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CES 2014
Anyone paying attention to this? Steam machines a month ago I said no way, but today after crummy consoles and seeing the bandwagon of steam machine makers, all I can say is watch out pc world it's about to reach 212 degrees Fahrenheit. And how about razers project Christine? Again today I am skeptical but ease of use and upgrading, it may not find a place at my house, but I can see people buying in, especially those that don't want to mess with hardware. The rise of pc gaming is upon us and I think more and more people are jumping ship from consoles to pcs. If you seriously did your homework, there will be no excuse why you shouldn't own a pc/steam machine.
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Imagine Microsoft joining the steam bandwagon and handing thier xbox one over to steams os because it's getting smothered by the competition and the folks that bought in need a place to go.
SteamOS has at least two years before it will be a solid gaming platform. The OS has to be stable and games have to be made for it. It is built on top of Debian, which is already a good platform, but a lot could go wrong, and a lot of driver support is needed as well.
Razer's Christine concept seems solid. I doubt it will generate a large enough market if the pricing isn't competitive with "standard" market hardware, though.
I do agree that desktop computers are likely to gain popularity due to the underwhelming console performance this time around. They are basically using APUs from AMD, which have some limitations on their performance that make it easy for a desktop system to beat.
Such talk is invariably either hyperbole or coming from people who are completely clueless. Some of us have to do real work on computers, and even if laptops could match desktops in price, performance, and reliability (and they're not even close on any of those marks), they'd still be a complete non-starter because the desktop form factor is so superior when you have an office or cubicle and need space and comfort to get real work done.
The downturn in desktop sales comes entirely from people keeping existing desktops for longer than they used to.
-212 degrees Fahrenheit more likely...
So far : Steam OS is in my Top1 of 2014 Flops of the year, sorry but what they´ve shown so far is utter garbage (overpriced as well). Fugly design cases, twice the size of a PS4? (more or less) and hmm can´t wait to hear what Noise-Level these "little" devices will have.
Steam Controller > Nice
Steam OC > Nice
Steam Machine made by 3rd Parties > -212 degrees Fahrenheit (copy&paste due lazyness...)
LOL. That will never happen. Microsoft doesn't care about games or gamers. They are going after Apple TV with the XBOX One. We're just a hold over from a past era. Multimedia is the future for that 'console.' They certainly wouldn't feel the pressure to hand their product over to Valve.
No thanks. I will pass. The very nature/limitations of it does not appeal to me atm.
I've been looking at benchmarks on Linux for a long while now:
Windows and Linux are not that different. A lot of outliers Windows sees a lot of performance on because it has better driver support, but on titles where there is some parity, it's just that, pretty darn equal. Which is to be expected, your dealing with the same hardware after all, and the only real difference is going to be under-the-hood software, and both Windows and Linux have been around long enough that both are very mature and stable -- the video driver being the only key variable between the two.
Can SteamOS "blow the doors" off Windows performance? No, it's just not technically possible. There isn't enough software bloat left in Windows anymore that you could get super high performance gains out of OS software alone (the consoles come the closest, they have realtime gaming OSes that do nothing else, and even they aren't going to see double-digit performance gains over a similar-hardware Windows PC).
Where SteamOS does win: Price. It's free. Windows costs $100 for an OEM base license.
If the performance difference amounts to a rounding error, and one system costs $100 than another system - then why pay that $100? Even on a decent PC, that's 10% of the total cost you can save right there, if all you plan to do is play Steam games and whatever you can find on Linux.
Steambox - I can't see much of a market for (yet)... SteamOS - if they can make it easy to dualboot or virtualize (which they should be able to do, Linux has been doing that pretty well for years now), that could gain some traction, and then they could use that traction to help push the hardware angle.
I'm really hoping SteamOS leads to increased support for Linux in all games. The more popularity that SteamOS has, the more likely Linux in general will be supported as a gaming OS. Even if a game developer doesn't want to release on Steam, they will have the option to target Debian and Ubuntu systems for their Linux release, and their potential market should be large enough to generate profits from their efforts.
I had an iPad 1.0. It is extremely slow compared to tablets today. As slow as it was, being a first generation product that pretty much kicked off the tablets we know of today, I never felt it was too slow.
It may not have had all the advanced effects that my PC did, but on a screen that size, there were still some amazing looking games.
The CPU/GPU weren't what I felt was really holding back tablets from getting "decent" games. I think the lack of an API for external devices is what is really holding it back. Having to use a virtualized joystick on the screen (and simultaneously blocking 25% of the viewing area with your hands) blows, to put it mildly, and I always felt was much more distracting and debilitating than the graphics, even on the iPad 1.0.
There were some amazing games that work well on a touch screen. And a lot that didn't work so well, but could have if we had some more input options.
We have Airplay which lets us play on the big screen. They have bluetooth and can use bluetooth peripherals, but implementation in games is spotty because there's no standard API. I hear Apple is standardizing an input API (or has standardized one, I'm not really clear on it) - that would let pretty much every compliant game tap into standardized bluetooth peripherals...
I'm sure Android already has this, so the fanboys can all come beat me up, but I don't use Android so I can't speak for it.
That depends a lot on whether you want 2D or 3D. Moving sprites around on a screen isn't terribly demanding, but needing a substantial fragment shader invocation for every single pixel on your screen and doing it again every single frame sure is.
The user interface is another problem, to be sure, but if a game can't run at playable frame rates, the user interface doesn't matter.
