Pricing and Market Realities

Well, haveave you heard about the D brand story? Oh, the forgiveness rather than permission model. Y my good. I got some I got some I don't know if it's tea, but I'll give you the the scoop here. haven't talked to anyone about it. This has happened. This isn't the first time this has happened to them for a right Be they did this with the PlayStation blades too, didn't they? Something that. I mean I'm not even super familiar. I know they do a a lot of sponsorships and I know they They make a lot of skins and stuff, but this this is a whole new level of brashness. So for folks who don't know, right we're talking Steam Machine and Dbrand maker of skins and caserssasses and stuff like that. Yeah. things to modify your everything from Steam deecks to switch toos and things like that and phones, they When Steam machine was announced in November, I guess they teased, oh, here's a thing we're working on, which is a companion cube. Weighted companion cube enclosure, a case. for the steam machine And it's a cube. It's it's a natural. It's a collaboration that was born to happen. A collaboration would be one way to put it, right? Seems like an easy thing to just call them and be like, Hey, can we do this? And then they'd be like, Ohh, yeah, sure. absolutely. or no, leave us alone So I had steam machine for a review about I think I got it. nine days before the embargo And And Dbrand reached out. They're like, oh if you're considering if you're doing coverage on steam machine would you consider checking out our companion cube case I was like, o, okay, yeah happy to check that out. So they someone over and it was a production protype they send it a bunch of creators L honestly, some people like if you go on YouTube and just search like Debrand can be on Cube, a bunch of people who don't have steam machines. have it. So they made a fair number of these roduction prototypes. I'll tell you things about the preroduction prototype. One, the build quality was great. It wasn't like a three D pr thing. It was definitely injection molded, plastic. The moldld. Oh, they made like fourteen molds, right injection molds, which is like, you know, six figures wor worth of tooling. and and they had to redo it because the mold release apparently that they use for the the parts that contact the steam machine Yeah left the grease on the hardware And so it wasn't even their final final product. L they said,, shipping versions, which obviously won't happen now, won't have this. So it was like you know prereleased stuff, but it looked industrial. They had like fancy portal aesthetic boxing. It was very elaborate box. So yeah, okay I included a shot of it, tried it out. It's very nice as a product, very nice thing And then just Really, do you think that they Do you think that they o, so do you think that they actually made injection molds? like they want told out one hundred percent and they're using silicone molds. they'll just do rubber. They one hundred d tooling because they wanted to they were ready to ship. They're ready to manufacture. They probably had paid for a run of these. I mean, who knows, right? They they could thousands of dollars. Oh, yeah, sixix figures easy Yeah And as you in their Reddit post, they talk about having to do revisions, right? They did like they did whole prromo shoot. I would say in terms of like having some sense of manufacturing, it was easily with R and D two to three hundred thousand dollars worth of someone's time, a company's time, people's time they put into this So we should get to the punchline because I people don't know this. Yeah. so Steam machine went for preorder a week and a half ago. when the embargo dropped, they went there was a A lot system And the same day actually ahead of the review embargo D brand P up The landing page. for preorddering this case And I think lawyers. Yeah. And I think they said, you know, like fifteen thousand people express interests. I don't know how many people actually the order. Less than a week later, they put up Rreddit posts and people got emails saying full refunds are bad. We didn't. Permission from Valve to make this. product which uses Valve IP, the weighted companion cube and graphics are very close to portal graphics and they had to takeak it down. And Valve reached out and said, no no. And Dera and said, okay I guess We're not making this anymore about doing it. But the thing I haven't told anyone is. so H So you have one? I have one. No no. and it's now it's like this rare collectors's. Yeah. Yeahah, right? Like I don't know, mayaybe like azen or two doz of them are out in the world somewhere They sent a like over email a assembly video, just like shot with an iPhone. justust like if you have problems putting this together, here's how it comes together and It's firstirst of all, it was very easy. you just slide it in. it's not like replacing the side. You don't want to take aart steam machine at all. It just literally just slides into this enclosure Does it impede airflow? No, it actually raises the bottom off of theround so it might in some way, but does definitely doesn't impede the intake or the exhaust on the back. The back is just the valve logo. the same just open. okay. The same same back is what comes a the machine The video they shared dememoing how to install this case had it installed in a steam machine They use get a steam machine They must have been partner somehow or tied to a developer or something, but they had access to a real steam machine to make this product And so My assumption is that they were partnered with Valvin sububway to make skins or something. Oh wow. And still madeade the choice to not get permission to make this Very clearly valve associated visually product Who does that Like it's such an own goal That's just wild. Like like it's one thing. It's one thing to make the fan design because there's a bazillion of those out on three printing sites now, right? But then there's a whole other thing to like go through the process because it's not an insubstantial time and energy and work investment to make injection molded plastic stuff.. Is it multiple like is it multiple Are all the different colors different pieces? Is that how it works? And then they assemble them? That's right And it's sleeve you just kind of lower it down and then magnet on the front piece. Magnet on the front piece and then bolt on. A back plate. Yep Wild. is wild. Well, congratulations on a one of fifteen collectible their norm Well, the other thing is it actually and we'll get to the steam machine the but a bit it Even though it's small, it makes a small thing not really that small small anyore So, you, aesthetically, it's very nice to look at And obviously we're not selling it right now, but one of the appeals of S Machine is just how small it is. And now it's a little less small And like you'd think they know that because when they did the PlayStation wings for the PS five and they made the low profile ones that don't stick out over the top. And then Sony sent them to the nasty graam and said, Hey, stop selling these. But L that was making the big thing small, which makes sense to me. This is a whole anyway, wild choices all around. Welcome to Brad Willmade a Techpod. I'm Will Oh Yeah our substitute bread this week, bread still out on personal stuff. Our substitute bread this week is one Norman Chan of tested d. com and Adam Savage is tested on YouTube Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the show Norm. Oh excited to be here I guess this is the season this is this is the season of talking about steam stuff. So u so once again, you're back. You have had access to a steam machine, I think longer than Just about anybody outside of Valve at this point. Valveers, but yeah, yeah Yeah I mind Oh, that's where that's where the debrand folks got one is they they must just seed them to early developers Yeah, that's my assumption is that they maybe a part they know newew a developer was able to borrow one. But if they actually got one from Valve as a as a manufacturer of aftermarket cases or something or skins face platess or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. But yeah, so you've had the I've had my steam machine for a little bit over a week now Valve was kind enough to send me the two terabyte kit with the controller, which is I think what they sent to everybody it seems like Um, and I've spent a kind of a lot of time with it. L it's become one of the main ways I play video games right now U It's been hooked up in my living room. I hooked up to the monitor in the office for a minute just to try some stuff out But we're going to talk about it. We're going go through the whole thing, the good, the bad, how it works, what the kind of out of box experience is like We're going to have to talk about pricing because It's unavoidable at this point. I think People who listen to this show know that pricing of all electronics that involve RAM and or flash memory. Our shit show right now But if you don't, well, we're going to talk about that. And then I have some questions from Discord and from the blue sky that people had set in that we'll hit at the end if we have some time. performance, the whole thing. So I guess let's just Let's just get right into it. I thought Like the setup, the out of box in the setup for this was was really nice. likeike the box was did you get retail box, I assume? Yeah, ye, yeah. Retail box. So two terrient models, same as you, which Now they do a five twelve There's four models, right? There's the five twelve gigabyte and the two terabyte, three hundred dollars price difference. And then there's also the Steam controller pack end, which is like a eighty dollars difference or something whichich is a little bit discount on Sam controller. And then you get the with the two terabyte models, you get the face plates too Yeah, so you get a wooden faceplate and a red cloth faceplate. I'm using the wooden faceplate right now Are you a red cloth Are you a black or are you it's not red. And I had this in my review and people shouted it out, but they're like, hey It's an orange, It's a blood orange one. It's clearly a reference to orange box And I'm like Borange. Well, well. I am very familiar