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Quoting: kuhpunktWhat I don't understand... if they are so hard into pushing AI at any cost, why aren't they just telling their AI to use one of the pre-existing engines like Godot or Unity or Unreal or whatever... and let the AI design levels and missions or whatever.

This crap that they are doing here is just mental. You're just playing a video stream, not a static product. Nothing "exists" here. It's just so dumb.

Because it can't do that. This so called ai can't produce nothing new, it can only copy other people's work.

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I'm swearing fervently in my head. Thanks "AI". I'm still planning on getting them, I just hope there isn't too much impact on pricing and delays.

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They'll bite the bullet... of us having to overpay for these devices. This isn't hardware they can sit on too long, and even if normally it could've been possible to sit down with AMD and maybe figure something out right now there's just nothing to figure out if there's nothing to sell.

I'm guessing once it becomes clear Q3 2026 isn't getting any better (the Nvidia guess for the Supers or thereabouts) is when we're getting dates and pricing - at the latest. The growing GPU shortage is perhaps the flipside to this coin, but relying on that too much positions the hardware explicitly as the "less bad" option rather than a "cool affordable device" that perhaps gives this legs rather than a temporary boost to sales While There's Few Other Options Out There.

Maybe. We'll see.

From my point of view... I'm into the controller, and hopefully there's no RAM in there, I'm not in the market for the Steam Machine, and if the Frame isn't a good value I'll just continue skipping VR altogether.

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Valve is really cursed when launching new hardware.
The Deck was also delayed because of chips shortage after the Covid crisis.
And now their new Steam Machine and Steam frame are also facing RAM and storage shortage because of the AI mania.
The concentration of high-end manufacturing capabilities is not helping the consumer electronic market.

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Quoting: KeksusWhat makes them so exited? We had procedurally generated worlds for years. Game engines to quickly import some character model to do basic stuff in them aren't new either. But now you call it AI and everybody acts like it's the second coming of christ.

The difference is you can do this with simple text prompts. It is an impressive tech, but as happens with most generative AI tools, real world use cases might be quite limited. Is it impressive you can get something looking like a Zelda BotW clone in minutes? Yes it is. But it is missing all that makes Zelda BotW a great game (on top of all the legal issues, economical and environmental disaster generative AI is, etc.). Yeah, using generative AI you can generate games in hours, maybe even minutes. But how much will it take generating a game **someone wants to actually play**?

It's like that experiment in which one Cursor guy built a browser in a week, that barely compiled and ran even worse. Is it an impressive feat the slop machine built a browser in a week? Yes, it is (even if it worked really bad when it managed to even start, and relied heavily on Servo code). But that's as far as the slop machine will take it. How much effort would take to patch those millions of lines of technical debt until you reach a production ready web browser? I suspect you'd be better throwing all of it to the trash and start from scratch, now with a real brain doing the work.

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This is very bad news, at least for the Steam Machine. It's a bit tight performance wise, so each day it is delayed, it becomes less and less attractive.

So yeah, we can thank Sam Altman for killing one of the best opportunities after de Deck, for Linux to gain market share. At least thanks to him, we can feed ourselves tons of slop on Youtube 🤮

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new half life game on the Steam machine? kinda like alex kidd in miracle world on the master system II???

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While this is somewhat bad news, and very unlucky for Valve, I'm going to practice some positivism (don't get used to it):

- If the devices are delayed, it will mean more developing time for HDMI VRR (HUGE, btw!!), FSR, Leap, Frame UI, QA for all of it... and maybe even for a Half-Life 3 🤣 Plus whatever I'm forgetting.
- I'd prefer waiting 6 months and see a price most people can get on board with, that rushing the release and see the machines flop.
- It also gives us more time to save some ££$$€€ (Will even start saving on groceries too when I change my diet to solely eating the rich)

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: PhiladelphusI must be misunderstanding this, because I don't really see much benefit from foveated streaming.

The benefit is in limited bandwidth. The Frame doesn't have a wired option - it can only be used wirelessly. Foveated streaming doesn't reduce the rendering load at all, it's true, but it does maintain the perceived quality of the image where bandwidth is limited or variable.

Less data means less transmission time, means lower lag. The problem with (wireless) streaming is too much data to get it to the other side with as little delay as possible. And delay is what makes you feel sick.

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The controller can work with any game compatible with the Steam Overlay.

I don't understand. Does the controller in any way rely on Steam Overlay being active? 🤔

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we do intend to support Index owners the same way we have in the past

So not very much at all then 😅
Cameras still not working after all these years

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Quoting: Doktor-MandrakeIt's amazing how fast these guys are getting these recomps out

What I particularly like is how they let the user upscale but then downsample back to native res. Far better then just bumping up the internal res!

How'd you do that?

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So, will this be banned [External Link] in China is my first thought, sad I know 😁

Yeah, Xinnie will have banned it by now even though it's not even out yet lol

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So, the billionaires stole all our Steam hardware parts. Yay.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: NociferAI is selling like hotcakes

AI* is all over the place, but mostly not because any end-users of anything have bought it. Can you really call that "selling like hotcakes"?

