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Low End Steam Machine better than PS4/XboxOne specs wise for only $100 more

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JordanN

Banned
Not accusing all PC users of this but why are so many invested in wanting consoles to die so much?

Did the PS4 run over your dog? If consoles die, I guarantee gaming will get a lot worse.

I love PC. I love consoles. It shouldn't be a war to see consoles die when it benefits no one.
 

kruis

Exposing the sinister cartel of retailers who allow companies to pay for advertising space.
Definitely. Every time I'm blown away by something on my PS4 like P.T, Killzone or Infamous, I can't help but wonder how absolutely crazy AAA games would look if developers were pushing the bleeding edge of high end PC hardware.

And optimize the hell out of the PC.

The problem with many PC games is that they're so shoddily programmed that you need a beefy PC and GPU to brute force your way to console equivalency. Case in point: every AAA Ubisoft game of the past two years.
 

nkarafo

Member
They are budget machines for 399/499 dollars. Don't expect them to be on par with gaming PCs.
Im not expecting them to be more powerful than PCs, read my freaking post. Its just weird that their OS is more bloated than what you usually have on a general use PC. Consoles used to have a lightweight OS (or just the bios). And everyone talks about how weak CPUs they have now, Cell was (supposedly) state of the art when PS3 was released and now they use budget-level tablet CPUs?
 

Zaku

Member
Question!

Will this Steam machine allow me to play modern AAA releases through the next five years without any upgrades whatsoever? Will AAA studios offer significant enough support for the Steam OS (which is Linux based) to make avoiding a Windows purchase actually viable for gaming?

No and no?

Okay. Cool. Consoles are still alive and kicking, then.

Definitely. Every time I'm blown away by something on my PS4 like P.T, Killzone or Infamous, I can't help but wonder how absolutely crazy AAA games would look if developers were pushing the bleeding edge of high end PC hardware.

They'd look better, but the dev would go bankrupt, which is why no developers actually target the bleeding edge of technology anymore.

Developing a game only a small fraction of your audience can run at launch is a recipe for poor sales.
 

Nzyme32

Member
Only if they launch with Half Life 3 as an exclusive.

Steam machine are already known to have no exclusives other than what is already naturally exclusive to PC (and on Linux/steamOS). They are not going to pay people for exclusivity as it will undermine their Steam self publishing future
 

kulapik

Member
excuse me, with DX 13 and Mantle, PC games are reaching the same level of optimization that consoles get. no longer will console warriors be able to hind that.

for example look at this

a $3000 PC can generate a life like image

the first time i saw this picture i thought i was looking into a living mirror. pyscho is so unbelivable, the wrinkles in his skin, the pain in his eye. you know he is a man who has truly suffered. each tree in the background, 100 miles away, is individually rendered with painstaking detail, and the sky scrapers and beautifully created, with real time rusting applied.

now lets look at what a $399 playstation 4 can do

firstly the image quality is so poor i can hardly see what im looking at. the trees are low quality jpegs with a little bit of depth of field to make them more real. drakes character is so poorly rendered, i bet his face only has 400 polgyons in it at least. and the lighting is so bad everybody nows when its dark you are unable to see anything secondly the enviroment is so tiny, what am i supposed to do? look at crabs on the sand?


trust me, a little bit more and you'll get a lot more for you money.

And now we wait :p
 

Henrar

Member
Im not expecting them to be more powerful than PCs, read my freaking post. Its just weird that their OS is more bloated than what you usually have on a general use PC. Consoles used to have a lightweight OS (or just the bios).

In case of PS4 the system doen't eat 3GB, but Sony reserved 3GB of RAM for it in case new features gets added. Remember PS3 and why they couldn't add party chat, because there was no RAM available for it?
 

pa22word

Member
8GB of DDR3 dual-channel 1600mhz is not better than 8GB of GDDR5.
I guess you missed the 2GB of VRAM in the 270? Anyways, given that the ps4 only uses 5 for games and win64 can shrink pretty small in game mode that 8 general system ram and 2 vram can and probably will do more than sony's solution.
 

KKRT00

Member
8GB of DDR3 dual-channel 1600mhz is not better than 8GB of GDDR5.