with orange Bx. Well, you reviewed Orange Box. Iangeox. Yeah. I reviewed Orange Bx for PC Gamer. And yeah, oh yeah. I didn't know that. I went to Valve. I think went the same time. Oh, no, you went right. I was with Josh Norham. Yeahah. that's right. That's right. And We put orange boox on the cover of PCGamer Magazine for the review. And do you remember the big controversy or the big hub Did you all mess up the orange? We messed up the orange. We had old Pantone guides Yeah and famously PC Gamer put out the review. orange box and had a more salmon like color because it was a faded Hands hone And we same thing at maximum PC for a different or different topic same orange and we messed it up because the pant because future was too cheap to buy current Pantone guides, it turned. hundreds and hundreds of dollars. even back that. Yeah. And That's to say I have a very intimate relationship with that valveange orange. I know that orange. I can spot it. And I'll tell you, the steam machine faceplate is not that orange. It's rust. It's not orange. It's not like that orange box orange is like a neon orange. It's fluorescent orange And this is definitely not that. This is more This is some inside baseball This is closer to the orange that the valve in their lobby, the wheel on that is painted. although I think that's reder probably That's more red. Yeah when you see like the red in the back of the valve on the back of the guy's head, right. That's that's more red. This is somewhere in between. So I don't know where they chose this color. I don't know why they have that like soft felt texture. That's the part that was confusing to me. Of course, I know they made the orange box Yeah Let me tell you, listeners out there, this is not that orange. Yeah Norman Chan knows orrange U The setup was really easy. You pop it out, the box was nice, the packaging was really good, everythingverything was really secure. It was three cables for me power HTMI and Eethernet. You could do Wiifi as well if you want And then I logged in with the did an update. I logged in with the QR code from my Steam app and I was there in steam just like on my desktop. It was it was or on the Steam Deck. It was it was, they've gotten good at this part of it, I think over since the Steam Deck came out Yeah. We've talked about the hardware a little bit. I gave some kind of first impressions last week because I got it the day before we recorded the episode But it's Zen four CPU R DNA three point five GPU. It's six cores, six CPU cores with two threads each Thermally limited to I think thirty watts. It's pretty low. Um, U And then the GPU is an RDNA three point five, which is like a seven thousand series GPU Um with twenty eight compute units and eight gigs of VRAM sixteen gigs of system RAM total. Do you know if you have a single stick or a two stick model? Did you like they're only doing the single stick. They're only doing Yeah ye. and this is a chang from what we had learned back in November and actually got it wrong in my video review because I shot it before I did the dissembly. But in the dissembly, yeah, all the shipping models at least they, I don't know if they're even to make announcement if they get to do a channel, but twoays thinking about it. and I think Gamerers nextcess said a latest videos doing some benchmarks. Single channel is like, you know, singleigit percentage slower in some compute tests U. guess if you want to go upgrade because RAM is one of the places you can upgrade and you can buy another sixteen gigs sodiam. You could get up to thirty two gigs But easier than if you had two eight sticks Yeah. I mean, it's in a world where sixteen gigs of RAM cost two hundred or three hundred bucks. It's nice to not have to buy an extra sixteen gigs of RAM if you want to get to thirty two gigs I don't see a lot of people doing with that, though. I mean, like I can't imagine no, no, no. For this type of machine, like, yes, you can run Lazy desk stuff, but sixixteen gigs is going to be plenty for most stuff unless I guess people are buying something like this to not just use a living room gaming PC, but to make it some type of No, semi portable workstations. Yeah, and we can talk about that. I I played I spent a fair amount of time using the Linux desesktop on it the other day. I think that As somebody who's spent it like I'm I'm a ninety nine percent Linux user at this point, right Um, I think that That idea that you're going to use this as a desktop with the immutable OS running in Steam OS is maybe not particularly realistic. We could talk about that later, but u the Hardware is capable. The thermal limits on the GPU and the CPU are very aggressive compared to even comparable Nuck style boxes and definitely compared to like an ITX machine you would build yourself So Yeah We should talk about the choice here because it's not APU, right? They chose discrete CPU, discrete GPU both from AMD. And while Valve won't say it, you know, you can kind of sus out that what they've done is they've taken a binN CPU part that was an APU and disabled the GPU cores. And then maybe they, you know for the pricing, for the sourcing, they were able to get this version that twenty eight CU version of the seven thousand series R DNA three point five two at that price point for this level of TDP for that one ten on the GPU side, which is going to be your your cap for your performance. And and it seems like it seems like that was a really strategic choice. So I did some I've been playing a bunch of games on it. I've been playing like indie games, of course run great on this. It's's it's It's it's very performant B I also downloaded some PlayStation five gam. So I downloaded like Goda War Ragonarock and for Horizon forbidden West and some stuff like that It's a little more intensive And I was seeing a solid like locked sixty frames per second on all of those games, right? Like I think that this this choice to throttle the hardware was A tight to noise in the living room because the machine's really quiet even under full load. Yeah.. And but I think it's also like in the same way that the Steam Deck was spepected to run current genen console games at a good frame rate at the twelve eighty bay one hundred display This feels like it's spepected to run current gen console games. T eighty p to four K depending on what kind of scaling you want to use And decent performance out of that. Like this is a decent performance machine. This isn't like an enthusiast computing thing. No, no, no. and and you know prricing's unfortunate, right because of supply chain stuff. But when they designed this, I think they really priorize that form factor and the noise level, right? Super custom fan, custom fan mount, custom blades. and It is so quiet. That's the thing. like I think even if it was hard to communicate in a video review the size of this thing. Like if you have a steam controller, if you have a game pad, it's less wide then basically your game pad, your steam controller. likeike six inches by six inches by six inches is tiny. Right? Its it's tall it's bigger than the the Kleenix square, the cube tissue box. slightly bigger than that, but not much bigger. That's why when we go back to the portal cube thing, Just even adding like an inch in any dimension. is significant volume wise. It's like eight liters So I have a dice roller dice tower thing that somebody printed for us back in the tested days. It's been sitting on in the speaker by my TV for years and it's five inches by five inches by five inches and this is That now sits on top of the steam machine and like it looks like a little hat for the for the steam machine. Um Let's see it ships five hundred, twelve gig or two terabyte storage. It has the same kind of EMMC slot that the Steam Deck has. So you can take a microSD card, which also are phenomenally expensive now and use those to store excess games if you don't want to open it up. If you do like opening it up and getting to the SSD seemed pretty easy You just pop the pop it out and the slots on the bottom, but there is only one NVME slot. So you can't add to it. You're just replacing the one that it ships with. And then I assume you have to go through the process of reinstalling Steam OS and that whole thing Yeah, so the external storage, the hot hot swappable storage because it really is hot swappable. You can just plug it in and the library will recognize that's not express speeds. So I think it's kind of capped. I want to say a hundred Micgabits per second or Micabitss not like the switch to which uses the new the newer spec, right? cor theer Yeah. ye. Yeah. So, you know, you you don't you're not going to be able to and you wouldn't want to run, you know, Pical applications off of that. It's really just for game storage. Itust fast enough for loading. The NVME will fit the full the full width twenty two hundred eighty size and the cavity, which lives in like as compact as it is, will fit NVME M. two SSDs with heat sinks to a certain extent to like not Like's there's multiple levels heat sink. I want to say Crucial made a T seven hundred that had like a two inch tall heat sink on it. That's not going to fit. But your but your normal like a PlayStation five style SSD with a heat sink in it seemed to fit from from what I was able to tell Um The they're using a Qualcom wireless chipset Linux users will know we love media tech over here, so I'm glad that they use Qualcom for that We don't love Media tech just for the record, Mediaech sucks shit, but u u airflow. They have a custom cooling solution for this thing. Basically the whole box is looks like cooling fins And did you do a tear down too? I saw the Gamer's exxcess tear downown. Yeah Um yeah this so there's you should watch the tear down videos because it's a really fascinating piece of hardware U It seems to like it's sucking a little bit air in the in the front, but mostly in from the bottom. Is that fair and then blowing it out the back. It's a combination and that's why the feet. which is where the bolts are hidden in. If you want to do a disassembly, the four feet are rais it up off the ground. And so their big reccoommnition is definitely don't put it on carpet because a lot of it does come from the airflow the