The Steam Machine has released and as Valve go through the list more people will get it, but it was pushed out clearly a bit too early.
  • fartsparkles@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    Eh, I had a Steam Deck on release and that was buggy too. The nice thing is, Valve will keep working on it, seemingly in perpetuity.

    My Steam Link still receives updates and that thing is like a decade old, was discontinued 8 years ago, and yet it got an update two weeks ago.

  • _spiffy@piefed.ca
    English
    1·
    1 month ago

    I’ve had mine for a few weeks now and have experienced a few issues.

    Mostly with game performance after it goes to sleep. Not sure why. Doom eternal was struggling at 45fps, but then I rebooted it and was getting 200fps in the same area on the same settings. It’s made much worse if my son was playing a game and put it to sleep while the game was open. Even switching profiles doesn’t improve it.

    It gets stuck in a loop sometimes as well with CEC, I ended up turning it all off.

    Sometimes it wakes itself up after going to sleep via the power menu, but if I let it wait 30 min it sleeps on its own no problem.

    But other than that I love it. It’s such a great device and it has pretty good performance for its power usage.

    I have just started rebooting the machine after I wake it if I know the kids were using it.

    • tacosanonymous@mander.xyzEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      100% agree. This would have been a great way for console lovers to get in on pc gaming.

      But bc of wildly gestures at EVERYTHING this will be a collector’s item for people who are already into the Valve ecosystem.

      • Jumbie@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        It would have brought me over to PC gaming — even at that dumb price — if it had a few basic things right.

        For example, 4K/60 not being baseline performance on a $1000+ machine is a deal breaker.

        • jacksilver@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 month ago

          I was looking into how cost effective it would be to upgrade/build a new rig - from my research I think you’d struggle to make a new build that runs 4K/60 under $1000. I feel like the steam machine is maybe $100-200 above a similar build, but that ignores things like size/wattage/CEC

            • jacksilver@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              1 month ago

              That’s a fair call out, you can definitely build cheaper if you’re using used parts, my research had been looking at new components (to try to make it a more fair comparison).

              The form factor on that is interesting though.

            • user_6282638282@sopuli.xyzEnglish
              1·
              27 days ago

              Do note the BC-250 can be LOUD with air cooling, uses much more power, and has no sleep or hibernate state.

              That’s to say nothing of the pretty substantial tweaking and modification that’s needed to get it that 1:1 performance level. It’s also not 4K/60.

              Still a fun project but certainly not the same type of thing as “open box, play games” which is what SM aims to deliver.

  • Jumbie@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Replace Steam Machine with Xbox or PlayStation 5 and the internet would melt down.

    How do some companies get away with inferior product releases while some can’t?

    • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      Because those other consoles are not general purpose computers that have value without the original locked down OS. A steam machine is just a compact desktop computer that happens to have a fancy version of steam on it. The fact that the OS is largely open source and hackable and the fact that valve contributes uncountable amounts of dev hours worth of code back to the FOSS community also helps.

      • Jumbie@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        So if it’s PC architecture it gets a pass for being mediocre and for malfunctioning/failing at basic functions.

        Got it.

        • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          Nah they dont get a pass (as you can clearly see from this article…) but people will be less critical than for the companies that have been established in the console hardware sector for multiple decades. People that are too consoomer brained to deal with a couple temporary bugs should just buy consoles and stay boring.