I have a 20m fibre optic cable, these things are great. Thinner than a standard cable. They are unidirectional, but mine has a dedicated copper line for CEC. 4k 120hz is no problem.
I also have a Pulse Eight CEC adapter in the chain, but I had to swap its included HDMI cable for full bandwidth.
Since I've switched to Linux I haven't had a chance to set up the software side for CEC though, does anyone happen to have recommendations?
I bought the same adapter and use it with Bazzite, which has a `toggle-cec-sleep` you can run that just set it up. Now when I press a button on my keyboard, the PC starts up and the TV turns on. It's magical.
What I've heard, for some reason, you can get CEC and working when you use a displayport -> hdmi adapter with the right chipset inside. So theoretically, get the right adapter, plug it on the side of the computer and you might actually get CEC signal decoded as a new kernel device.
One of the better tech investments I’ve made is in a 20 metre Thunderbolt cable from Corning. It’s surprisingly useful- if you have a monitor that takes TB input then your computer can be stored in a small closet next to your router/switch, where you can’t hear it. Alternatively if you just need a quick 10Gb Ethernet link between two computers with USB4 or TB3/4 that it would be complicated to have next to each other, you can use it for that as well.
I really hope Corning eventually make a TB5 cable.
You didnt need the corning one, though, that's an electrically isolated cable, maybe thunderbolt can't go far unless it is media translated to optical, but I am unsure.
10+ gigabit serial connections (Thunderbolt, USB 3.2/4 DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.1, etc) are limited to 1 or 2 meters on passive copper cables. You need optical for anything longer (or a hot, power-hungry transceiver, like for 10GBaseT ethernet)
Interesting idea! I'm currently using Parsec to connect to a computer in a closet (due to noise/heat). It's low latency, sure, but a direct Thunderbolt connection would be lower!
Yet HDMI is more widespread and both cables and equipment tends to be cheaper, which is surprising considering a USB-C to HDMI dongle needs actual hardware, while its basically just passthrough for an USB-C to DP.
It's also quite nice that HDMI keeps basically all the logic and signaling the same as VGA (blank periods, EDID etc.), so actually making use of the signal is much easier.
DisplayPort still doesn't have anything as good as CEC. DDC/CI exists and bizarrely enough has existed for much longer than CEC (since the DVI port era), but DisplayPort Alliance has never bothered to standardize it and iterate on it.
For example, some monitors crash if you read any value from the monitor, so you can only blindly send brightness or volume levels. Some internally use 255 instead of 100. Some have crappy flash and you will wear it out by sending values constantly. Etc, etc.
Speaking of Steam and controllers - is anyone else annoyed by piss poor compatibility of PC games with Steam onscreen keyboard. I can count on one hand games with seamless integration, where it popups after moving to input field.
The manual Steam/XBox + "X" shortcut always shows the keyboard, but games like to ignore submitted value. My favorite example is Dark Souls character creation screen, it is the only place in the entire game you can and need to enter text, and it is faster to walk the 50ft and back, than to get it working.
That hasn't been my experience on SteamOS and Bazzite. Generally the keyboard pops and you can enter text, occasionally you do need to do it manually but even then text still works. On my GPD Win Mini I actually have the opposite problem. It brings up the on screen keyboard when I want to use the built in one.
Isn't that a consequence of it being a fairly open platform and no certification gatekeeper before a developer can release/update their game? The platform isn't specifically steam or where mouse/keyboard is unavailable or inconvenient, it's generally what they think most of their target market will be using which is likely a generic windows desktop. I don't think developers or valve themselves would want to set up certification and enforcement to say "you must have X in your game otherwise you can't release on steam", especially for the wide range of categories of criteria you could possibly think of, and someone out there will want a way to do text input on their steering wheel for a driving simulator. PC gaming casts such a wide net it's likely an impossible task.
EA still hasn't made its EA account malware SteamDeck compatible. I have to spend 30 minutes every few months to enter again my EA account credentials (nowadays I use a dock and a hardware keyboard).
How do you expect Dark Souls, a game made before the Steam controller, to signal to Steam to open the onscreen keyboard?