7gb of DDR3 + 2gb of GDDR5 is better than 5GB of GDDR5

---
Which bit is false?
Whole optimization part. Part about comparing Uncharted 1 and 2 as a hardware utilization optimizations, not algorithms optimizations etc.
Games on PC progressed at the same rate in past gen as on consoles and requirements did not go up for similar settings. We've been through this topic dozens of times already.
 

DiscoDave

Member
I guess you missed the 2GB of VRAM in the 270? Anyways, given that the ps4 only uses 5 for games and win64 can shrink pretty small in game mode that 8 general system ram and 2 vram can and probably will do more than sony's solution.

So you think this will out perform the consoles the entire gen?
 

Nzyme32

Member
8GB of DDR3 dual-channel 1600mhz is not better than 8GB of GDDR5.

Actually it may well be if you want to include the video memory of the graphics card (which usually is gddr5). Pretty sure the ddr3 memory isn't shared between the two as on the console. You may also want to watch a Linus tech quickie vid that explains the difference between DDR and gddr, you may learn something interesting http://youtube.com/watch?v=pbgvzVgfoSc
 

kruis

Exposing the sinister cartel of retailers who allow companies to pay for advertising space.
Question!

Will this Steam machine allow me to play modern AAA releases through the next five years without any upgrades whatsoever? Will AAA studios offer significant enough support for the Steam OS (which is Linux based) to make avoiding a Windows purchase actually viable for gaming?

No and no?

Okay. Cool. Consoles are still alive and kicking, then.

No one knows how much developer support Steam OS will attract. How many developers will invest funds in making separate Steam OS Linux versions of their games when the marketshare of this OS/platform is miniscule? I suppose indie developers working with multi platform development tools like Unity could do it, but the big studios have their own engines and tool chains and I don't think EA, Ubisoft and others will be in a hurry to add SteamOS support (particularly because they're in direct competition with Steam anyway).

I think SteamOS will have indie support and all the big Valve titles, but anything else? Don't think so.
 

Ramenman

Member
excuse me, with DX 13 and Mantle, PC games are reaching the same level of optimization that consoles get. no longer will console warriors be able to hind that.

for example look at this

a $3000 PC can generate a life like image

the first time i saw this picture i thought i was looking into a living mirror. pyscho is so unbelivable, the wrinkles in his skin, the pain in his eye. you know he is a man who has truly suffered. each tree in the background, 100 miles away, is individually rendered with painstaking detail, and the sky scrapers and beautifully created, with real time rusting applied.

now lets look at what a $399 playstation 4 can do

firstly the image quality is so poor i can hardly see what im looking at. the trees are low quality jpegs with a little bit of depth of field to make them more real. drakes character is so poorly rendered, i bet his face only has 400 polgyons in it at least. and the lighting is so bad everybody nows when its dark you are unable to see anything secondly the enviroment is so tiny, what am i supposed to do? look at crabs on the sand?


trust me, a little bit more and you'll get a lot more for you money.

I said wow :D
 

ttech10

Member
Not accusing all PC users of this but why are so many invested in wanting consoles to die so much?

Did the PS4 run over your dog? If consoles die, I guarantee gaming will get a lot worse.

I love PC. I love consoles. It shouldn't be a war to see consoles die when it benefits no one.

Because master race.

I also own a gaming PC and consoles and I don't understand it either. For a group that's so happy with their superior gaming devices, they sure spend a lot of time focused on lesser gaming devices that they wouldn't be paid to use.

Like trying to convert console gamers to PC with a list of 100 ways PC is factually better. Why does it bother them so much that others enjoy playing on consoles? It's like they need to justify to the world why the money they spent was worth it instead of simply enjoying their PC. Just hush up and enjoy gaming.
 
Better question is, what is wrong with your post, son?

Windows x64 currently takes 3.5 GB with Outlook and Chrome open.

CPUs are perfectly fine since nobody complained about them being the bottlenecks.

Also, have you ever heard about GPGPU? You know, that little function where you can offload CPU functions to GPU?

Why don't you go and read a few thousand pages of next gen hardware threads and then come back a bit more informed.

