Posted by doener 9 hours ago
Half Life 3 is coming.
Right now getting fast enough and reliable wireless connection means either tweaking to death one's setup or spending car money on the entire setup. In particular normal people usually don't realize how crappy their wi-fi and assume it's all the same, which would end in blaming the poor perf on the headset.
Steam machine is cool, but with how good handheld PCs already are, I'd be ok spending a bit more and just using those instead and docking it for TV gaming.
I have a 8bitdo controller and they are really good. They work perfectly with Debian 13 and probably pretty much every other distro.
I love my steam deck, but lately find myself reaching for emulation handhelds like the Retroid Pocket 5 more due to smaller size, especially when I'm leaving the house. There's already projects like GameNative that try to hack steam onto these devices, but if valve offers an official client on Android and other arm devices that would be incredible.
Having my FoV dumbed down to 90º sounds like hell, especially in a game where we are looking for opponents.
Playing Doom on a widescreen monitor with the FoV modifications made it a lot less annoying. I want that even more today.
I am a bit confused: you can see your shoulders while you are looking forward?
It’s the amount of compute power that my brain allows for peripheral vision that’s the only unusual thing. But it makes video games feel claustrophobic to an unpleasant degree.
I can just about see my shoulders when i look forward, I'd probably also say my field of vision to be "the plane of view defined by my shoulders".
It might be easy to forget, but most gamers are not using the higher-end hardware that enthusiast discussions tend to focus on.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
Perhaps an 8GB limit will encourage game studios to allow more time for optimization, which seems to have fallen out of fashion in recent years.
I imagine this will also help keep the price down, which is always nice.
And thus the Steam Hardware Survey was born. The specs automatically sounded a bit anemic to me, too, but seeing them placed on the hardware survey I don't think they're making an outright mistake, per se.
If they are selling this for $300-400, it will be a hot item and I cant fault them at all. If it sells for $500+, its hard to recommend over a PS5 for most users.
1080p is already a struggle for some games with 8GB of VRAM in 2025, and this will probably be expected to have a service life of 5+ years.
The steam machine will be a very good upgrade!
With how PC part prices have exploded after AI data center buying, I think we will see developers suddenly discover that you don't actually need half these specs to run games.
In a world of locked bootloaders and ever more locked down device, valve is pushing the envolope with a linux based gaming console.
https://www.inexhibit.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/NeXTcub...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/NeXTcube...
Logitech finally got their USB-C dongle out last year I think ? Keychron only offers USB-A as far as I know. And many other keyboard and mouse brands are in the same boat. Depending on your setup that's already 2 USB-A ports needed. You can put an adapter, but you're then dongling a dongle.
PS: just realized Valve's own VR to PC adapter is also USB-A.
Many new computers (including this Steam Machine) have exactly two USB-2-only USB-A ports (the rest of the USB ports being more capable). It's not hard to guess what they're for: the keyboard and the mouse.
