TV was cheap so I didn't expect much. Steam link really struggles on it - thankfully I still have the old Steam Link hardware and it works alright. Locked to 1080p though.
Refused to spend more on a TV because I feel you don't get much more processing power for an increase in price. All smart TVs I've interacted with in the last 5 years have been much slower than I would consider acceptable.
> Refused to spend more on a TV...
While one can always try to see if their "Smart TV" can actually run a streaming client app like Moonlight with adequate performance, it's so hit-and-miss I just assume I'll have to plug in a ~$50 Android TV streaming stick via an HDMI input. I've used the 'Google Chromecast with Google TV' and 'Amazon Fire TV Stick 4k 2nd gen' and was able to sideload the open source Moonlight client app to stream 4K HDR10+ / 60fps from my server PC at 80 to 100Mbps.
It's not necessarily the CPU power, it's just that most of these TVs have wildly varying throughput from crufty driver stacks. The manufacturers don't seem to test them beyond the ability to receive ~25Mbps streams in the usual streaming apps. As long as it does that, they don't care to make it work to the rated speeds the hardware should be capable of. So maybe it has higher throughput, maybe it doesn't. And there's no guarantee what the throughput will be after the next firmware update. Since I want to do game streaming and also have UHD rips that can go up to ~100Mbps, I now just always use 'Smart TV's in dumb mode and run content from an external device.
Also really depends on what codecs are done in software vs hardware on the device.
Speaking from working on the Android/Fire TV devices, they all have at most one hardware decoder, which really limits what the streaming companies can do. My team recently launched a multiview feature on A/FTV and we had to do so much hand holding and device detection work (4K decoder) to try and make the experience good and hide it from others...
Meanwhile the mobile teams, roku, iOS / tvOS / vision pro teams can full send with 4 players because the devices all have multiple hardware decoders... for some reason Android TV devices are along in this category.
> a multiview feature...
I'm actually surprised you're able to support true multiview across diverse hardware platforms at all - so congrats! Consumer streaming sticks, dongles, boxes and smart TVs are a fragmented hellscape between divergent hardware, firmware, OSes, codecs, DRM and apps. Pretty much anything more demanding than baseline '1 stream in 1 app' will have lurking issues on at least one platform with a >1M unit installed base.
The android streaming device market pretty much died when it became a race to zero margin. Arguably, the best Android-based streaming device money can buy is still the NVidia Shield, which is a 10 year old hardware design.
> I'm actually surprised you're able to support true multiview across diverse hardware platforms at all - so congrats!
We had to define a ton of different variables to try to categorize the system, and from that we track playback events (buffering, errors, etc) and if a device family as a whole shows too many issues we kill switch the feature for that device. This is on top of device side watchdogs that kill the feature for a user specifically if we fail to have a baseline playback performance with the software decoder. It's a very hands on feature, but I'm proud of the work our team did!
> Arguably, the best Android-based streaming device money can buy is still the NVidia Shield, which is a 10 year old hardware design.
Absolutely. As an example other devices had good playback at only 360p, but couldn't hit 540p. Shield can reliably hit x2 720p streams.
It's still my daily driver for personal browsing and the device I primarily develop on (also the only 64 bit kernel ATV device currently iirc). The Walmart Onn Pro 4K boxes are the runner up in my experience, they're pretty good.
I'm still mad that Steam stopped producing the hardware Steam Link.
The app replacement is garbage (and not because of the app itself, but because of Android and the fact that most TV have garbage hardware).
I wish Steam would release a new 4k Steam Link, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
You can run steam link on a Raspberry Pi.
Or like the other commenter said, Apple TV is what I use.
Apple TV is affordable and has a Steam Link app that works pretty well.
I got a second hand M1 Mac Mini for this purpose. Costs about $200 and it can easily handle 4K streaming.
My TV was expensive and it still only has a 100Mbps adapter
Steam Remote Play sadly breaks down if anything involving Admin comes up. Task manager, admin prompt, etc.
Sunshine / moonlight can work but you need to run them as admin.
Sunshine / moonshine also have problems with the full DualSense features, you need to be wired, have VirtualHere set up, and even then it might not all work with all clients.
So yes both can work, but both have downsides that can be alleviated with an HDMI cable.
Dualsense's main advantage is the built in trackpad and gyroscope but if you want to play wirelessly you are probably better off switching to the Steam Controller at this point which also has a trackpad and gyroscope. Or if using Windows standard Xbox controller if you don't need a trackpad or gyroscope, as Xbox controllers have first class support.
If you particularly want a steam controller go for it, but otherwise that sounds worse and more expensive than the long cable option.
Not really looking to spend another $150 while losing a headphone jack, adaptive triggers, and microphone tho.
My point is, streaming introduces compromises, while I chose PC gaming to avoid a lot of compromises.
DualSense just got wireless rumble support Linux. I think that was the last missing feature!
Audio jack support has been in since 6.18 last November. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sony-DualSense-Audio-Handling
Come to the penguin side: we have the best drivers.
I just disable UAC. Yada yada bad practice yeah I know. I'm sick of constant slight annoyance due to hypothetical threat. If I get pwned I get pwned; hasn't happened yet lol
that you know of
”If a tree falls in a forest”, U=U, etc. This is just FUD otherwise.
re: wired dualsense features, try https://github.com/awalol/DS5Dongle
> If you already have Ethernet at both ends I cannot recommend enough game streaming. With the right setup it is almost identical to having my computer plugged in physically, and I am very sensitive to input latency.
There still some issues. If your beefy machine has monitor of a different resolution it gets a bit wacky. In the past I had to plug fake HDMI-EDID thing because my main PC is ultra-wide and what will get streamed is a coin toss: sometimes it's ultra-wide made to fit in destination screen, sometimes It's something else.
If game you're trying to stream has a launcher: again, coin toss - might display launcher that is PITA to use from controller or not at all. I recall having to walk to another room to do the launcher steps on the main PC to play on steam deck.