Modern games probably have something in the newer steam APIs for controllers, but without that explicit support, there was not a preexisting game API for notifying your host machine that you need an onscreen keyboard.
That can't excuse the onscreen keyboard being nonfunctional though. Steam is already middlemanning control APIs so it should always just work to inject keypresses.
My problem is that in weird cases, the Steam+X shorcut doesn't work for me. I added firefox on my steam deck as a "game" in steam so I could open it without going into desktop mode, and sometimes invoking the onscreen keyboard will bring it up and then immediately close it. I have to quit and restart firefox.
Does anyone have a proper (and not overly expensive) solution for also moving input devices somewhere else? My main device is not in the same room as my TV.
I think the options are dependent on your setup. For example if you have a smart TV running Android, you could run https://www.virtualhere.com/usb_client_software on it to connect a dongle or controller attached to the TV through to your main device.
I do this with my Nvidia Shield and Xbox One Controller.
Depends on what you mean by “proper” and the exact layout you are trying to work around.
I can state from experience that drilling a hole through a wall, installing brush plates on both sides to make it look neater, and passing display and input cables through, works pretty well and costs very little. I was using wireless input devices, but still had input cables through the wall with the other end of the wireless link plugged into them, as the range limits of the devices' radios was problematical otherwise.
If you sometimes need to use the machine in its own location as well, then you need a screen there with the pair set to mirror the same output and a local set of input devices, sharing/switching audio output might be a touch more faffy.
Less practical if the device and screen are not near enough to the joining wall, or are in rooms that don't share a wall, of course.
With usbip you can run a USB device remotely as if it is local. You could use this to, for example, access a printer remotely (Wireguard would also allow you this). I went for fiber in my home, through the walls mostly. Also still some legacy twisted pair (esp. PoE).
I run 25 meters AOC HDMI, the problem was to pull it through pipe in the floor to the living room - those connectors are quite bulky. Some AOC cables come with mini-hdmi and, an adapter to the full size, but it wasn't available for HDMI 2.1 at the time. Works flawlessly. To switch between display on the desk and living room I run a small DIY java app in windows (shouldn't be a problem to run it on Linux), MQTT + home assistant as a remote app. I didn't play with CEC.
More interesting is a USB setup at this distance. I picked Ethernet - USB 2.0 converter and a simple USB hub with external PSU in the living room, $30. This enables BT, xbox360 dongles, keyboards. I didn't go with USB 3 as its expensive and unnecessary.
EDIT: It's easier to find under 'usb extender over ethernet', and I double check mine ATEN UEC260 costs closer to ~100$ now, way more expensive compared to what it used to be. It requires a dedicated CAT5 cable, it cannot go through any networking devices.
A few miles? My closes server is in Paris, and im in Barcelona. I get a minimum of 30 to 40 ms of lag, fine for slow games, but if you are playing something multiplayer and there is another 40 -> 100 ms lag on the server connection things quickly go downhill.
I did a USB extension and fiber optic DisplayPort to game on my old rooftop deck. It was very nice.
The first cable I bought was 150ft! Too long! Really hard to coil.
I've been on sunshine/moonlight mostly these days (updating to Apollo/artemis is in progress), but I do sometimes wire my desktop to my patio with this cable & wireless input devices these days. That spot is pretty sun exposed so it needs a real sweet spot, where-as the streaming just works anywhere & is easy, but sometimes it's nice enjoying the flawless low latency.
Have you looked at what sort of FPS it gets on the games you want to play? Overall it's performance is... Quite poor even on the lowest settings for lots of games
If the benchmark has the words "RT" on it, like a lot did, you can safely throw them in the trash. That's people benchmarking the device in the same spirit as people who thought the Steam Deck and the Switch 1 could do 4K. Worthless.
Okay but we aren't talking about a handheld device here. You should not need to literally put it on handheld graphics settings to get decent performance.
Also this thing is literally designed for running on TVs and everybody uses their TV at 4K resolution...
>If the benchmark has the words "RT" on it, like a lot did, you can safely throw them in the trash
More like you can throw the console in the trash if you can't run current day games on it well, when those games mandate RT.