You need to clean your PC. 3.5GB of RAM is way to much for what you're doing. Im at under 2GB with multiple chrome tabs, Foobar, Skype and the BattleNet launcher open.
 

Vagabundo

Member
excuse me, with DX 13 and Mantle, PC games are reaching the same level of optimization that consoles get. no longer will console warriors be able to hind that.

for example look at this

a $3000 PC can generate a life like image

the first time i saw this picture i thought i was looking into a living mirror. pyscho is so unbelivable, the wrinkles in his skin, the pain in his eye. you know he is a man who has truly suffered. each tree in the background, 100 miles away, is individually rendered with painstaking detail, and the sky scrapers and beautifully created, with real time rusting applied.

now lets look at what a $399 playstation 4 can do

firstly the image quality is so poor i can hardly see what im looking at. the trees are low quality jpegs with a little bit of depth of field to make them more real. drakes character is so poorly rendered, i bet his face only has 400 polgyons in it at least. and the lighting is so bad everybody nows when its dark you are unable to see anything secondly the enviroment is so tiny, what am i supposed to do? look at crabs on the sand?


trust me, a little bit more and you'll get a lot more for you money.

Do you have the right licence to go fishing like this?
 
How far above their weight can consoles punch due to their lack of baggage and closed box?

I remember my old PC (late 90s) would struggle to pull of PS1 level graphics even with far better specs.

The 360's got equivalent specs to AMD Athlon II X3 and a 7900 GTX with 512gb

This is MW3 running on a similar build.

FPS: 9-24
AA: 4x
Resolution: 1280x1024
Textures: High

The game ran very smoothly at 60fps on 360 at 1024x600.

Thing's like U3, Gears 3 and Halo 4 just aint happening on a PC with similar specs.
 

Riky

$MSFT
It's $100 more, then you need a headset and a cable to connect to your TV. Lastly you need a Windows Key to actually make it useful. Plus the controller you get is at the moment unproven as something decent.
 
excuse me, with DX 13 and Mantle, PC games are reaching the same level of optimization that consoles get. no longer will console warriors be able to hind that.

for example look at this

a $3000 PC can generate a life like image

the first time i saw this picture i thought i was looking into a living mirror. pyscho is so unbelivable, the wrinkles in his skin, the pain in his eye. you know he is a man who has truly suffered. each tree in the background, 100 miles away, is individually rendered with painstaking detail, and the sky scrapers and beautifully created, with real time rusting applied.

now lets look at what a $399 playstation 4 can do

firstly the image quality is so poor i can hardly see what im looking at. the trees are low quality jpegs with a little bit of depth of field to make them more real. drakes character is so poorly rendered, i bet his face only has 400 polgyons in it at least. and the lighting is so bad everybody nows when its dark you are unable to see anything secondly the enviroment is so tiny, what am i supposed to do? look at crabs on the sand?


trust me, a little bit more and you'll get a lot more for you money.

lmfaooooooooo
 

Lulubop

Member
Because master race.

I also own a gaming PC and consoles and I don't understand it either. For a group that's so happy with their superior gaming devices, they sure spend a lot of time focused on lesser gaming devices that they wouldn't be paid to use.

Like trying to convert console gamers to PC with a list of 100 ways PC is factually better. Why does it bother them so much that others enjoy playing on consoles? It's like they need to justify to the world why the money they spent was worth it instead of simply enjoying their PC. Just hush up and enjoy gaming.

it was one person who said it, and that master race shit is bannable.
 

Zaku

Member
I think SteamOS will have indie support and all the big Valve titles, but anything else? Don't think so.

This is my bet as well. Consoles already see the lion's share of most multi-plat titles, so I don't even want to imagine what the sales for the typical Linux release look like. Very likely not enough to warrant more than a token effort port, for most, if it's even worth doing that.

It's hilarious that people think the Steambox is going to displace consoles, really. It's not.
 

playXray

Member
It's not really false as much as it is dishonest, because it ignores the fact that the valley between the two games was purely due to boneheaded hardware design decisions made by sony

This isn't really a Sony issue. It's happened with games consoles as far back as I can remember, and is still happening now. Take a look at Oblivion on 360 and compare it to Skyrim on the same console. Skyrim looks way better.
 