Meanwhile, PS Portal is flawless when connected to 5GHz network.
Look into Apollo, which is a fork of Sunshine. This works flawlessly for monitors plugged into the host, and clients using a different resolution
Back when I actually had a gaming PC, I loved using my Steam Link. I used powerline Ethernet to get a decent connection from my bedroom to the basement and it worked well, rarely stuttering. I could never get the D-pad working on my PS4 controller with the Link, no idea what went wrong but my wired 360 controller was perfect. I would use a handheld wireless keyboard/touchpad for any kb/mouse input. It was great.
I think you can run Moonlight or Sunshine (i forgot which is which end) even directly on some "smart" TVs lately.
Second hand info though, I have a friend who swears by those but he didn't give me the details.
I run Moonlight directly on my Apple TV and it's great! Apple TV is so wildly better than any smart TV on the market that I'll always have it be the brains of any TV I own for the foreseeable future anyway.
Except Apple TV doesn’t support 120fps which is a huge bummer
It does ?
> can get 4K HDR 120Hz running over gigabit Ethernet without visually sacrificing too much on bitrate,
While I agree game streaming can work well, in practice on a modern game the frame rate will vary if you try to get 4k hdr 120k and I don't believe a game stream can use variable refresh rate. In practice what do you do if playing a modern AAA game? Do you set the frame rate to a locked 60?
I used to do game streaming but ended up buying a 50 foot HDMI cable and USB and ethernet to link two rooms. One advantage of this is I don't need to worry about what frame rate to set the stream at and my Xbox adapter (or any adapter really) can be used natively on USB without worrying about controller compatibility over Ethernet.
The video codec does not care about VRR, it happily does it. If the receiving display can do VRR, it'll just work.
Yeah, in practice for a demanding game (RDR2 is a good example for me) I do lock at 60.
There are many many types of games (platformers) that can achieve and are preferable to play locked at 120 though.
I miss Stadia
I just had a screen and a internet connection. Bliss.
With Sunshine (I looked at it ages ago but totally forgot about it), do you have to be logged in order to accept clients? With Steam remote play streaming it won't let me stream unless I'm logged in - which is a problem given that I leave my PC (Windows 10). in my bedroom and I don't want to leave it unlocked.
Sunshine will solve your problem, the computer does not need to be unlocked once the service run.
Out of curiosity, why not use a $10 steam link to achieve a similar effect to using a $700 gaming tablet?
Steam Link is very oudated hardware which does not support modern codecs.
I have tried both Smart TV and Android Streaming Box hardware to run various setups - both of which are theoretically capable - but in practice fall short compared to the Steam Deck experience (which I already had lying around almost gathering dust)
Not the person you're responding to but I bought the Steam Deck to use mainly as a handheld and docking it is a bonus. The Steam Deck's controller support is the best of the other cheaper options that you could also use to stream.
I'm missing something here, are you streaming from your pc on to your deck? But then why would you need a dock?
I do this.
I have a gaming PC connected to my living room TV, but sometimes I’m lazy and want to play games from my bed.
My solution is that my bedroom TV has a Steam Deck dock connected, so I take my wireless controller to the bedroom and stream the games there instead.
To the tv through the deck, is what I understood (maybe not using the smart features of the tv?)
Probably for wired networking.
Do you find Sunshine to be better than Steam's streaming?
I find the Sunshine clients to be much better. You can set them up with much more granularity than Steam client, which can help a lot depending on the type of game you want to play. You also have a variety of clients not just Moonlight, for ex, on iPad I can recommend VoidLink which is really well made and handle touch events beautifully, turning the iPad into an actual MS Surface with multi-touch support when streaming Windows.
I actually have an interesting setup to play Civ 4 with the family (best civ game, change my mind): the games are running on virtual machines on a headless servers and we play on iPads using the native touch controls. It's really nice user experience and I was surprised it worked so well on such an old game.
So, I just discovered MoCa Coax in the house, and it's the kind of thing that makes me feel silly, especially since we don't have cable tv. I suppose it's because of the ubiquitousness of "wireless."
Anyway, will be looking into all of this soon.
what settings are you using? Game streaming from my PC to my steamdeck over ethernet for me feels like absolute shit. The quality gets destroyed every time i rotate the camera even on 1080p
With Steam Link I just press the "enhanced 1080p" or "4K" preset then tweak whatever else. The latest update allows up to 250mbps bitrate I think.
I'll give it another go maybe there is some routing issue thats messing things up
FWIW due to the other quirks of streaming me and other people have mentioned I too have switched to a very long HDMI cable + Ethernet usb hub
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I don’t understand why the Steam Machine is getting so much hate. The form factor is amazing and a huge part of the value proposition. It’s slightly bigger than a box of Kleenex and you can put it next to the TV, on your desk, etc. I’m tempted to get one just to free up the floor space used by my ATX case. The graphics capability seems good enough, most people can live without 4k gaming.
I don't think the majority of ppl are giving it hate tbh - I think it's just a HN thing. everyone I know that is into gaming is excited about it. I would chalk it up to consumer misunderstanding around the pricing, but I actually think most consumers that are interested in buying a steam HW product are fully in the know why there's a chip shortage. I am in the group that is waiting for the price to drop, but I am excited to get mine!
The Steam Machine is a victim of RAM prices exploding. It's price is fair considering the price of its parts but also causes it to be in a price segment where I am not sure who it is for.
People that can afford a Steam Machine at the current price point are likely to already have stronger hardware.
A Mac Mini a similarly sized with like half the price with dramatically better CPU. Or if you could get a PS5 pro, still for cheaper with vastly superior gaming performance.
Valve could have started with a premium model for the hardcore fans that are less price sensitive and released a budget version later when maybe the RAM apocalypse has ebbed.
Still hope it sells, the form factor is amazing.
