Steam Machine: Gamers praise Valve’s living-room PC – even though they do not want to buy it

[Redaktion]

There is currently an interesting Steam Machine debate on Reddit: many gamers acknowledge that Valve's living-room console could be an interesting alternative to a gaming PC, even if its performance may be significantly lower. Still, many apparently would not buy one anyway.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Steam-Machine-Gamers-praise-Valve-s-living-room-PC-even-though-they-do-not-want-to-buy-it.1324443.0.html

[It's just a]

It's just a gaming PC wih 8 GB VRAM and 8 GB VRAM are ..: youtube.com/watch?v=ric7yb1VaoA: "Gaming Laptops are in Trouble - VRAM Testing w/ ‪@Hardwareunboxed‬"

[It's just a]

And the price to performance may be quite bad, too.

[It's just a]

It's just a gaming PC wih 8 GB VRAM and 8 GB VRAM

Let me correct myself: In a gaming PC one can simply upgrade the GPU, here one'd be stuck with 8 GB VRAM.

[Value proposition]

But if you only had the choice between being compute bound or memory bound which one would you choose?

I would always choose prioritizing more shader compute over more memory for gaming. Maybe for llm usage it's different?

youtu.be/t1Q-iMTHg4A?si=0VQN5lnG4GxH869D

It's surprising just how playable a 3 year old mobile 6GB vram rtx 4050 is as long as your willing to play at more reasonable settings (lower gfx details, not high resolution) and not go crazy on features (RT, FG, etc). The only game here that is completely unplayable is Indiana.

Remember, there are many igpus that aren't limited by vram as they've access to 32 GB LPDDR5X yet they still suffer more often than not from unplayable frame times in modern games due to lack of shader compute along with not fast enough memory, rather than the amount of memory.

That hardwareunboxed video is right about one thing. A mobile rtx 5070 product should have never came with 8 GB. It maybe fine for a lower end **50 class gpu but not 70 which used to be midrange. Anyways, this video is going to be out of date soon with 12 GB mobile rtx 5070 being here and later n1x coming with way more vram.

And the price to performance may be quite bad, too.

But the same applies to igpus with way more vram too? They all give terrible perf per $. Actually they're much worse then dgpus with less vram, which is why valve went with the current specs of their steam machine.