I think most of this power talk will end when Driveclub, TheOrder1886 and Uncharted are out.

I don't think people will still care about specs when the actual graphics are that great.
 

DiscoDave

Member
Because master race.

I also own a gaming PC and consoles and I don't understand it either. For a group that's so happy with their superior gaming devices, they sure spend a lot of time focused on lesser gaming devices that they wouldn't be paid to use.

Like trying to convert console gamers to PC with a list of 100 ways PC is factually better. Why does it bother them so much that others enjoy playing on consoles? It's like they need to justify to the world why the money they spent was worth it instead of simply enjoying their PC. Just hush up and enjoy gaming.

This annoys me the most there is just no need for it especially that I can imagine so person uying a PC due to people like this to realise they have spent alot of money on someting they didn;t want. Gamers have always had the choice to go PC it has been the superior graphics option for years now The thing is most don't want a gaming PC for alot of reason's. Why the PC crowd need to try nd convert console owers is beyond me. anyway this thread is very bait like especially with that coment of consoles even if it was a joke your gonna have both side's reacting to it. Im out this bait thread.
 

Carlius

Banned
History laughs at the idea of this. Not that everything will stay consistent and that there can't be surprises, but we've always had stronger machines fail to unseat a weaker, cheaper alternative, even when the price advantage was eliminated or inverted (the PS2 was just insane.) If something like this causes a hardcore shift it's likely going to be from another major company, or at least as part of a collective Valve push.

jus tlike history laughed at the idea of PC gaming dying right?
 
7gb of DDR3 + 2gb of GDDR5 is better than 5GB of GDDR5

---

Whole optimization part. Part about comparing Uncharted 1 and 2 as a hardware utilization optimizations, not algorithms optimizations etc.
Game on PC progressed at the same rate in past gen as on consoles and requirements did not go up for similar settings. We've been through this topic dozens of times already.

You could run BF3 720p with playable framerate with Geforce 7900 GT on PC?
 

KKRT00

Member
I'd like to see this PC run Watch Dogs no console-like details and performance

"We also tried the GTX 760 and found that frame-rate varied uncomfortably around 30-40fps, and found that pursuing improved visuals at a locked 30fps was a better option than attempting to hit 60fps. Here we could have ultra-level presets with temporal SMAA at 1080p. Dropping down to the GTX 750 Ti gave us the same experience at the high quality level - effectively a match for PS4, but with a full 1080p resolution."
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-watch-dogs-face-off

Ubisoft games are a mess for ultra setting and 60hz, but on console quality settings they are properly optimized.

---
You could run BF3 720p with Geforce 7900 GT on PC?
If i had CELL performing some GPU tasks, of course.

Still, we have examples of Radeon X1950 running 2011 games on higher settings and 8800 GTS running games from 2012 in double the framerate than consoles. If the optimization mantra was true, both GPUs performances would fall hard in newest titles, but instead they stayed consistent in terms of gap to consoles.
 

pa22word

Member
This isn't really a Sony issue. It's happened with games consoles as far back as I can remember, and is still happening now. Take a look at Oblivion on 360 and compare it to Skyrim on the same console. Skyrim looks way better.
It would help to read the second half of my post instead of cherry picking out a portion of it you feel is easier to attack if you ignore the aforementioned.
 

Riky

$MSFT
Did it also have 4x msaa on the 360 too? Because I highly doubt it.

And yeah, not to mention the res difference, lol...

If you read the description that machine has 2gb of ram, so four times a 360. If anyone can show me a PC that can run the game at 360 settings with a total of 512mb of ram I'd love to see it.
 

SMOK3Y

Generous Member
Im not expecting them to be more powerful than PCs, read my freaking post. Its just weird that their OS is more bloated than what you usually have on a general use PC. Consoles used to have a lightweight OS (or just the bios). And everyone talks about how weak CPUs they have now, Cell was (supposedly) state of the art when PS3 was released and now they use budget-level tablet CPUs?
I have no doubt their OS's will shrink considerably Sony just realised the mistake they made with PS3's OS and don't want to make that mistake again
 

Nzyme32

Member
I think SteamOS will have indie support and all the big Valve titles, but anything else? Don't think so.