*A term which for purposes of the current discussion I am using to mean the Large Language Model "AI" currently bubbling the economy.

I don't see end users paying (yet), but my company did buy AI access (that's supposedly not using our input for anything). Not the whatever trillions they're spending though of course. But in the millions I guess.

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My only concern is that they will set the prices based on the local top and then never revise them (*ahem* [regional pricing](https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/eventcomments/3494256769198451731#c687496109043561138) *ahem*).

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*steamsad*

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Quoting: EikeAccording to what I read, most US states do have sales taxes

Generally not on digital items, and also usually quite a bit lower than VAT (rough guess average of about 8%).

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Quoting: PhiladelphusI must be misunderstanding this, because I don't really see much benefit from foveated streaming.

The benefit is in limited bandwidth. The Frame doesn't have a wired option - it can only be used wirelessly. Foveated streaming doesn't reduce the rendering load at all, it's true, but it does maintain the perceived quality of the image where bandwidth is limited or variable.

Should eye-tracking become a baseline expected feature of VR headsets following its inclusion in the Frame (and which will necessarily be the case for, say, ARM and Android games put on Steam for use on the Frame) then game devs can justify utilising it for foveated rendering, which does reduce rendering load. They haven't been able to rely on eye-tracking being available generally, so they haven't generally bothered with foveated rendering. Foveated streaming makes sensible use of eye-tracking orthogonally to the foveated rendering chicken-and-egg. Both techniques can be used together with headsets that have eye-tracking.

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• Foveated rendering uses eye tracking data so the game only renders high resolution data in the portion of the viewport that the player is looking at.
• Foveated streaming, on the other hand, uses eye tracking data so that the PC only streams high resolution data in the portion of the viewport the player is looking at.

I must be misunderstanding this, because I don't really see much benefit from foveated streaming. Foveated rendering makes sense; the game can selectively render a small area in higher detail and save compute power for the rest of the frame that's not in the user's central vision (thus allowing potentially higher framerates). For foveated streaming, it sounds like the PC still has to render the entire frame in high resolution, only for a bunch of that data to be lossily dropped in the streaming process. (This seems to be the only way it could be a "system-level feature" that "applies to all games".) I get that that has the benefit of lowering the amount of data streamed, but that doesn't seem like a particularly large benefit for a device that will likely be kept in close proximity to its broadcasting station; it might marginally improve battery life or provide redundancy in electronically-noisy environments, but as far as I can tell it neither improves the image the user sees nor reduces the amount of computing power the GPU needs. What am I missing here? 🤔

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Quoting: BumadarSo they can either sell now at to high a price because of the market
Or they sell next year with outdated specs for a still high price (memory won't drop big time next year)

Unfortunately true. Damned if they do, damned if they don't. It doesn't seem farfetched to predict that, one way or another, the AI memory crisis is going to ruin the Steam Machine.

If I had to choose between the two, I'd say it's at least better to release it while the prices are high. At least that way you can still price it competitively according to the market, even if barely anyone is buying hardware because of the cost.

The other option, delaying release too long, is just an unrecoverable situation since it guarantees an inability to compete.

I feel like the Frame and Controller can afford the delay. I assume the controller also has onboard memory and/or storage, so its price is likely affected as well even if not nearly as much as the other two.

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So, will this be [banned](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Winnie-the-Pooh_in_China) in China is my first thought, sad I know 😁

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A delay on the Machine might make sense but also means that if they going to release it, for example, next year, it will get even more critique on the low specs since a year has passed and cpu/gpu will continue to develop. Add to that the fact they probably must have signed some deal with AMD for the current chip they sort of stuck with it.

So they can either sell now at to high a price because of the market
Or they sell next year with outdated specs for a still high price (memory won't drop big time next year)

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A delay on the Machine makes sense to me but it's the Frame and the Controller I'm most interested in right now.

If delayed to next year the Machine might need an upgrade but I would definitely be more interested in it by then.

Right now gimmie Steam Controller ASAP.
Early adopters already know they want it.

Too bad for Lighthouse not being part of a planned implementation for Frame but I do hope it gets implemented later or done by fans cause I think VR needs it for the best it can be.
Least it's an open platform so sky's the limit.

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I wish they'd go ahead and release the controller, but I understand why they'd want to release all three at the same time.

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The biggest troll Valve could do is to launch it on march 3, together with HL3. But unfortunately is not gonna happen in today's situation.

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They can probably launch the controller this year, but I'm not holding my breath. As the Steam Machine itself, I don't think it is gonna happen with today's market. I don't think Valve will sell hardware at a loss hopping for the best at the end of the year.

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What makes them so exited? We had procedurally generated worlds for years. Game engines to quickly import some character model to do basic stuff in them aren't new either. But now you call it AI and everybody acts like it's the second coming of christ.

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I played it several years ago on Steam. The only problem I had at the time was a mod which restored some content but didn't seem to be Linux-friendly (strange filenames). I'll have to check it out again 😀

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The big question is: How consistent are those interactive worlds, and for how long?

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