+1
And we don't know yet, but I am hoping for reliability. My gaming PC is a nightmare. Sometimes it works great. Other times, I have to sacrifice a goat to get the thing to work.
Today I had to disable dual band WiFi on my windows gaming machine because PoE2 has this bug when a group of mobs surround you, network latency suddenly spikes, but only if the network card works on dual band... Sigh.
I assume many issues like that will still exist on Steam Machine, as it's kind of unrelated to what's running the buggy software.
That issue cannot be a bug in the game, because the operating system should not allow a game to (by any means) produce that type of behaviour. So it's a bug in your OS, potentially the network card driver.
There are fewer of those on Linux but they still exist.
Given my experience with Steam Deck, I strongly doubt this?
My guess is that the extra $200 (over a custom built pc) will precisely be "everything mostly just working."
I wish I could buy the Steam Machine. I just can't afford it. The high price is probably why people "hate" it.
>I’m tempted to get one just to free up the floor space used by my ATX case
if you're willing to spend a grand just to free up a few inches of floor space I don't think you're going to understand the reaction of the average consumer to prices in the current economic climate
I don’t understand who the target is. I can afford one but I’ve already got a PS5 Pro and it just works. I’ve got a threadripper+blackwell running Linux too, but it gets 2/3 the framerate of when I boot it to windows for games. When I had more time and less money, I would have built a gaming PC that would be better and cheaper than the steam offering. So the market isn’t me.
Who is it? Who wants a gaming machine connected to their TV? Every PS5 and Nintendo owner. Are they the target market? Why would a PS5 owner spend $1100 on a machine that places games worse if at all? So I can FPS with a mouse? DRM doesn’t work. So I can play RTS? No I’m sitting at my desk over my keyboard.
Who wants a Linux PC connected to their TV that doesn’t already have a Linux PC connected to their TV? Who wants a smaller, less customizable box? That you can’t swap out the graphics card when they inevitably become a lot cheaper? Who wants a last gen AMD GPU and not be able to swap it out for a 5080 once things are cheaper again and the 6060 comes around?
Who is this for? I’m not hating on it. It’s not for me and I don’t know who it IS for.
I use Sunshine streaming from my home office gaming PC (4070Ti Super) via 1Gbps Ethernet to a "Google Chromecast with Google TV" streaming dongle running the Moonlight client in our dedicated home theater room. The streaming dongle is powered via a USB-C hub that has an Ethernet port and the HDMI output is plugged into a Denon AVR as an input source.
The AVR outputs to a ceiling mounted laser projector with 150" screen. We run games at 4K HDR10 / 60 fps with no latency I can detect. The key is avoiding wifi and testing actual point to point throughput (I run a local instance of OpenSpeedTest). The streaming stick gets around 320 Mbps which is more than fast enough (it's capped by the Android TV CPU and poorly optimized driver stack).
I jailbroke my TV to put the sunshine client directly on it, and it works great.
What projector are you using if you don’t mind me asking? Been in the market for one.
Sony VPL-XW6100. Extraordinary image when calibrated, especially if you have full light control.
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Ive been using Moonlight on my Apple TV, with a 8bitdo controller connected to the Apple TV. My gaming computer is running bazzite and runs Sunshine as streaming server and it handles basically any game. I did use Steam Remote Control earlier but i found it quite unstable and slow compared to Sunshine which basically just works out of the box. Ive beaten Silk song and Elden ring on the setup. Its just wired 1gb networking. In the future i might upgrade to faster networking to get down the latency but its not really needed as long as i dont stream in 4k (my computer doesnt really do 4k that well anyway). The computer(s) have nvidia and amd gpus, both work just as fine.
I have a very similar setup. On Ubuntu (wayland only) I had to build sunshine for support. There is also always the bootstrapping issue for logging in when locked. Yes, I can physically log in, but I'd like something a little easier. Remote desktop is actually quite a bit of a headache and locked down in annoying ways by gnome.
yea, i wanted as little friction sa possible. I landed on Bazzite so that i didnt need to spend any time tinkering, and the little tinkering i needed to was easy to do with claudes help. Ive used to just use the same a my daily driver (i use arch btw), but i wanted something that "just worked". Really impressed with bazzite for the gaming streaming setup, kudos to that team and their great work.
Oh and i use a virtual display, which was easy to do in wayland.
I have some terrible NixOS hacks on my desktop machine which bridges Home Assistant via MQTT to some configuration around which video and audio outputs should be used, and whether my login manager should automatically log in as my user account running Steam Big Picture or wait for auth before starting Niri. Its certainly not anywhere near as smooth as having a Steam Machine under the TV, and I don't love that I have to run a machine that makes the room several degrees warmer while running, but it does have the advantage of being free apart from the time spent making it work.
I use similar setup (CachyOS, Apple TV, Moonlight/Sunshine), but I play on a projector instead of a TV, which results in slightly higher latency. With that in mind, I connect gamepad via Bluetooth to my PC rather than to the Apple TV to minimize input latency; all single-player games are fully playable without any noticeable lag.
cool, I didn't know Apple TV could be a Sunshine/Moonlight client!
It's perfect for gaming: silent, reliable network and Bluetooth, and supports basically any TV or projector. Works great with Xbox Elite controllers.
Only downside is that keyboard/mouse can't connect to Apple TV, so it's controller-only.
I haven't had luck with mouse, but you can actually connect a bluetooth keyboard to the Apple TV. I use a little handheld unit from Rii and it works great.
For mouse, if you have an iOS device you can use the "Remote" widget on your phone as a mouse, and it works in the Moonlight client well enough to click through prompts etc.
I'm doing the same and it works great. The apple tv is an amazing little box for all of these things.
I have a 20m fibre optic cable, these things are great. Thinner than a standard cable. They are unidirectional, but mine has a dedicated copper line for CEC. 4k 120hz is no problem.