I don't see why anyone should expect any different for an OS that isn't out yet to demonstrate viability, and hasn't got a proven user base. In a few years that may change dependant on how it grows and changes over time. To me it's surprising that it has as much support as it already does at this time.
 
It amazes me that consoles are now "beating" PCs in the bloated OS department. My Windows 7 setup only takes up about 1.1 GB after it loads, with around 50 processes. And console OS takes up 3 GB?

Also, whats the deal with the weak CPUs the new consoles use? Sub 2Ghz tablet CPUs? Are you telling me that the current generation machines actually have weaker CPUs than the PS3's Cell?

Seriously, what is wrong with consoles these days?

What's wrong with you?

A 3GB reserve is not the same as taking up 3GB. Quit being so disingenuous. Your agenda is painfully transparent.
 

syko de4d

Member
I'd like to see this PC run Watch Dogs no console-like details and performance

PS4 version was max details 900p@30fps, or? A 280 could do that in 1080p, maybe a 270 is a little to weak for that in 900p, but maybe it would be enough. No idea how much fps 900p saves, cant find benchmarks for this ^^.
 

Mugatu

Member
Look at it from a consumer's perspective.

It does less (what you call bloat, many people call features and they do value them), costs more, and does one thing slightly better.

That's not a recipe for success in the real world.
 

jaosobno

Member
And why, son, would i need outlook and chrome opened when i play games?

Also, you might need to clean up your computer, son, disable all those unneeded services and start up programs you have. My 64x setup takes up 1.6 GB with a bunch of Firefox tabs open (and it has a few memory hungry plugins as well).

So, sonny, go read some guides on how to keep your OS clean, stop clicking on everything you see and when installing free software, make sure you uncheck the extra stuff they usually come with, like tool bars and other shit.

Nice try. Currently I'm on my business laptop and believe me, there isn't even a single amount of "free software" like toolbars and crap like that running on it. In fact, there is only essential software running on it. Clean installation of Windows 7 x64, running for 7 days (update, when idle, no apps running, falls down to 2 GB).

So, again, go educate yourself about console hardware (since you are completely ignorant about how that stuff works) and try to return here for a meaningful discussion, because your posts in this thread so far have only been pathetic trolling attempts.

Consoles punch well above their own weight and that has been known for decades. Too bad you've spent them living under the rock, only to emerge now to talk crap about "tablet CPUs" and "bloated console OS".

I'll give you a hint where to start: GPGPU, hUMA, asynchronous compute.
 

nkarafo

Member
Seriously...
Jaguar in PS4 is better than Cell in PS3.
Well, that's debatable. Slightly more powerful, slightly less powerful, it doesn't matter as much as the fact that the difference is small and there are discussions about which is more powerful really. This is the first generation of consoles where the CPU is comparable in power with the previous generation and topics like this exist. That is at least an interesting thing to talk about.
 

pa22word

Member
You could run BF3 720p with playable framerate with Geforce 7900 GT on PC?

BF3 uses an entirely different build for its pc release vs consoles, so there's no direct comparison that can be made.

BF4 gen8 was the first time a BF game used the same build cross platforms, iirc, so it would be better to use that.

If you read the description that machine has 2gb of ram, so four times a 360. If anyone can show me a PC that can run the game at 360 settings with a total of 512mb of ram I'd love to see it.

Msaa isn't going to tax the system ram...that's entire point of having that 512 split memory pool in the first place, and it's why the game is running so poorly--because it's out of video memory to display the scene.
 

Zaku

Member
I don't see why anyone should expect any different for an OS that isn't out yet to demonstrate viability, and hasn't got a proven user base. In a few years that may change dependant on how it grows and changes over time. To me it's surprising that it has as much support as it already does at this time.

Most of the support, ironically, is from people who have little need to buy a Steam machine in the first place, the people who already own a high-end gaming PC. While I'll admit Valve is doing some interesting things with the controller (not good, just interesting) I've got a feeling Steam machines and the Steam OS in general are going to wind up as a footnote, with Steam OS primarily being used for in-house streaming of games from a proper gaming PC to a cheap micro-PC sitting next to someone's TV.
 
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