There were plenty in 3D that ran even on the iPad 1.0. Infinity Blade, of course, comes to mind, and it is running on a version of Unreal Engine 3, but it's not the only one with decent 3D graphics.
Could they be better? Sure. Is it what's holding back tablet gaming? In my opinion, definitely not. That's like saying the current crop of MMO's sucks because the graphics aren't good enough... a statement most readers on this forum can resonate with (one way or another).
The thing I find holding tablets back is a lack of computing resources as a whole due to its small form factor. This is while the operating system is constrained and does not execute code quickly. These two problems are resolved with x86 tablets that use Temash based APUs. The problem with Atom based CPUs is that they are not as efficient per core as a more modern CPU, and they lack the GPU power. The Temash APUs have a reasonable efficiency per core and a great GPU by mobile standards.
This accomplishes 2 things. It allows traditional PC gaming on a tablet once you overcome interface issues if they exist. The issue does not exist on some games like Ragnarok Online. It also brings a large dose of computing power to the Windows Tablet environment.
Increased computing power can also translate well to more productive workflows.
Tablets "execute code" at a pace that's faster than most desktops from 10 years ago, and those produced some nice graphics and very playable games. The problem isn't their speed or efficiency, exactly. It is a combination of a few things.
First, you are correct about the lack of GPU power in the Atom processors. They can't do 3D graphics with lots of shader effects at a decent pace. This has nothing to do with code execution. It has more to do with the architecture of the GPU.
Second, we have a form factor that can't dissipate heat very well. Laptops have ventilation and fans to remove heat. Desktops have plenty of air or even liquid cooling to remove heat. Processing anything generates heat. We have increased the efficiency of the ratio of computing power to heat generated, but not to the point where tablet processors can do as much as a laptop or desktop.
Third, you need developers to produce things. In my experience, developers for the mobile platforms are just looking for a quick buck instead of creating great games. Their excuses are justified, mostly. The interface is limiting, players are looking for shorter games, and the processing power is limited. This results in games like Candy Crush becoming the most popular instead of a game like Bard's Tale.
Finally, people like you expect amazing graphics out of their games. For the reasons above, it simply isn't possible. Those expectations are not met and disappointment follows. The new line of processors will help, but I highly doubt developers are going to make games exclusively for it, just as the Tegra Store for Android wasn't very popular.
3D graphics from 10 years ago were awful. They were usually worse than 2D graphics, and often a lot worse. If you were happy with 2D graphics 10 years ago--and I was--then tablets today can do just as well on graphics. Maybe better, given that some tablets have high quality displays, while desktops from 10 years ago were largely CRTs. But if you want 3D graphics, then apart from some very recent launches, today's tablets are pretty miserable.
Intel's new Bay Trail Atom with Silvermont cores is an enormous leap over previous generation Atom chips. In the same tablet-friendly TDP, you'll get more CPU performance out of Silvermont cores than AMD's Jaguar cores, though I think that's largely because Intel is wiling to allocate more of the chip's TDP to the CPU than AMD is.
It's important to realize that Silvermont cores target lower power consumption than Jaguar cores, so tablet-friendly levels of consumption are pushing the upper bounds of what is reasonable for SIlvermont, but the lower bounds for Jaguar cores. Silvermont cores also need to go into cell phones, while Jaguar cores don't, so AMD isn't bothered if they can't build a 1 W chip around Jaguar cores. On the other end, if you let both architectures have enough power headroom to really stretch out, Jaguar cores can handily destroy Silvermont cores. Of course, that's kind of like saying that Haswell or Piledriver cores can easily be much faster than Jaguar or Silvermont cores.
The graphics that Intel put into Bay Trail are also massively better than previous Intel graphics paired with Atom--perhaps 10 times as fast as what Intel offered only two generations prior. They're still not great, and lose badly to AMD Temash graphics in the same TDP, but Bay Trail Atom finally has graphics good enough to display the Windows desktop, play videos, and other such light tasks without completely choking.
If you want a Windows 8 tablet and you want to play games on it, then yes, you want AMD Temash. But if you don't care about games, Intel Bay Trail Atom is a good budget alternative. Previous generation Atom chips weren't.
Tablets allow a lot more space and a lot more weight than cell phones, which allows for a bigger battery, more power consumption, and more performance. AMD Temash and Intel Bay Trail Atom take advantage of that to massively increase performance over older tablets. So does the upcoming Nvidia Tegra K1, and, for that matter, Apple's latest A7 chip, which offers the new 64-bit ARM v8 architecture long before anyone else does or was even expected to.
I don't think you realized my point. x86 based tablets will have a much larger library of existing programs. There are existing mouse interface applications that would transition easily to a tablet interface. In this instance I used Ragnarok Online. The thing holding back x86 tablets is that the only processors were the atoms or the first generation APUs. What happens this year is the broad leap forward in x86 computing power.
To me there is not much you can do with Android, iOS, or Windows Phone/RT platforms because they are limited based on their existing libraries and programming languages. Android just started allowing C++ code using the Bionic C library. However its not under widespread adoption and is poorly positioned to replace what a lot of Android developers have already gotten accustomed to. So there will be much more limited development using Android C++. Windows Phone/RT uses C#. iOS uses Objective C. Java, C#, and Objective C are all slower than C++ so they won't be able to maximize the usage of hardware like an x86 application can. So not only does the x86 tablet already have a large library of programs, more application development will also be done in C++ rather than a slower managed code solution.