airflow has come from the bottom. The back feet actually have a has a little divider that connects the back feet to prevent recirculation. So the exhaust in the back. you don't want to block back, of course, but the hot air that goes out the back When you can' feel it, it doesn't come back underneath the steam machine to recirculate. So it's really well, well designed airflow wise and really the noticeable thing is at load, thirty watts CPU and most games aren't CPU. heavy Y, but Yeah one ten watt. Max RPM, you're not going to hear it. all You literally don't hear it Like I had to get right up on it when I was running Gota War Ragnarok yesterday hear anything J just sitting in the living room at my on my couch fifteen feet away I didn't you couldn't tell it was on. Um, On that front, I got to say Like I don't want to It's a cliche to talk about the spouse approval factor here But in terms of Things that I' put on it visibly connected to the TV over the years My wife is like, this is way better than the dock that you had the steam deck on before. No and that's why they made this, right? So many people buy Steam deeck and Steam deeck prices went up by two hundred bucks, right? by thir hundred percent. But so many people do the seam back the attach rate for the dock and Val just knows their cell numbers, but there are plenty of people who make tiny third party steam Dck docs as well. It's just a great way to use The Steam Deck because you can stream from your tower over internet and streaming is just you can pump it out. but Steam deeck had some issues just like Even if you don't go into Linux the desktop mode, you're not going to get full resolution. It's going to output just, you know, captit I think nineteen twenty Um, and Even then the theral design of Steam Deck, you're going to hear that exhaust and it goes up the top too. So it's not really well designed for small cavities. And there's a whole argument that yeah, you could build your own PC like a laptop works as well, right for a living room. But I've tried putting a laptop, you know behind the entertainment center in the corner of their room. and it's thermally, it's just not made for that. The giant power bricks that laptops come with, it's just really not family or you know, spouse friendly haaving to dig it out to do the the to like to press the power button or whatever. Like there's always there's whenever I've done that in the past, even using like a Nuck style machine. because I went through a thing with PCWorld a couple of years ago where we went through and tested Bazillion like B Lincoln MSI and Asus boxes which are basically a steam deck hardware. It's an APU in a less thermally limited and less power limited box So we installed Bzyiton, Steam OS and a Holo ISO and all that stuff on them. And the experience was fine, but it wasn't great. It was good for streaming. likeike that that was the thing, the The problem with those was I couldn't get the cost to a point that it was in like the price range that felt okay forreaming. So like a streaming box felt like it should be a hundred or maybe two hundred bucks at the outside. And if you were going to go more than that, you wanted somebody to actually play games at four K And the but when you got to performance it could you that you werere looking at seven or eight hundred dollars for the most part Um, So yeah, like the the experience in terms of like How it is a as a console I was really blown away, right from from really simple stuff that actually the Steam Duck does this now too. I learned this the other day by accident because it didn't used to do this You can wake up the steam deck with a PlStation or Xbox controller, an external controller now. even on Bluetooth, which is which is The last time I tried that was probably more than a year ago, but it did not work for a long, long time U You can wake this up with a Steam controller, you can wake this up with the Playstation controller. You can wake this up the Xbox controller connected wirelessly Well, more importantly, you could wake up your TV that way too Yeah So it doesn che my CC. Yeah. That's it. Yep. you can And that's that's one of the reasons that things that you're not necessarily going to get with a home built PC. and Steamedeck got it through the you know, latest software channels. but No, you can Wake up your TV with You know, console style And the one changed the appropriate channel, change change your receiver, your sound bar, whatever, all of that stuff happens The one thing you can't do is there's no wake up on land So for example, I know Well, It's one of the ways I would be using the steam machine, like you know, when Steam frrame comes out is a stream games maybe from it. Oh ye stream games from Steam Machine to Steam Deck because don't that's better power consumption on Steam Deck. I want all the biirectal streaming possibilities, right? And so Steam machine is in sleep mode because it's only going to consume like in sleep mode, sub one watt Yeah And I would love the ability to power on Steam deeck and say, hey Wake up my steam machine over land And let me stream the game with sixX pressing power. I'm actually going to get much better frame rates at the twelve eighty eight hundred OLED, right? And then Let it go back to sleep after fifteen minutes when I knowing my game. It's interesting because there's Like this is a thing that Apple realized late in the Apple TV's life is that Having an always on boox in the home is a real powerful thing for like their home automation stuff and all of that And this gives Valve a similar place where you can have, hey, this is the machine that is the local cache for all of your all of your game downloads or whatever, whatever it happens to be Um, I don't, I don't know that there're like this feels like , I think a lot about the first year, what the first two years of the Steam Deck looked like and how that software evolved. And at the beginning, it was just like, oh, thank Godd, the game worked And by the end of the second year, you were like, Yeahah, I'm gonna to plug this into the TV. I'm stream from the office and I'm going to have my giant video card in the office make my games look really awesome in the living room I still feel like the steam streaming is is not always there. Moonlight's better for sure. one hundred percent. And it's not just the valve like they're so fast. it's a relelatively small team for the size of the company they are, especially on the hardware side, right? And so they push out updates nonstop. I'm getting on Stam machine like we're getting Almost a daily daily updates. rightight. And you're going to get those updates because they can iterate so fast and there are lots of bugs to fix. like There are things with recognizing the, you know, aspect ratios and screen sizes, there's things on the front panel that the light that is the LED light strip that they need to figure that out because I can't get it steam enough to where it doesn't annoy the room sometimes. Oh really. It' broken for me. the brightness on it. But you're have third party stuff. I mean, people are getting steam machine in Asia right now and the US's got to be in the next couple days, but you're going to get like the equivalent of Decki on steam machine And that's just going to be great Yeah, it's it's um I mean, the benefit of building on something that's open and actually shipping in open OS for this is Like we're not to see the benefit for that for a while until the hardware gets out in the world, but but I think Deckie is a good call out because the the The stuff you get with Deckie Loader on a steam deck is is a real real plus up for the whole platform Um and Valve did really, I mean, one of the things that you get with Deckie and all the emulation stuff, right and And that's the thing So many people are buying into the valve hardware ecosystem H you know, their're Linux or third party hardware based emulation setups and Steve Deck isn't great for that. and while Valve talk about that or they don't care about it because they hear about selling games on Steam store. It's going to be a great Steam machine is going to be a great machine or emulation Yeah, it's funny. the first thing I did when I booted into desktop mode was install Steam grrid, DB and and moonlight. Those were those were the two things I put on and then I mounted up SMB share with all my with all my stuff on it Um I want to talk about performance because I know you talked about some of the games you loaded up and going back to hardware, right? L they chose this specific level of CPU performance and GPU performance, but more importantly, they also chose eight gigabytes of VRM And I would say the one sticking point because The V RM is tighter the The GPU and the TDP load, right? Be And I think Aside from the pricing stuff, they couldn't or that they just cant control The messaging was the thing that they could control. And even back in November, they were talking like to four K sixty FPS. and I think they some ext that had to say that because a lot of the console equivalents, PS five, PS five Pro are being sold as four K machines, I think from a practical standpoint If you're playing this even on like I have a seventy seven inch OLED I'm never playing in the games Native for K out of a se machine or even on, you know, on my console style equivalents four thousand forty p is totally fine. a standard twelve foot distance or something ten foot distance I was going to say, have they reached I know AMD did talked a couple of weeks ago about doing FSR four point one on this era of hardware, which FSR four point one is It's kind of the parody it finally gives AMD parody with DLSS on Current genen RDNA RDNA four hardware, sorry. So we've got too many fours and fives here. On the RDNA four hardware, you get like Tensor core acceleration for upscaling and stuff like that Frame Gen and all that So you're not sacrificing performance to get the upscaling or the frame genen Um, they they talked about rolling that out A couple weeks ago It's unclear if that's hit theinux side yet and I'm not seeing The way Proton works, sometimes the FSR and DLSS settings get obfuscated in ways that are confusing And I was curious. did you experiment with that