I also have a Pulse Eight CEC adapter in the chain, but I had to swap its included HDMI cable for full bandwidth.
Since I've switched to Linux I haven't had a chance to set up the software side for CEC though, does anyone happen to have recommendations?
I bought the same adapter and use it with Bazzite, which has a `toggle-cec-sleep` you can run that just set it up. Now when I press a button on my keyboard, the PC starts up and the TV turns on. It's magical.
https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/Baz...
In case you hadn't seen the signal path's teardown of an optical HDMI cable, here it is. These really are marvelous devices for the cost.
https://youtu.be/O9QPecpLcnA
Valve's CEC stuff for the Steam Box is open source: https://github.com/OpenGamingCollective/linux-cec
Someone on HN posted a more official link recently but I can't find it right now.
What I've heard, for some reason, you can get CEC and working when you use a displayport -> hdmi adapter with the right chipset inside. So theoretically, get the right adapter, plug it on the side of the computer and you might actually get CEC signal decoded as a new kernel device.
> It turns out that a _very_ long HDMI cable, a Steam Controller 2 and Bazzite on a second drive was all I needed to get a comfortable couch gaming experience.
Yes, it does turn out that if you already _have_ a capable gaming PC, you can use that instead of buying a Steam Machine. Who would have thunk it.
It feels like people don’t understand what the value prop of the Steam Machine is, maybe because they’re mixing it up with existing functionality and previous hardware attempts for ”streaming” games. That’s obviously not what this hardware is about.
One of the better tech investments I’ve made is in a 20 metre Thunderbolt cable from Corning. It’s surprisingly useful- if you have a monitor that takes TB input then your computer can be stored in a small closet next to your router/switch, where you can’t hear it. Alternatively if you just need a quick 10Gb Ethernet link between two computers with USB4 or TB3/4 that it would be complicated to have next to each other, you can use it for that as well.
I really hope Corning eventually make a TB5 cable.
Interesting idea! I'm currently using Parsec to connect to a computer in a closet (due to noise/heat). It's low latency, sure, but a direct Thunderbolt connection would be lower!
You didnt need the corning one, though, that's an electrically isolated cable, maybe thunderbolt can't go far unless it is media translated to optical, but I am unsure.
10+ gigabit serial connections (Thunderbolt, USB 3.2/4 DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.1, etc) are limited to 1 or 2 meters on passive copper cables. You need optical for anything longer (or a hot, power-hungry transceiver, like for 10GBaseT ethernet)
In Bazzite I've had innumerable issues with waking from sleep and display driver crashes, which means a 50 ft walk to press the reset button.
If you're cool with that, this appliance isn't for you.
Used to use moonlight/sunshine to stream to my steamdeck hooked to my TV, but switched over to just using a long HDMI cable and a wireless controller. Have everything hooked up with Home Assistant, so when I start the PC in a specific automation, it will automatically switch output to the TV and start steam in big picture (steamdeck) mode. Works fairly well. Using a normal distro (Fedora), so no dual boot shenanigans. If something goes wrong, either get out of the couch (duh!) or remote with moonlight :-)
50ft fibre optic HDMI cable, for those of you throwing an exception based on time domain reflection, and line level settling periods.
Right, yes, of course... the, um... domain reflections and... line settling levels. It's like you read my mind, thanks for addressing those.
I have a setup where I use a HDMI-over-Ethernet extender [0] to play games in my living room from my homeoffice desk setup in the bedroom. Funnily, the computer and TV are just 1m apart, but separated by a wall and I didn't want to drill (it is a rental). Luckily it is new construction, and all rooms have CAT7 ethernet outlets (most rooms even have two). I use a female-to-female ethernet coupling in central fusebox to bridge those cables together (they need to be directly connected, switching is not possible). So the signal travels around 30-40m over ethernet even though the devices are literally back-to-back against a wall.
HDMI-to-Ethernet extender cost around 50€, but is limited to 1080p@30, 720p@60 or 1080p@60 in "low quality mode" (macOS lingo) - which is enough for me. Low quality mode is still good enough for games. As you just read, my computer is a Macbook Pro so it is not AAA games anyway. I think there are now extenders that can do 1080p@60 on regular HDMI quality.
[0]: https://www.amazon.de/OREI-Anschl%C3%BCsse-Splitter-Extender...
> The Steam Machine costs about as much as a comparable self-built PC.
That's amazing, is VALVE selling these at a loss?
Linus Tech Tips did a video a few days ago where they built a DIY Steam box for the same price. What they came up with was a decent improvement on the GPU but not a massive upgrade. Kinda suggests Valve isn't necessarily selling them at a loss but the margins are probably near zero.
"50ft" are 15 meters.
"HDMI" is proprietary worse DP
DisplayPort still doesn't have anything as good as CEC. DDC/CI exists and bizarrely enough has existed for much longer than CEC (since the DVI port era), but DisplayPort Alliance has never bothered to standardize it and iterate on it.
For example, some monitors crash if you read any value from the monitor, so you can only blindly send brightness or volume levels. Some internally use 255 instead of 100. Some have crappy flash and you will wear it out by sending values constantly. Etc, etc.
Yet HDMI is more widespread and both cables and equipment tends to be cheaper, which is surprising considering a USB-C to HDMI dongle needs actual hardware, while its basically just passthrough for an USB-C to DP.
It's also quite nice that HDMI keeps basically all the logic and signaling the same as VGA (blank periods, EDID etc.), so actually making use of the signal is much easier.
> It's also quite nice that HDMI keeps basically all the logic and signaling the same as DVI
FTFY. VGA uses analog signals, HDMI uses only digital signals.
televisions with displayport connectors are sadly still not all that common
Yes lol same! I was using Sunshine/Moonlight before, it does work great but then I got a 4K 120Hz HDR TV that only has 100Mbps ethernet, a weak video decoder that can't really handle AV1 at decent FPS, weak network stack that can only hit like 80Mbps, and a "Game Mode" that only triggers with external cables.. unfortunate. I also looked into Steam Decks and other docks but none of them actually support the full bandwidth either network or video that it would take to get those specs either. Even with a direct ethernet connection between the TV and PC and lower quality, it still has a noticeable input lag.
