Quoting: Segata Sanshiro

Quoting: bubouswhy one intel i7 CPU?
have to improve the GPU and not the CPU, Steam Machine is to games....and i5 is sufficient.

Yup. Would make more sense if the next model up had a GTX 970 and still an i5 since it still wouldn't bottleneck the card.

It's this kind of stuff I've been complaining about since the first Steam Machines specs were announced. All these terrible decisions end up doing is giving the machines a terrible price-performance ratio and make them pretty unappealing.

We are talking about small, laptop like silent machines here, not full blown PC. A bit different pros and cos and requirements. One of them being silent.

Also Vulkan (why i7 upgrade).

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If their Steam Machines wouldn't sell, they wouldn't do beefed up versions, period.

You could argue the opposite though, if it didn't sell enough they are trying higher models to see if people bite.

Maybe in some alternative universe. Dell doesn't think Steam Machines are stinker, period.

edit: also they are only OEM who knows how to market and sell Ubuntu OEM.

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Added this to wishlist. This looked like descent 2D Dark Souls-que game. Nice to see it coming to Linux.

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Quoting: Mountain ManArs Technica has been down on SteamOS pretty much from the beginning. I really don't care what they have to say.

This. Arc Technica has clear bias against Steam Machines and SteamOS.

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I will guess that nothing will convince people who are against Steam Machines. Some people will declare them failrue. Some people will hate anything non-Windows.

As for actual numbers - it still very hard to understand what actual numbers are. So controllers have been sold over 500k. How much over? How much of that share are Steam Machines?

To be fair, I expected SM to be sold around 200k - 300k units, if successful. How that translates that SM are dead in the water I really don't know. They aren't sold at loss. Research is done at Valve side, and they seem to be happy with SteamOS development.

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Valve does not communicate much. It's true if anyone follows their Steam story. There are some disappointments - like we don't know what's with Witcher 3, or Rocket League which got delayed many times, Arkham Knight was pure PC release fail, not Linux problem though - and yes, there's still lot of potential games - even indie games - which aren't released on Linux.

However I am not panicking. Technically things get better each month. Binary drivers get better, open source drivers get better, Linux desktop evolution continues at steady speed.

Would I like to know have Steam Machines gained any traction? Definitely. Have I heard rumours project has failed? No, not a inch. I think if it was disaster we would have heard by now, especially from vendors. SteamOS evolves. AMD driver improvements, Vulkan - this all has happened in just last six months! In fact it feels like that Linux gaming platform - and therefore SteamOS - just getting started. And that might be a clue - Valve did first wave of SM, collected feedback, collected feedback about their controller, etc. And all this feedback is fed into next wave of Steam Machines.

At least I could see it. Of course it might be that everything's kaput and we are just not being told :)

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I am loving new style too.

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Nice rush towards completing OpenGL API support. There's lot of things to be done but it is awesome to see so much progress revealed. Intel needs support of older archs where it's suitable, and of course optimize and speed will be next goal for devs (as API will be locked in place).

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Quoting: boltronicsThe worst part about the AMDGPU-Pro drivers by far is that it still relies on proprietary microcode. Most Nvidia cards have free software microcode (up until the last couple of generations at least).

All modern graphics cards require binary closed firmware.

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About damn time! :)

Vulkan will help small indie games to run better on Intel graphics. It might be a huge boon for Steam Machines.

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