stuff at all? Yeah Do you know what's what the stat? And this is another thing where timing really hurt them, right? Yeah. So to refresh for people and I had to refresh this for myself too because I'd been so much more freely on DLSS side. R. And D DLSS just in general has been I think more acceptable Visually for me. Yeah the artifacting. So when I've done head to head comparisons with the FSR three and DLSS four or four point five The for the DLSS solutions generally are less artifacty They and they and they have less weird stuff going on is the is the easiest way to say it. So yeah. Yeah. So FSR w gave you kind of a um like they they're um, They're upscaling. Amy's upscaling, which was fine. like Cyberpunk use FSO two FSR three It added frame Gen and And and a kind of a rel right the low latency stuff and revise or upscaling. But you see a lot of games let you choose between two and three because the general consensus and I hadn't done the testing on this, but the general consensus is Visually, three was impacted a lot Yeah. like you get better frame rates, but you just the quality modes were not as good. as on two. And not Fundamental problem with both of those is that AMD didn't have dedicated tensor hardware and still doesn't on the three point five stuff So so you were using the compute cores that the GP uses to do like shaders and things like that. So you are Kind of robbing Peter to pay Paul in some of this stuff, which is isn't great And so the machine learning base upscaling that was in FSR four was previously limited just to RDNA or ass of hardware. nine thousand series GPU's, yeah But As of last year A DLL leaked that allowed FSR four to run on RDNA three hardware people could inject themselves with Opt the scaler. And so you got a better sense like, one, hey, AMD, you could have, you can, you're working on this. you can run FSR four and get those visual benefits. on RDNA three hardware And so I think two months ago, they announced, okay, it's actually coming. July was their time frrame And as a recordingist, it's like Beginning of July. It's july second. Yeah Valve actually had to let reviewers know part of AMD's release Steam machine would also get FSR four, but they just couldn't commit to time time would get update. But here's what happened. Reviews went out, The review embargo went out FSR four dropped that same day on Prokeon experperimental. And so no one in the reviewer's batch Got a chance to or the Marg branch. Yeah compare FSR three and four on C machine and you can run it right now. So I have it. I have the proton you know, the experiment of running FS of R four. and It's going to be one of those things where if if you don't care like if you're not pixel peeping if you're not you're playing this on a on a monitor if you're just going on a TV The takeaway is you can now run FSR four, which in many games is just you just turned SSR three on and you're running four in the background You can run Poton Proton will handle that in the background, right? Yeah youuge can run performance FSR performance based upscaling, performance priority, but get the quality based visuals Okay. so so you basically you're going from Performance visuals to quality visuals at performance speed That's exactly it Um it's so I was going to say I hadn't used a lot of FSR stuff outside of like some specific testing we did at PC World I'm mostly In my experience, I'm generally just playing at ten thousand eighty P and letting the TV up scale or Let's go Man, that's fine The thing the thing I guess my point is when I'm sitting in front of the monitor and I have a four K monitor sitting fifteen inches from my face or twenty four inches from my face I noticed this much, much, much more than I do in the living room when I'm sitting ten feet away from it. And you're talking about aliasing, right? You're talking specifically edgesally specifically edge sharpness. and then also the artifacts that come with the AI upscaling stuff I think I think that's the stuff that's more noticeable in the big TVs. I think you're right. like Yeah, and sharpness on TV's Honestly, ten thousand eighty fourty forty p is like a really nice sweet spot where it feels like, you know, feels good for a big sixty five or seventy seven inch TV. A one thousand eighty p on a standard fifty inch TV is going to be fifty five inch TV is going to be totally fine But it's the artifacting. It's where in previously in performance mode on FSR three You get the shimmers, you get the weird shadows. you get like ghosting in the movement Yeah. And it depends on game to game but also depends on what the internal resolution that they you know, what' the games be comfortable running at to get to your frame rates And if you're going from seven hundred twenty P to fourteen forty, it didn't look good beforesw four. Norm, it's also worth reminding you because you've been to the house in a minute, but We are still my wife is really attached to the ancient Panasonic TV So we are still Every time I've tried to bring an LCD or an OLED in here, she's looked at it and she's like, yeah, I want the old one back. This doesn't look as good because she's used to that the motion on the Panasonic. I'm going to have to buy a phenomenally expensive OEed to get the refresh rate that she likes on the TV. So my living room testing has been exclusively at ten AP It turns out, you can run native TyP on this thing and it's rock solid ' an eighty ninety FPS, no problem Yeah, yeah Um, the uh So I did some benchmarks becausecause you know, you could get it out of your The thing I found is that it's kind of hard to get it to unlock the frame rate actually By default, it locks to whatever your refresh rate is on the monitor, it seems like, up to up to I think, one hundred and twenty or one hundred and forty four herz Um The Shadow of the Tomb Raider ran at sixty herz no matter what I did playing the benchmark I unlocked it on the steam side. I unlocked it in the game. I turned off Bync, all of that stuff. It was it loves sixty hurtsz. There's nothing I could do to change that U Cyberpunk, I was seeing seventy four point five frames per second on the RT Low setting. rununning at ten EP which was like RT low is basically reflections and puddles and stuff like that. It's not the full, obbviously it's not the full overdrive path tracing mode That's not going this is not a machine to run full path tracing. Aol not. Yeah, this is a PS five launch, not a PS five pro is the way I kind of think about it Doom the Dark Ages again, not the full path tracing, but the steam deeck path basically is sixty one and a half frames a second average Um, and then everything else I played with the with the ticker was basically locked at sixty herz. Like I couldn't find something God of War was solid sixty. I never saw saags It's the performance has been Kind of remarkable in that the frame pacing feels really, really good for a Linux machine sitting in my living room plugged up to a TV. The the kind of rule of thumb for I've been telling people is you could play ten eighty with FSR four now on because I think that's we've passed the point with FSR four where I would feel comfortable in performance mode, just leaving that on for everything. ten eighty ultra settings, fourteen forty p high settings, and four K low to medium settings T our rachers is in off That's your recognition. And you're going to get that that hits your fifty to sixty for everything So I it's funny, I was playing this and I tried I want to say zou zer seven was probably the newest big kind of AA AE game that had come out at the time I got the Steam machine you know, light the running the basic just default version proton that they recommend, which I think is I think it's the most recent one, I can't remember Um It ran great. No problems. No weird artifacts. everything's running great. at four K. I was running FSR performance, I think And it was a very playable sixty, you know, fifty five, sixty fres per second across the board. That game doesn't have any tracing. It still looks really nice on on the TV And these games don't have steam machine profiles now. I mean, that's another thing that developers,, even if they weren't optimizing for a Steam machine, they were creating performance profiles that made it easy. And so in this early stage, you're still going into settings and this is where it feels more like a PC experience and a console experience. I'm going in and kind of like making my trade offffs VRAM consumption and saying do I want what type of filtering do I want? do I want the techn living rooms. Its like the things I want are textures And you know, draw distance and textures Yeah at fourteen forty And you know, some pro' boss get can turn off Modern games, Indiana Jones runs great Yeah I was. I was shocked at Indiana Jones and doomed at Drc Ages honestly because both of those t least at launch we're rate tracing only via full path tracing only the on the PC And the experience, I mean, they've done some pre pre lit u modes now for Steam deeck and for lower end hardware The game ran great still looks really good U the the big thing I noticed on the performance stuff generally is that u That's what I was sitting in the desktop specifically I did notice that I wanted to run the better quality FSR. I didn't actually run stuff at four four forty p and scale it up. I did, which is I think the quality profile at four K. Is that right? It goes from It's performance is a four X upscale from one thousand eighty p to four K and I think quality is from fourteen forty p or thereabouts to four K Um and and it's funny The benefit of running the upscaling stuff is much greater when you start with more pixels versus the steam deck where you're starting with like six forty by four eighty or something like that to upscale to twelve eighty by eight hundred Yeah And not every game supportters sports and. likeike there's MD has their list of You know, what FSR three games, FSR four games and you assume that gets expanded Uh and you know, and it is fundamentally with R DNA three without those Tensor cores doing a different style of upscaling. I think it' still into eight, but it's not the full R day day four upscaling One of the things I did hit that was a