So I ended up getting an long HDMI 2.1 fibre optic cable and a long USB-extender for the controller dongle.. works great. It just sidesteps a whoole lot of annoying problems and limitations all over the stack.
How did he get 50ft controller range though?
EDIT: To quote GamerNexus, “ Using the Puck outside, we were able to get around 146 feet (44.5m) away with direct line-of-sight before it completely dropped out. In a house, you’d lose connection much sooner due to walls and obstacles. Still, it’s an impressive range.”
I did this by having a 30ft Bluetooth dongle in my attic near my living room
Cool!
I used a Raspberry Pi 4 as a Steam Link for many years. It was only 1080p60 and had a touch of input delay, but it wasn't terrible. It actually got better with bug fixes over the years.
Any reason for stopping? I have a physical steam link and a Raspberry Pi 4, and house rearranging is making me look into all of this.
Optical cables have gotten very good and cheap recently. I was able to move my desktop into another room and run outputs / usbs to both my office and tv for under $100.
I have my LLM/gaming PC tucked in a rack in my basement:
- 100ft DisplayPort + USB cables going to my home office's monitor - 100ft HDMI cable going to the TV on the wall in my home office - 30ft HDMI + USB cables going to my receiver in the upstairs gaming/tv room
Works great. I can control/game from any of the three screens, and I also have Moonlight to sometimes control the PC remotely either in the house (bedroom) or externally via Tailscale.
I have an old Steam Link lying around, but I never have a use for it anymore, so while I can understand that there is an audience for Steam Machine, if you are capable, and have a dedicated gaming machine, a couple of long active/fiber HDMI+USB cables is all you really need.
hello mr tech tips
I have moonlight and sunshine and also drilled through the other side of the house with a long fiber optic HDMI cable. Best of everything lol
Also a Bluetooth dongle in my attic about 40ft USB cable. Works great for home assistant too and Bluetooth devices like plant sensors outside the house over ble
Bonus points if you do tailscale and jetkvm or wake on LAN and can moonlight from anywhere.
Why not just dual boot into windows for your gaming needs? It works out of the box more than Linux (if you ignore all the ads, windows updates, and so on). Alternatively stream over local wired connection using apollo
Does it really, though? I haven't used Windows as a daily driver in forever, but I'd have trouble believing that my Linux Mint desktop isn't less hassle than Windows (e.g. the ads, windows updates etc you mention)
Because fuck Microsoft.
Using it even just for games is giving them a signal they're doing something right.
Speaking of Steam and controllers - is anyone else annoyed by piss poor compatibility of PC games with Steam onscreen keyboard. I can count on one hand games with seamless integration, where it popups after moving to input field. The manual Steam/XBox + "X" shortcut always shows the keyboard, but games like to ignore submitted value. My favorite example is Dark Souls character creation screen, it is the only place in the entire game you can and need to enter text, and it is faster to walk the 50ft and back, than to get it working.
That hasn't been my experience on SteamOS and Bazzite. Generally the keyboard pops and you can enter text, occasionally you do need to do it manually but even then text still works. On my GPD Win Mini I actually have the opposite problem. It brings up the on screen keyboard when I want to use the built in one.
Isn't that a consequence of it being a fairly open platform and no certification gatekeeper before a developer can release/update their game? The platform isn't specifically steam or where mouse/keyboard is unavailable or inconvenient, it's generally what they think most of their target market will be using which is likely a generic windows desktop. I don't think developers or valve themselves would want to set up certification and enforcement to say "you must have X in your game otherwise you can't release on steam", especially for the wide range of categories of criteria you could possibly think of, and someone out there will want a way to do text input on their steering wheel for a driving simulator. PC gaming casts such a wide net it's likely an impossible task.
EA still hasn't made its EA account malware SteamDeck compatible. I have to spend 30 minutes every few months to enter again my EA account credentials (nowadays I use a dock and a hardware keyboard).
I plug a wireless keyboard into my client device for these situations though it does add clutter to the room.
How do you expect Dark Souls, a game made before the Steam controller, to signal to Steam to open the onscreen keyboard?
Modern games probably have something in the newer steam APIs for controllers, but without that explicit support, there was not a preexisting game API for notifying your host machine that you need an onscreen keyboard.
That can't excuse the onscreen keyboard being nonfunctional though. Steam is already middlemanning control APIs so it should always just work to inject keypresses.
My problem is that in weird cases, the Steam+X shorcut doesn't work for me. I added firefox on my steam deck as a "game" in steam so I could open it without going into desktop mode, and sometimes invoking the onscreen keyboard will bring it up and then immediately close it. I have to quit and restart firefox.
> Unfortunately, HDMI 2.1 does not work with AMD graphics on Linux due to shenanigans from the HDMI Forum.
IIRC, recently, AMD got permission to implement HDMI 2.1 in their foss driver, so soon this shouldn't be an issue.
Does anyone have a proper (and not overly expensive) solution for also moving input devices somewhere else? My main device is not in the same room as my TV.
I run 25 meters AOC HDMI, the problem was to pull it through pipe in the floor to the living room - those connectors are quite bulky. Some AOC cables come with mini-hdmi and, an adapter to the full size, but it wasn't available for HDMI 2.1 at the time. Works flawlessly. To switch between display on the desk and living room I run a small DIY java app in windows (shouldn't be a problem to run it on Linux), MQTT + home assistant as a remote app. I didn't play with CEC.
More interesting is a USB setup at this distance. I picked Ethernet - USB 2.0 converter and a simple USB hub with external PSU in the living room, $30. This enables BT, xbox360 dongles, keyboards. I didn't go with USB 3 as its expensive and unnecessary.
