I'm on the fence for SM bc of 8GB GPU RAM, but I just enjoy the tsunami of chinese followups after it, so guess I just have to buy one SM to make the wave work.
It's funny - if you look at the most recent steam hardware survey results this new steam machine almost exactly matches the median system - 16gb ram, 8gb vram, 6 physical cores, and the GPU looks like be roughly similar in perf to a 3060 too.
Half Life 2 recently got a dev commentary track where Valve reflected on their decisions from 20 years ago. One of the things that stuck out to me was that, apparently, Valve called up Microsoft and said "Hey, what percentage of desktops have DirectX 8 compatible graphics cards?" and Microsoft had no idea.
And thus the Steam Hardware Survey was born. The specs automatically sounded a bit anemic to me, too, but seeing them placed on the hardware survey I don't think they're making an outright mistake, per se.
On the other other hand, the average system in that survey presumably cost more than what the Steam Machine will retail for, if we're correct in interpreting this as being a competitor to dedicated consoles.
But even if it's double the price of the PS5/Xbox, it's still likely to be less than the price (at the time of purchase) of the mean PC in the hardware survey. For every gamer out there struggling along on a $500 mini-PC, there's another who plunked down $5,000 to play Cookie Clicker at 8K/240 FPS.
If this gets enough adoption for gamedevs to prioritize support when testing games that's likely not going to be a huge problem. 16gb ram + 8gb vram is also similar to what all the current gen consoles have, although all three have the advantage of it being unified between the CPU and GPU so they can use more than 8gb vram if needed (16gb, 16gb, 12gb total system ram for PS5, XSX, Switch 2 respectively)
It's close to an RX7500/7600 paired with a Ryzen 5 7500/7600. Depending on the price it can be fine for gaming. Nobody expects enthusiast performance. It has to be priced to be competitive against consoles and lower end DIY PCs.
This is my concern as well. I suspect this will struggle versus a PS5 because even though the PS5 only has 16GB total, its unified, so it can be allocated more towards VRAM if needed.
If they are selling this for $300-400, it will be a hot item and I cant fault them at all. If it sells for $500+, its hard to recommend over a PS5 for most users.
1080p is already a struggle for some games with 8GB of VRAM in 2025, and this will probably be expected to have a service life of 5+ years.
The Steam Machine looks to me like it'll become a great optimization target to hit (if it becomes popular enough, which it probably will). Solid, predictable targets are always great, and now we have yet another one that doesn't have the downside of being in some insular, exclusive dev space like PlayStation, Xbox or Nintendo. It's just a PC, in an open eco system, with predictable and decent hardware.
This is the real answer. Vram is largely dependent on the resolution you're running, and at 1080p 8gb vram is fine. People who want 20GB vram are probably going to build their own machines anyways, the steam machine is meant to be a console replacement to my understanding.
I'd argue that 1080p gaming is also perfectly fine. These days most games have split the UI/window resolution from the game resolution. So you can have 4k sharp text and UI, while the actual game runs at 75%/50% resolution and you largely can't tell the difference while sitting on the couch.
Is it dependent on the resolution your running, or is it the size of all textures that need to be cached in RAM? The amount of data needed to framebuffer 1080p vs 4K isn't that great
I don't think there is any reason a game _needs_ more. I don't think there is any gameplay experience that couldn't be enjoyably delivered on this hardware. And it's a massive disappointment that minimum requirements bloat has been out of control lately.
With how PC part prices have exploded after AI data center buying, I think we will see developers suddenly discover that you don't actually need half these specs to run games.
I'm thinking maybe it's unified memory? They posted "16GB DDR5 + 8GB GDDR6 VRAM" as the specs as RAM. Typically you'd put the GPU-only VRAM together with the GPU, but the GPU has it's own separate row in the specs. Kind of suspicious how they placed those together like that, isn't it?
azure seems quite shitty too. I only use it for having GPT models which is a corp requirement. For 1 hour total I spent on azure.com in past weeks, besides how slow it usually is, I ran into two issues:
- models sometimes got deployed to an unwanted instance, likely because some API is slow and front end state was not well maintained, so user clicking Next too soon will end up screw up the data being submitted
- one of the models (5-mini) deployment took very long and failed, it apparently ended up in a bad and invisible state, and future models can't be deployed any more on that instance. I retried today, same thing, gave up and created a new instance/
Azure AI is supposed to be an area MS making all the bets which I assume should have high quality, but apart from frequent update, it's same low quality as MS Teams.
1 in 3 times I used it in past 2 months, it failed for really odd reasons, sometimes the node app just exception quit, sometimes gemini stuck and blame itself and gave up. same task I throw to cc and codex, they nailed without a blink...
in this particular case maybe. but i don't think he's pardoning only crypto people. as long as criminals can offer sth useful to him, they will get above the law.
https://github.com/maxandrews/Epstein-doc-explorer/blob/83ee...