little bit of a frustration is that Some games, I want to say Capcom was the big offender here was detecting the and it does this on PC as well. if you're using Linux on the PC. It says oh, hey this is a steam deck And it locks you into a Steam deeck mode When it sees you're running on Linux. So it assumes you're running a twelve eighty by eight hundred screen and makes some downstream choices around ray tracing and upscaling and stuff like that Don't make sense in the new context There are two things that every steam machine owner should do is one disable on a system level the auto detect a Steam Deck setting, which is in SteamOS. You could uncheck a box, do know on your per game setting, but it's a valve knows this like The C machine Its name was steam deck in the, you know, for the re units in terms of the game profiles. and then also out of box safeg The resolution to ten eighty as a default, I think just so people get good performance you set your display resolution to whatever max display max, whatever your output resolution is. For me, I set that to fourteen forty one twenty Um So let's see U I think that's the last thing to talk about and I feel like we've talked about this to death It has all the same problems that every other Linux gaming machine is going to have in that U annti cheat that doesn't the developers choose not to run on Linux isn't going work so So you're not going to get college duty, You're not going get battlefield six. you're not going to get riot games, you're not going to get Fortnite Um stuff like Apex Legends and the games, the helldivers, the companies that choose to sport Linux with their anti cheat embark with finals and arc raaiders all work, but no destiny too or Marathon because Bungie doesn't like Linux apparently Um So that stuff remains an issue I don't I kind of don't anticipate them selling enough of these just because of the pricing and the RAM situation that it's going to move the needle in any kind of meaningful way But maybe one day Microsoft and Bungie and Epic and Riot will decide that they want to support u Linux gamers Um Did you spend any time on the desktop? Norm Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's very similar to Steam Deck on desktop, right? KDE, I mean, they got rid of the Steam Dck logo stuff. so it's just a standard KDE logo. But you know, it's not a production machine for me because there's just not the applications I need for work I had it plugged into my monitor and you know for web browsing, for just downloading stuff. it's just It's so easy now. So so yeah, the big challenge for me sitting down and using it is that is the immutable nature of the OS. and Um The idea there is that the core bits of the OS the basically everything but your home folder and which is where games are stored and where your profile stuff happens and where where you save your work and things like that U is is an unwritable partition And when you get an update from Valve, then it just rewrites, it just dumps over new information on top of that provition which just replaces it wholesale the main brunt of the OS And then things like your Steam folder where your games are installed and like your screenshots folder where your screenshots are saved. orr you're in ak, if you're doing desktop stuff, your documents and downloads and all that stuff lives in a different subvolume that is writable and does persist between system updates Um And that's more like the consification of the OS update system, right that you're downloading. packages and rewriting the whole thing and do I mean, I would say that this is the trend in OS' that aren't Windows. Apple's been moving in this direction for like five, six years now the point that the Apple OS updates replace like the brnt of the OS and just leave your home folder untouched Um Big change is that Most Linux applications that you install natively, like if you're installing stuff from the arrch repositories or the Arch user repository They're going to want to install somewhere in the in the rooutot of the drive that's going to get blown away every time you do an update. So as a result Valve ships the Discover app and makes that front center, which mostly deals with flat packs. which are kind of like containerized applications that include all the bits and pieces and then those will live in your in your in your system fold in your home folder rather than the system root Um, I think that's fine for light use computing for likeome Chrome OS tile. Hey, I'm just using the browser mostly If you get into more complicated workloads, if you're using stuff like OBS or're using DaVinci Resolve or anything that has actual real lift behind it and requires Oh access to the file system or access to specific hardware es a kind of sticking point. It's not insurmountable But I don't like I could see this being a kid computer. I don't see this being a computer I'm ever going to use on my day to day Partly because of the horsepower, but mostly because of the immutable nature of the OS C I wanted to talk about a little bit about kind of the consolely stuff. We touched on this a little bit Things like that HTMICC. when I was looking at this and looked at the hardware, I was like, o, okay, I can spec a machine out that's like this And I think everybody who did a video almost did that exercise and of all those, the one that Steve did over at Gamers Nexus I think was the most realistic in terms of like what actual What you're going to get that's comparable to performance given the throttling and the cooling and all that stuff I want to say his price at the time, which probably has changed was sixty or seventy bucks less than the retail price for the cheap for the five twelve gig model and For me, that's the interesting question, right? is like Can I build a machine as quiet as this sits in my living room? I actually don't think so. Right? I'm good at building quiet machines. It's going if I want to build something that's quiet as this and as performant as this, it's going to be a lot more expensive And I'm also not going to get the benefits like the being able to resume turn it on by pressing the button on the controller from across the room. I'm not going to get the the stuff like the MMC slot that just seamlessly connects. I don't know that I'm ever actually going to use that, but that feels like a nice thing to have U and it's not going to be a six inch by six inch cube. It's going to be the size of a fractal terra or u you know, like a A small IT I can't build an ITX boox as small as this thing Yeah, I mean, start talking about leaders is like most small form factor, most people are ten to fifteen leaders and that's that's more than like triple like quadruple the volume of this. And yes, this is a cue, but like I think people are underestimating how small and how quiet this thing is. And I think the exercise of building a similarly Performing computer is ike it's fine as an exercise. but most people, if you're going to spend a thousand plus dollars on a gaming PC That the extra hundred dollars just for the better performance. you're gonna want level up. step up U and that's where, you know, The more interesting comparison is like something like the framework desktop 's under that's a sub five liter machine and that' Strix's halo so that's your alternate reality. What if Valve chose Strict' Halo APU, which is costs costs more from a B materials standpoint is more performant than the twenty eight CU one ten watt GPU eight kigates of VRAM. Sr Halo gets that thirty two gig minimum of shared memory And so sccalees better And even if you're not using it as a then you're talking about, okay, well then for a gaming machine That's a lot. It's like thousandteen hundred, fifteen hundred dollars hundred for something that's going to live in your living room that you might not use for, you know Oh, it's way more than say AI workloads or whatever that people would be investing on a small phone veor for a desktop. PC equivalent of a litx equivent of a Mac M min The the thirty two gigabyt Strix halo machines are way more than four thousand four hundred bucks at this also. That's crazy. Like there, I'm looking at the GMK tech This one has okay The Problem is they come in The AI people like them. so they're they're doing butloads a RM A sixty four gig model is twenty thousand four hundred bucks. So So I thirty two gigs would be a good sweet spot there for Gam and PC. And and this is the reason that another reason that steam machine exists is for CeMOS along with the release of this device, DOS three point eight. now gets ability to install the desktops, running AMD hardware pretty easily. It becomes a competitor to Ezite It's interesting because I've been thinking about who I would recommend install Steam OS at this point versus who I would recommend it Let'ss take a moment back I think that Steam OS makes a lot of sense in the context of these machines, the steam deck and and the steam machine. I don't know that it makes sense in a DIY system. I think that the Basite people have done a really good job of building something that's generally accessible to most PCs, including people who have Nvidia graphics cards And alsoso that are designed to work better like they handle things like bootloader and and thingsings that I'm I'm curious. I haven't I haven't Full disclure I have not installed Steam OS on a machine in the in the current uh and under since they released it a couple of weeks ago But I am pretty skeptical about dual booting on a Linux machine with Windows on a Steam OS machine. And Besite has that stuff locked down. It's really good. So So like I don't know that it's the short. I think More interesting to me is what is thisus going to do? What is Lenovo going to do with a Nuck style smallmall subot sub three liter box using an APU Um with SteamOS. So I think I think that The other thing I'm curious about is when they start selling the steam the integrated hardware controller for the steam controller If on IFix it If we're going to be able to hack that into existing machines. Oh are buillt in steam control plus So I didn't actually I meant to take it apart and look. I forgot when I had it open the other day Look at this is there do they have a I wonder