EDIT: It's easier to find under 'usb extender over ethernet', and I double check mine ATEN UEC260 costs closer to ~100$ now, way more expensive compared to what it used to be. It requires a dedicated CAT5 cable, it cannot go through any networking devices.
Depends on what you mean by “proper” and the exact layout you are trying to work around.
I can state from experience that drilling a hole through a wall, installing brush plates on both sides to make it look neater, and passing display and input cables through, works pretty well and costs very little. I was using wireless input devices, but still had input cables through the wall with the other end of the wireless link plugged into them, as the range limits of the devices' radios was problematical otherwise.
If you sometimes need to use the machine in its own location as well, then you need a screen there with the pair set to mirror the same output and a local set of input devices, sharing/switching audio output might be a touch more faffy.
Less practical if the device and screen are not near enough to the joining wall, or are in rooms that don't share a wall, of course.
With usbip you can run a USB device remotely as if it is local. You could use this to, for example, access a printer remotely (Wireguard would also allow you this). I went for fiber in my home, through the walls mostly. Also still some legacy twisted pair (esp. PoE).
I think the options are dependent on your setup. For example if you have a smart TV running Android, you could run https://www.virtualhere.com/usb_client_software on it to connect a dongle or controller attached to the TV through to your main device. I do this with my Nvidia Shield and Xbox One Controller.
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Is PC gaming on your TV the real selling point of the steam machine?
Not at all, it’s pc gaming without managing a pc
You cannot play two different games at the same time with your 50ft hdmi cable.
Can't people see any usecase for the steam machine?
I understand, you are not in the market for it.
I am, I have a good usecase which possibly will make the cost drop below a ps5 over the years (if you include games cost)
> Can't people see any usecase for the steam machine?
The only problem with the Steam Machine is the price tbh, and that's mainly Valve having a really bad luck with timing once again.
Having a custom-made "Steam Machine" for the past 3 years thanks to ChimeraOS, it really changed the way I play for the better. I can play on my couch with my son and wife, and it made my wife (who wasn't really into gaming) buy a Steam Deck and enjoy my 500+ library instantly.
Now, I can play CS2 in my office, my son can play Astroneer in the living room and my wife The Witcher 3 next to him. The Steam ecosystem is simply amazing, it's a real shame Valve had to launch their machine during a worldwide component crisis.
That's where I am at, but I think me and you ARE the audience the Steam Machine is aimed at.
>The only problem with the Steam Machine is the price tbh
It's not just the price, it's more like the hardware that is dated on arrival(weaker than a 2020 PS5) and customers are expected to use for 6+ years into the future when more and more new games are demanding RT.
Is not a problem for Nintendo to ship dated HW, sine one it's cheap, and two, since developers will walk through fire to optimize games for the Switch but that's because they're Nintendo and they ship tens of millions of Switches while Steam Boxes will not sell in such numbers to warrant this level of extra developer effort.
Good if you're only intro playing older games or are willing to stomach a lot of upscaling and low graphics setting or must have a just-works linux PC, but given the price and performance this isn't gonna be a mass appeal product.
>and that's mainly Valve having a really bad luck with timing once again.
You know the saying "you make your own luck? Or the saying "luck is opportunity meets preparation"?
So, no, it's not bad luck, it's that the problem with Valve is they just take forever to launch a product. Which is fine for stuff like Steam or games that you can keep delaying and delaying until you get it just right exactly the way you want it, but HW has a limited shelf life where it's most valuable and once you lock in a BOM, you're on the clock to get it out the door and need to haul ass. See the titanic efforts Microsoft put into launching Xbox and Xbox 360 on schedule, it was a rootless bloodbath, as all consumer HW is, but if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
So there's no bad luck here, just bad preparation on their part. Valve could have easily launched this earlier if they just spent less time trying to engineer everything from scratch with custom parts just to fit the HW inside a cube as small as possible just to flex their HW design skills, and instead just focus on quickly getting the HW in another boring VCR box into consumers hands ASAP the way MS did it with the first Xbox.
The whole point of the Steam Box is the Steam ecosystem centered around just-works Linux emulation of windows games, not the box being an engineering and design marvel, so speeding so much time on perfecting the form for a first gen product, was pointless endeavour that cost them the product launch.
Xbox was overpowered at the time
Xbox 360 was rushed with gpu problems
I would say they got it all right with the Xbox one. Then the series came out and is a good example of what valve is doing with the steam machine. AAA Games will be optimized for the steam machine (and consequently for the coming shortage in memory components) with power players in custom rigs getting the full 8k, hdr 4.0, DLSS 6.5 etc
>Xbox 360 was rushed with gpu problems
No, it wasn't a GPU problem, it was semiconductor manufacturing and package assembly and soldering issue, that a lot of the electronics of that era suffered, from the early PS3(YLOD), to early Wii, to Macbooks and gaming laptops.
They all ran very hot back then in that 90nm era and since the industry switched to ROHS solder around 2005-2006 but the fabs hadn't yet mastered a realizable assembly process with the new solder, so early device it would lead to CPUs and GPUs desoldering off their ball grid array from the heat and the weak solder, until these kinks were ironed out over the years via 65nm die shrinks to lower power usage and better packaging and soldering techniques had evolved.
So this isn't an issue Valve could have faced as they weren't using brand new innovative HW using new manufacturing techniques, but older components that were already tried and tested. They were just too slow and lazy and prioritized form over function.
> AAA Games will be optimized for the steam machine
I fully doubt it. It's a niche product that won't sell well and game devs are stingy in the current industry market plagued with mass layoffs for cost cutting.
And the proof is in the pudding when you see how badly some AAA games run even on top end PC HW. Studios just don't put in any optimisation effort anymore and just ship Unreal Engine defaults.
Have you looked at what sort of FPS it gets on the games you want to play? Overall it's performance is... Quite poor even on the lowest settings for lots of games
The world is full of beautiful indie games, I barely play AAA games. But even then, I wouldn't consider it as a PRIMARY pc if you have budget for something more. It's a great secondary pc.
That's what I mean by "market", I don't think they are targeting the global segment
Well I play both and if I only had $1,000 I would stick to consoles
I mean, to everyone their own? I would have saved money in the long run with a steam machine
Yeah totally it just comes down to if you're able to play the "games you want to play". But I definitely think there will be some disappointed buyers who don't quite realize the limitations
Yeah, 60fps in Slay the Spire 2 and Risk of Rain is very feasible with just about anything.
If the benchmark has the words "RT" on it, like a lot did, you can safely throw them in the trash. That's people benchmarking the device in the same spirit as people who thought the Steam Deck and the Switch 1 could do 4K. Worthless.
Okay but we aren't talking about a handheld device here. You should not need to literally put it on handheld graphics settings to get decent performance.
Also this thing is literally designed for running on TVs and everybody uses their TV at 4K resolution...
>If the benchmark has the words "RT" on it, like a lot did, you can safely throw them in the trash
More like you can throw the console in the trash if you can't run current day games on it well, when those games mandate RT.
A lot of AAA games have started mandating RT since 2025, like Doom the dark ages for example, and the number of games doing that will only increase moving forward as devs just take the easy way with Unreal Engine, instead of optimizing for performance with baked in lighting like it's 1999. So the already mediocre performance of the console will only get worse and worse over the years in the upcoming games.
I like Valve, but there's no need to larp for Valve and run defense for them when they make mistakes, like with the steam box.
Not disagreeing with you about lighting, but there is a differnce in older games that make RT optional. They use RT as a "ultra high quality" shadows/reflection graphical option. So there's no point of having a high performant, low quality RT option.
This isn't the case with games that require RT. Doom Dark Ages can even run the RT entirely in software, implemented in AMD's Linux drivers: https://youtu.be/R5G2bYiA1hk
So I think it's fine to ignore benchmarks that mention RT, meaning it's basically testing the game at "ultra quality" settings.
>Doom Dark Ages can even run the RT entirely in software, implemented in AMD's Linux drivers:
Running RT in Software doesn't mean it's free, it just draws the performance penalty from the rest of the system.
And the demo in the youtube link you shared shows this. Like sure, it's playable, but it looks like game from 2009. It looks fine for playing on a small handheld device like the steam deck, but not on a 27"-60" monitor/TV.
Sure, but it's also running on a GPU that's almost 10 years old and wasn't even high end at release. So I think it's fine performance for the hardware.
True, but that's also not 1050 $ either.
I feel bad for the people who are going to buy it and then have to run Cyberpunk at 1080p on the lowest setting to be able to maybe squeeze out 60 FPS
Maybe those people are fine playing a 30fps?
Maybe but the thing is with averages it means that sometimes you'll be getting even less than that which is pretty unbearable
> The only problem with the Steam Machine is the price tbh
Can you show the parts list where you found this level of performance cheaper, with new parts, current prices?
> You cannot play two different games at the same time with your 50ft hdmi cable.
Why not? The use case of the Steam Machine is that it gives a great out of the box PC gaming experience for the living room (which is great for most people), not that it enables things impossible to configure on a PC (it's just a PC itself).
I might not be understanding what you are saying.
I am suggesting that having a PC + a Steam Machine, you can play 2 different games at the same time from 2 different people.
With a 50ft cable from one pc, you can play at most 2 instances of the same game using Nucleus coop on Windows (so, not SteamOS), but you cannot play 2 different games without an enormous effort (it is technically possible to do the same of what Nucleus coop does, but that doesn't exist yet)
> You cannot play two different games at the same time with your 50ft hdmi cable
... do you spend a lot of time playing 2 different games at the same time?
depends if you have roommates
I mean, if you’ve got 4 people living in the same house it’s not crazy
ADHD and cutscenes means a laptop game and a console game so you're never ever waiting. Must be nice to have a brain that doesn't need that.
Train your brain to not "need" it. Brains are malleable whether someone diagnosed and labeled them or not. Concentrate on something else during those cut scenes, read a book, study the clock or thermometer or cat or leaves on the trees. Imagine a scenario where the power fails and you can't play games. Anything which doesn't enslave you to technology.
"Just think your way out of ADD" is a take, for sure.
Better than medication. Better than giving up and giving in. Better than learned helplessness. Better than being a slave to technology.
Being a slave to a malformed brain is better than being a slave to technology? How about it's wheelchairs for disabled brains. Yell at a person with two broken legs to stand up. Yelling louder isn't going to heal their broken bones.
I mean, I also have a smartphone to play games in quick 5 minute breaks
Are console loading times really still that shit? I haven't found PC loading times to be much of an issue since fast SSDs came around
More like there's a waiting lobby for multiplayer games, e.g. Fortnite.
You also can't turn it on from your couch.
There's a potential meme image demanding to be made.
One shows the steam machine user playing a game with resume feature in just 2 panels. One sitting down and pressing the controller, the next playing.
The other half of the comic has 10+ panels. One sitting down. One facepalming. One standing up and turning on the pc elsewhere, one sitting down, one opening steam link one staring at the screen waiting for the pc boot, one facepalming, one going to the pc to launch steam, one sitting down, one waiting to connect to steam big mode, one waiting for the game to launch because no resume feature.
My PC runs proxmox (multiple gpus) and a remote in homeassistant triggers a shutdown and start command for the streaming VM (bazzite booting into gamescope). Instead of picking jellyfin on the firetv stick I select moonlight.
Wake on Lan is also a thing.
-> I have a steam machine since 2023.
All very achievable, I have a setup with a wireless keyboard to the htpc, and a script that wakes up my desktop with wake on lan, ssh's in and starts sunshine if I start moonlight.