if they're jp straight into a power lead off of that daughter board so that it's getting always on power and then also is triggering the boot sequence But I don't remember. I' have to look at the footage. It's two wi radios, one Bluetooth, and one dedicated steam controller on the top left. I want to say if I want to say it's all the radio Wires go to the same plate and It's true Two wires. so one must be power I don't think it's dedicated power. I don't know, That's a good question. I wonder if they have a I guess I wonder if they have like an I twoC bus or something like that's doing the communication or if it's Yeah, anyway, TBD But u, but yeah, it's it's It's much more consoolly than I expected. It's much more conantly than the Steam Deck was at launch and I think in all the important ways and go back, you know, without even having to buy I fixed partarts. I've seen people build small form PCs after Steam contontroller came out and try to embed the chunongle on the inside just you know, wire wire USB cable into the cavity of their case and just have the the receiver there. If you do that Make sure you put electrical tape over the contacts. Oh God, yeah. You don't want to weld that to your to to your case. Or start a fire. Yeah, or start a fire fire Okay Pricing and lottery Um Like the pricing is hard this this to me feels like it was meant to be a three seven hundred fifty dollars kind of entry six hundred, seven hundred and fifty dollars entry point Um And the price of RAM, the price of VRAM, the price of the SSD inspired over the last year. I mean, I assume You know, I assume the people listening to this podcast are part of the thin layer of sea foam at the top of the ocean of uninformed consumers. that know that RAM is four times more expensive than it was this time last year I don't judging by the reaction to the to the your video and the videos I watched on this I don't think the vast majority of people understand that and they are thinking this is one hundred dollar, this is going to be a five or six hundred dollars box Wh is we'll talk about timing because after they announced price and reviews droped A week later, Microsoft jacked up prices, Apple jacked up prices. And so you have you're the first one thatre you take the brunt of that coming up with a, you know, a appealing in un atttractive price it looks more attractive a week later relative to other hardware. and It maybe like And also PlayStation just yesterday. sunsetting physical disc. Yeah, right So like it's like Steam deck today. maybe isn't like financially more attractive than anything else a week ago, but you get a better understanding of where the market's going I will say Norm, we went to a giants game last week. I think I told the story in N lander We were at a giants game in the guys we were in the bleachers out out and right field And the guys sitting behind us were like, Hey, what do you think about that steam machine Unfortunately, this happened while I was taking the kiddo off to get a Sunday at the end of the end of the sixth inning. So Gina was sitting there, she was listening. She's like taking notes. She's like, Ohh yeah,ah, okay like they were like, hey, it's expensive, but this is way cheaper than I'm going to get a PC four otherwise and they were all talking about wanting to build it. like I wish I had known this before we left the game because I would have totally interrogated them about the kind of games they wanted to play on it and like if they knew that Cod wasn't going to work and all this stuff. Just the fact that they were having this conversation in a in a in like I've never had An incidental conversation about the steam deck in the last five years, right The fact that this is broken through at that level that people are talking about it. just like normal dudes at the baseball game I was kind of surprised by. so Think about the success of the Steam Deck, right? There was nothing on the market like Steam Deck when that came out. and I mean, there was stuff out of China, but it was not you're not accessible. the GPD stuff. Yeah Yeah, but like Valve made a really like, you know, even when it was rumored, it was Valves's switch handheld, right? But ended up being so much more than that. And the big success of Steam Deck is that one It allowed you play this existing library of stuff that people had invested in on the go, which you could never do before. from Steam Library. And two, it made proton Like over the, you know, many years it's come out, it made that a non question, a non issue And so the big success of Ce machine you know, is that now they've put that on the desktop. And if you compare it to the steam machine we saw Wellas it fifteen years ago or ten years ago?, right? fifteen years ago. you know, valve with Linux gaming is like they they've achieved kind of what they set out to do is to not have compatibility be a thing you have to really worry about. Certainly not for old games, but for most new non multiplayer new games. Well, and they're getting enough market share now that people are actually paying attention to it before launch. even even even the bigger folks. Um The other thing that so the pricing is feels high. It feels bad. I think it's a unfortunate reality of of the time in which we live If you don't like it, write a nasty letter to Sam Altman, I guess because it seems like they're the driver of the problem I mean, the thing I go back to is if Valve knew Obviously they' trying to reach a certain price point and maybe internally they felt this size, this performance, seven hundred fifty or whatever it was as they originally planned it, was a great seed spot. A little bit of a premium over consoles, PS five equivalent, but and it will last for this long. It moves the ball forward for its CMOS and it serves this need right now If they knew price are going to go up by a third. Would that have changed their allocation of memory, would that have forced them to say, okay, maybe if it was going to be over one thousand dollars anyway. If it was going to be thir thousandteen hundred dollars anyway Should we have invested twelve gigs of VRM to make it last a little longer see I don't I don't think should they have put things like, you know, like a audio head check in or different, you know, different Thunderbolt on here? Like would they have allocated the materials differently I think for me, I think the Their focus has always been on what what's the cheapest thing we can tellll that will play current genen console games well And with that in mind I can't imagine them changing too too much I think the um I actually twenty the the backhanded compliment on this is that The high price of RAM, I think that the console vendors are looking really closely this is going because if it doesn't sell out, if it doesn't sell super well then then they're going to it's going to make them gun shy about thousand dollars consoles for next generation Just to be clear, that's what we're looking at is PS six at a thousand dollars and should there be another Xbox thousand bucks, which I think is going to extend this console overlap period way longer than we've ever seen. Like the last one already went long because of the pandemic I think this next one will see a much longer cross platform cross generation over lap time than we ever have before In terms of future proofing, the The way I think about it is, is this a machine that you're going to buy to play GTA six And for this performance The answer I think is no I should not Do we even know what GT does GTA six have race racing We don't know I assume so. It's going run on Crage and hardware. By think GTA has always been like a game to bridge generations. of hardware And for PC gamers who want to have the best version of GTA when they get the chance to play it I think it's hard to say spend one thousand hundred dollars on a machine or thousand eleven hundred dollars on a machine that you're going to compromise your GTA six experience on I think I think that this will like If the launch Playsttation and the Xbox Series S are the low bar for what your GTA six experiences, I think you're you you're to get exactly the same thing here That's fair. Yeah. Yeahah, but I would want more. I would want more. Yeah want I would want to turn textures from low to high. Here's my question is are you going to play GTA six on a Playsttation when it comes out Uh later this year, are you going to wait until the PC released two years from now Yeah, that's the thing. likeike they've also changed the release. I'm going to play on PS five proro. Yeah I mean, that's the best possible way to play it when that lunch is I'm not to wait two years Um I thought the lottery was interesting. They rolled out a lottery scheme. This is the eternal battle against scammers and scalpers, I think, more than anything Bom It seems like they they you expressed interest they assigned you a number randomly based on U, what you're in then they they put you in the highest numberers slot that you fell if you if you expressed interest in multiple SKUs, the one you stayed in is the one that you were closest to the top of the list on that initial period and then they're emailing people as they get allocations. And there's a lot of tea reading going on in the subreddits about who's getting what when and which models they have more of and all that. But it seems impossible to know from outside Demmand is more than supply. That's that much is clear. Yeah. So I mean the argument that they should have prriced it lower or takaking it at you know, price it on a loss. completely understand why they did not do that Obviously, demand is there. Look, I don't think in the modern era I don't think any in the current era in the age of tariffs and exorbitant RAM and storage prices. I don't think anybody's going to sell anything at a loss. Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Valve U I think looking at the prices and looking at the BOM and looking at The terror of prices and looking how they've raised the steam Duck prices in the last year I really, really don't think Like this doesn't feel like they're making a ton of money on the on the on the hardware, especially when you factor in warehousing and shipping and the risk of tariffs in any given moment I suspect it's as much as cost as they could make it and they're eating the the R and D. Basically, the people time. And there's enough padding that if rM prices go up, They have one RAM price increase without having to raise prices and then we'll see a price increase if that happens suppliers won't you can't negotiate, right? You can't say we're buying this amount. suppuppliers will just say no. We'll ghost you Yeah. and I think the The expectation my recommendation, all of this is the same as anytim somebody asks me if they should buy hardware right now, which is like if you want to buy in the next two years, it's not going to be cheaper than it is today which is T of grim Let's see, do we have time for a couple of questions, Norm.? Do you have a couple more? Let's take aple questions, and then I'll give my one final thought on the thing I wish they made. Okay. fininal thoughts. I like this. So Embergs from Blue Sky asked how are the console like aspects like wake wake from sleep? ground game updates. we didn't talk about that game suspend, we should talk about that He says, I hook my PC up to my TV pretty often, but it's always a big hassle, something different breaks every time I love the Game Suspend thing. It's my favorite thing about the Steam deeck because I can play a game like Terotch Legion that doesn't really have a pause or reszoe or save. put the thing to sleep. This works the same way. I haven't had any failures on that yet So it doesn't and it doesn't, right? Because unlike the steam deck you don't turnurn it off, it's always plugged in. It doesn't run on a battery, right? And so while CMOS supports that game suspend, if you put it into sleep mode The game suspend doesn't resume. the same way What it did for me? Like if you go to sleep and then you go back into the game. Yeah. I had to the game.. Okay. I gotta be able to take that. It may vary on the game. L I did So I was playing thena Jones yesterday. I put it to sleep. I came back like thirty minutes later. It was exactly where I left off with no no problem the I didn't try that with a ton of different games. I'm sure that there's Suspend mode for games is a nightmare for a whole host of reasons, mostly related to the GPU turning off and dumping whatever is in memory. So Um, UI the main UI I still think is not as good Console friendly, you know, user friendly as a console UI I think it's That's the weakest point of Valve's design is their UI is they make a like it's not like, you know, a phone UI is not reactive in that way A And the design language, I guess is consistent with Steam Dck But I had this same issue with Steam Dack is that like It is cluttered and it is still intimidating for people who come from console experience. I think so It's funny. I set my daughter up with an account on the steam deck on the steam machine rather earlier today because she was like, hey, can does this mean does this thing let me play my steames in the livingom like Yeah, absolutely like Oh I want to do that Um The the I would put it Below the playlaystation and probably below Nintendo on the swwitch. deffinitely below Nintendo. Nintendo' that's the gold standard. My five year old can power on Switch two and launch justust Dance with no problem. That's true And the five year old with the steam machine, it's like accidentally clicking onto the news tiles and the, you know, those the f tiles and random things. So I think it's better than the Xbox though. I think the Xbox experience is abysmal in the Honestly The last time the Xbox had a good UI was probably like two thousand nine. so Um the background updates It does the same thing that the Steam Deck does where it's like, hey, you're downloadinguff. Do you want to keep going in the background when you try to turn it off. And I think that's the way the switch works now. I think the switch pops a similar prompt when you do that Um There's a whole splash screen that it goes to when you activate sleep mode but you still have a download queue It just shows the bar and then obviously the LED light shows a download progress bar. and then it'll go to sleep after for that. And that's all configurable too. So you can say go to sleep, we can say, know, let me download while I'm in a game and I'll take the performance hit, which Steam Deck wouldn't let you do because there was too much of a performance hit that background now. I mean and this is again, the modern PC gaming, there's so many downloads. I get patches for everything Yeah The other thing it does it does do the thing where it downloads shaders in the background so you're not compiling shaders necessarily, I think. I actually don't know that I've seen that on everything. I think I've seen that on a handful of things and I wonder if that's tied to the Steam Deck had thatab So much shader compilation. especially with the new patches and the new FSR four stuff. It's like shader shader shaders I do I will say It doesn't do the thing where it wakes up in the middle of the night to download the patches for you, which I kind of wish it did I wouldn't I wouldn't mind having a fresh Powering it on in the morning and having having everything up to date without me having schedulle a scheduled wake or something. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing that the consoles do and it's quite nice Um The last thing is the it does do it does let you do things that the consoles do. It lets you change your TV volume or your soundbar volume or your receiver volume which is really nice. The interface for that isn't great. I'm sure they'll work on that over time because I think that's a relatively new feature to the Steam OS front, but yeah, that that's that's that's pretty much Those are the big things for me I hope that the update cadence slows down after it's available to general public because right now, even in the stable channel, I'm getting an update or two every day, which is a bit much One analogy I have and's not the most flattering one is so much of it is built off of you know the Linux architecture that you that they're only servacing so much of that in StMOS as a UI. Like I had this sim issue with SteamDck is that you have to go into desktop mode sometimes to get to The deeper settings, especially for audio, like configuring five point one sound and what type of audio speaker setup you have and not getting your vocals to your center channel and that stuff. That's best configured in and sometimes only configurable in the desktop mode And it feels like Windows when they reskin control panel and they gave you, you know, Windows ten friendly, family friendly control panel, but they still hid the real control panel over underneath that. it feels like that. L you want to get to the real meaty parts of the configuration stuff, but that's really only in deskop mode And what they present to you in SteamMOS, the big picture mode when you boot that up is sometimes not everything you need to get you. Ething you want to gets you. So in fairness, I didn't have to boot into desktop mode until I went over there to see until I wanted to install Moonlight, honestly was was the big thing that got me to do that U And I plugged in a wireless like a Microsoft keyboard that has a trackpad on the side and that that worked great for that experience Um Do I haven't done anything complicated with the audio routing. Like I plugged I hooked a dual sense up to it But I haven't tried to use the headphone port on that. I think probably not putting a headphone port on the steam controller is a deliberate choice. because that makes the audio routing configuration and complexity really it's like it multiplies that complexity a lot U let's see, I've got another question from humumanity Plague. They wanted to know, do you think the apples to apples comparison of how does this compare to a PS five is actually valid Both things seem to be going for vastly different aims I mean, from a performance standpoint, that's a safe comparison to say like it performs like a PS five but a little better, specially if FSR four. you know, it has like, you know, borders at PSR stuff. that you get with PS five Pro H So I'd say yeah, performance wise, fair comparison, but the person in the market for PS five it iss not the person who in the market for steam machine I think that's right. It's funny, what are the things that the guys at the basketball at the baseball game were talking about was how good steam sales are. My wife wasn't she doesn't buy games on steam. so she doesn't know, but she was like, Hey They were talking about steam sales being really good, Are those? Is it better Then everything else I' was like, oh god, yeah, you have no idea. That's an entire business. Yeah, that's like, hey we're going we're going to race to the bottom on pricing for games. Let's go Build a library Um, let's see, people wanted to know u I have this written down I don't have the username. so I apologize. Somebody asked how It works with Mixed mode controllers. So if you're like using a steam controller and an Xbox controller or a Playsttation controller, how does that work? I didn't actually test that. Did Did you take a look at that? Absolutely because it's Bluetooth radio and the steam two point four gigahertz. can use you can use both. It does up to four, just like the tunongle, up to four steam controllers. And still have one steam controller plugged wirelessly connected to that And then the Bluetooth is slightly noisier, but I have like my stadia controller and an Xbox controller as two and three So we're playing, you know, playing LeGo Batman right now doing split screen. I'm on a scam controller and the kid is on xox controller. That sounds good. Miguel Burgers in the Discord asked what does the vent exhaust smell like I didn't it doesn't man. It doesn't have the smell the flux smell. Itject. Um So I think that that's probably let's see. The last one is how many USB controllers are there in the box? I didn't actually look at that. I ment to the when I had the thing open last night and I forgot to I forgot to switch over LS USB it but um We don't know many rooote hubs they have. There's only four ports. Well, there's five ports because there's two. UB A on the front to USB A on