Booting the htpc can be a pain; personally my best solution has been wake on lan via phone. I've also used universal remotes before cec was reliable, and I had to control the screen separately.
she-bang
I wonder how many people buy a "living room PC" just because they don't know about these fiber optic cables?
Mine is moving my Razer laptop from my office to next to my TV and picking up my controller which is slightly annoying but at least I can play games at a good FPS which the Steam Machine cannot do
I did the same thing but it's 25 feet hahaha, love to see this
My gaming PC motherboard recently sh*t the bed. It was over 10 years old and I’ve beaten that thing up quite a bit. It’s Zen 1, so new MOBO basically means like 70% new PC. Before the price was announced I figured I’d look into a Steam Machine because I also want a well-supported Linux box for coding. I already have a PS5 Pro - which turned out to actually be a decent investment because the price has been increased multiple times since I bought it. When I saw the price of the Steam Machine I just *sigh*’d. Reviews are saying the Steam Machine barely stacks up against a base PS5. Excuse me, WHAT!?
Was considering just getting a MacBook Neo to tide me over until I can build a proper PC and they just jacked up the prices. I’ll probably still end up getting one but I just gotta wait a bit longer.
I’m currently surviving on a 2012 iMac my mother in law asked me to get the files off of for her and she gave me the computer itself. Installed Ubuntu on it and it’s…fine…but it doesn’t even have an SSD so it can be rough at times.
It’s ridiculous. I’m a software engineer, and I can’t even afford mid-level technology anymore (not American so I don’t have the ridiculous salary like some).
Thankfully my M1 Max Mac Studio from a few years ago is still going strong and my employer pays for that anyway. It’s also for work only. Though I suspect not gonna happy when either 1) I need an upgrade for local LLM developement for the AI projects coming down the pipe or 2) he sees the API bill because he can’t be arsed to make an upfront investment.
Something has to give.
Motherboards are actually stupid cheap right now, especially secondhand. I'd look into that some more.
>the Steam Machine barely stacks up against a base PS5
People keep saying this as if the PS5 competes with a gaming PC. It doesn't.
Please tell me when you can run Firefox on your PS5 (specifically Firefox, for good ad blocking. Or Brave if you want, it's just a PC). Please tell me when you can run a minecraft server on a PS5. Please tell me when you can run Factorio on a PS5.
For your actual problem though, look at refurbished business laptops. AMD really boosted what $500 gets you there.
sunshine + moonlight + wakeonlan is quite good if you actually set up the black magic that is wol
An old steam link still works for me
Now just make the cable a few miles long and call it Nvidia GeForce NOW?
A few miles? My closes server is in Paris, and im in Barcelona. I get a minimum of 30 to 40 ms of lag, fine for slow games, but if you are playing something multiplayer and there is another 40 -> 100 ms lag on the server connection things quickly go downhill.
I did a USB extension and fiber optic DisplayPort to game on my old rooftop deck. It was very nice.
The first cable I bought was 150ft! Too long! Really hard to coil.
I've been on sunshine/moonlight mostly these days (updating to Apollo/artemis is in progress), but I do sometimes wire my desktop to my patio with this cable & wireless input devices these days. That spot is pretty sun exposed so it needs a real sweet spot, where-as the streaming just works anywhere & is easy, but sometimes it's nice enjoying the flawless low latency.
I tried this years ago when I got my first 4k TV. The cable was not even 50', more like 15', and the picture would green out and artifact horribly at the worst times. The solution eventually ended up being Moonlight running on an Nvidia Shield TV Pro, and the gaming PC shoved somewhere else where I didn't have to listen to the fans.
>I doubted long HDMI cables would work well, so I never bought one. Turns out we've had active fiber optics cables for a good while now!
Yeah I wouldn't recommend, if you have to though I have had better experience with DP. Also, you need the ones with the repeaters.
Why not? I’ve been using 75ft fibre optic HDMIs for a few years now and can play counter-strike on it like normal. They work great
Sorry I was referencing the authors comment about non fibre cables. Fibre indeed works wonders for these applications.
I wish my OG physical Steam Link supported 4k. It was the best thing ever for the price.
Yep, there are better ways of (mis-)spending a $1.5K.
Maybe it's possible to order an aesthetically-looking cube sculpture even. Or make one with Legos.
I just use Steam Streaming. If that doesn't work because they fucked it up again, Parsec. MBP as a terminal, smol ITX T1 running Windows as host.
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These setups suck for following reasons:
1. Can't wake up your PC with controller. Workarounds with custom scripts and WoL are ridiculous. They also don't solve having to log in afterwards and starting a game.
2. Because of missing HDMI-CEC, you have to switch to PC output manually on TV
3. Same issue in opposite side. PC stupidly uses TV output even if TV is off. If you want to use the PC without TV, you gotta disable TV output. What's that, you can't see display menu so you can do this? Yeah because that menu showed up on your TV that is off, since it's set as primary display, which is needed for games to launch on that screen.
For first issue, you gotta walk to your PC to turn it on, login and launch game. For 2) and 3), it's easiest to plug in cable in TV when you need to and plug it out when you are done.
I don't know why there isn't a consumer product yet solving this without hassle.
You're not wrong but those aren't insurmountable. Of course the Steam Box is a better experience, but I built a remote starter for my PC and a dumb little Go program to switch the displays and disable some devices.
End result is I tap maybe two shortcuts on my phone and the computer is on and switched to the TV.
Do you have a script which bypasses login screen and switches input on TV too? I don't think so. Anyways my problem is that it takes a programmer to solve this even partially.
Autologin is trivial to set up on most operating systems. There are solutions for using CEC to control your television as well. I'm not a programmer, but I was able to set this up with minimal issue.
If you don't want to have to solve these problems, that's fine, but please don't parade around as if these are insurmountable, unsolvable problems.
Nah it's still a dance to get the TV input switched that's a good point.