the back and one USBC. And some of those are USB two and some of them are three point. That's right. The ones in the front are two point zero and the ones in the back are three and the USBC is not Thunderbolt So ume three controllers? not I'm not surprised that they didn't do Thunderbolt on this, honestly. That adds so much expense and I don't know that any normal people are going to do it But Norman Chan, anything. Oh, let's hear that let's hear that final takeake. Oh yeah yeah, yeah. yeah. So is this a hot take? Do I need to like get the asbestos gloves out? or I need to put the fire suit on? I don't know if it's that hotot take, but you know Steam machine I think it's me, you know, it is what it is. in using the steam machine and in using the steam deck as a living room PC and as primarily a streaming device It made me realize the thing I want and I know Val will not make this because it got burned so badly from the first iteration is another is a modern take on a steam link box. and I know you you talked about well, you built, you know, you tryed to figure out, you know, if you wanted to build a dedicated streaming box two hundred bucks, what would that look like? Yeah, right The analogy I have is the steam frame. So steam frame is still coming out, hopefully, you know of summer right? That's their next hardarare device they're working on But the steam frame, interestingly, is a device that the R ago now. Yeah It's a veryve headset, and we're not going to get into the architecture of it, running arm and dition to Proton. But the idea of the usability of Steam frrame is you can run games locally on it, some games, right? You can run games flat screen. you put on the v your headset, but you run like Hades two or something or like a two D game or maybe like a Xbox three hundred and sixty or Xbox one era game or locally on it. At least that's the hope.ike can run something that's just like little underpowerered than what the steam deck could run But if you were for a more modern game or higher fidelity, it's primarily as a streaming device. that the set top box version of that philosophy is kind of what I want from Valve, which would be the steam deck I want a steam deck the screen or the controllers. I want to I want an a steam deck in an Apple TV size box with an SOC on there And maybe it's running arm where I can run locally at ten eighty fourty forty or four K, a game like Hades where I W want to run locally, don't want to have to on network and maybe a lot of like emulators or whatever for anything that's going to be at high resolution for anything that's going to be modern stream it from desktop gaming PC I already have in my house. and have that cost two to three hundred dollars two hundred two fifty bucks or something, I feel like would be a good swe shillld price is totally fine, right? Exactly. E Yeah, exactly, right. I want that type of box work can run most things oldld games, two deep games locally reallyally it's designed as a streaming box and then have Valve focus on optimizing streaming Well so my stam likeink streaming Needs You and I and Gordon When I cleaned out when I was helping Adam clean out Gordon stuff at PC World earlier this year He had like a stack of six steam links that he apparently he'd bought when they were clearing him out. And I think I can't rem if you and I were there or is there for a VR thing? When I was working on foo But I was up there and I was like, man I love the steam link. This thing it's my favor thing you guys have ever made. You gott to do a new one that supports newer wi Yada yada and they're like, Hey, you want more steam links? I got you steaminks and rolled out like a half dozen. Take as many as you want I don't think theyre to make another Steamlink. Yeah They got burned by it it didn't sell well, right? L And that's because it was tough to sell a hundred dollars hundred box that people could get that feature as an application on whatever setup box on their TV on their Apple TV. And that's kind of how Val thinks about it now. But if you're supporting it as an app, one, it doesn't have enough support, I think. The UI for Steamlink, I think is It's terrible. It's really bad. So bad And you're not optimizing for decoding hardware If you look at the the SOC that you can get that People are quc whoever making four phones. you get AV one decoding. There's next gen stuff are made for mobile that's going to give you high bandwidth and faster load latency dec coding, the valve can put some engineering on both on the hardware and the software side and then build in things like you know, steam controller support. So you don't have to you have like the benefits of that, you know, integrated two point four gigahertz receiver, like Ste Machine does and put it in an even smaller form factor, even quieter, lower power consumption box I pay two hundred fifty buck for that Well and end My hope is that the FEX the steam frrame focus because they did, they listed the steam streaming as a selling point on that thing, right? whichich is the first time it's been more than like a oh also you can do this weird thing for weirdos My hope is that The focus on that will make that experience smoother because The probleroblem isn't that it doesn't work But it's good and it works. it's great. It's really, really good. It's really easy The problem is that there are a million edges which like they have a proven plan for fixing the million edges at this point. Like they have a proven use case for that where it's how they fixed proton. They looked at Every time they found a bug in a high profile game, they fixed it and then that had downstream fixes for another hundred games that had a similar pipeline and similar pathway The um the I apologize,'m the people next do areready having their yard crew come so It's loud now But the thing that I wish that they would do. Here's here's my valve wish They They have a tool that lets you share build and share custom configurations for the Steam controller and any other input device I wish that they would do the same thing for the proton configuration and the command line stuff so that I can load up steam And when I have a game that's like not working right or that's iffy, whether it's on the Steam machine or the deck or my Linux machine I wish I could hit a button and say, oh get the Proton DB experience built into steam using the same kind of commommunity voted infrastructure that they're using for the controller configurations because it' It shouldn't be complicated. They know what the hardware in my machine is They should be able to filter down to the people who are running the same same stuff that I'm running and give me, hey, this is something that everybody thinks is okay so that I don't have to go look at Proton DB and copy in a bunch of command line stuff and choose some screwy version of Poton and all the stuff that you have to do right now. So That's my l, Valver you listen. Let us know. I guess on that note, that's as good a place as I need to wrap it up. We We've both shared our deepest valve desires U Norm, thank you as always for coming by. You've done I think I've seen two videos, I think for this. Is there more that I've missed? It's YouTube is inscrutable these days No, you know there's a second team channel that I might do more stuff on, but at this point, I'm just waiting for frame. Cool. I can say I don't have frame Okay, all right now. Okay. good to know. I'm not I'm not under NA. I'm not under Vgo because I don't have it. I'm I am wild like Look, I tea leaves a little bit. What do you think are like are we Are we looking at Hey, you can port your quest games over to this thing and you'll be able to VR we're going to make VR a thing again. Or is this a that's the hope, right? you could put Android APK right on this thing. That was the promise when they announced it in November Ah But there's so much more to test with frame. There's local games, there are Android, there's games that are X eighty six, then there's streaming, there's the Wi Fi streaming stick, right So many questions. of course, price too. I mean, the other thing that's happened since they announced that is and it's partly due to the downstream work that they're doing with the FEX is The X eighty six emulation on AM is you know, Adam, Adam, Patrick Murray over on Eedation handandheld has been talking about this a lot lately. But it's feeling real good now, not even for old games, just for current X eighty six games U So so it might be the stealth like, hey, this is the this is the Baller product out of all these. I I can't wait to see it. I'm very curious Anyway Norm tested d. com YouTube dot com slash tested That's it Any anythingy personally want to plug you or I don't think you heard No Bue guy. and channel on Blueky. Alrighty. Thanks again, Norm for coming by. It's always a pleasure to get to catch up and talk about latest hardware. Make sure you go check out Norm's work over on Tested. He does a wonderful job covering what's going on in VR and consumer technology over there, among all the other stuff on the channel Again, it's tested. com and the tested YouTube channel U As always, this is the part of the show where I remind folks that we are a listener supported show. We wouldn't be here without you all, the listener So if you would like to find out how to support the show and keep the tech pod ad free, you can go to patreon. com slash techpod. Again, Patreon. com slash techbod where for five bucks a month, you get access to the to the discord, which is full of beautiful nerds just like you talking about all sorts of interesting stuff, including things like the steam machine and how they're booting it off of the controller input and stuff like that. You can also get the monthly Patreon exclusive episode where we sometimes take questions, sometimes talk about projects lastast month, I did a little bit of both. I talked about glance, which is the thing I'm using to build a custom new tab page in my browser. And then we took questions from the discord. I took questions from the Dcord and kind of just went down the list of things that are interesting and exciting going on in everyone's lives technology wise. 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