A lot of AAA games have started mandating RT since 2025, like Doom the dark ages for example, and the number of games doing that will only increase moving forward as devs just take the easy way with Unreal Engine, instead of optimizing for performance with baked in lighting like it's 1999. So the already mediocre performance of the console will only get worse and worse over the years in the upcoming games.
I like Valve, but there's no need to larp for Valve and run defense for them when they make mistakes, like with the steam box.
Not disagreeing with you about lighting, but there is a differnce in older games that make RT optional. They use RT as a "ultra high quality" shadows/reflection graphical option. So there's no point of having a high performant, low quality RT option.
This isn't the case with games that require RT. Doom Dark Ages can even run the RT entirely in software, implemented in AMD's Linux drivers: https://youtu.be/R5G2bYiA1hk
So I think it's fine to ignore benchmarks that mention RT, meaning it's basically testing the game at "ultra quality" settings.
>Doom Dark Ages can even run the RT entirely in software, implemented in AMD's Linux drivers:
Running RT in Software doesn't mean it's free, it just draws the performance penalty from the rest of the system.
And the demo in the youtube link you shared shows this. Like sure, it's playable, but it looks like game from 2009. It looks fine for playing on a small handheld device like the steam deck, but not on a 27"-60" monitor/TV.
Sure, but it's also running on a GPU that's almost 10 years old and wasn't even high end at release. So I think it's fine performance for the hardware.
The world is full of beautiful indie games, I barely play AAA games. But even then, I wouldn't consider it as a PRIMARY pc if you have budget for something more. It's a great secondary pc.
That's what I mean by "market", I don't think they are targeting the global segment
Yeah totally it just comes down to if you're able to play the "games you want to play". But I definitely think there will be some disappointed buyers who don't quite realize the limitations
There's a potential meme image demanding to be made.
One shows the steam machine user playing a game with resume feature in just 2 panels. One sitting down and pressing the controller, the next playing.
The other half of the comic has 10+ panels. One sitting down. One facepalming. One standing up and turning on the pc elsewhere, one sitting down, one opening steam link one staring at the screen waiting for the pc boot, one facepalming, one going to the pc to launch steam, one sitting down, one waiting to connect to steam big mode, one waiting for the game to launch because no resume feature.
My PC runs proxmox (multiple gpus) and a remote in homeassistant triggers a shutdown and start command for the streaming VM (bazzite booting into gamescope). Instead of picking jellyfin on the firetv stick I select moonlight.
All very achievable, I have a setup with a wireless keyboard to the htpc, and a script that wakes up my desktop with wake on lan, ssh's in and starts sunshine if I start moonlight.
Booting the htpc can be a pain; personally my best solution has been wake on lan via phone. I've also used universal remotes before cec was reliable, and I had to control the screen separately.
Train your brain to not "need" it. Brains are malleable whether someone diagnosed and labeled them or not. Concentrate on something else during those cut scenes, read a book, study the clock or thermometer or cat or leaves on the trees. Imagine a scenario where the power fails and you can't play games. Anything which doesn't enslave you to technology.
Being a slave to a malformed brain is better than being a slave to technology?
How about it's wheelchairs for disabled brains. Yell at a person with two broken legs to stand up. Yelling louder isn't going to heal their broken bones.
> Can't people see any usecase for the steam machine?
The only problem with the Steam Machine is the price tbh, and that's mainly Valve having a really bad luck with timing once again.
Having a custom-made "Steam Machine" for the past 3 years thanks to ChimeraOS, it really changed the way I play for the better. I can play on my couch with my son and wife, and it made my wife (who wasn't really into gaming) buy a Steam Deck and enjoy my 500+ library instantly.
Now, I can play CS2 in my office, my son can play Astroneer in the living room and my wife The Witcher 3 next to him. The Steam ecosystem is simply amazing, it's a real shame Valve had to launch their machine during a worldwide component crisis.
>The only problem with the Steam Machine is the price tbh
It's not just the price, it's more like the hardware that is dated on arrival(weaker than a 2020 PS5) and customers are expected to use for 6+ years into the future when more and more new games are demanding RT.
Is not a problem for Nintendo to ship dated HW, sine one it's cheap, and two, since developers will walk through fire to optimize games for the Switch but that's because they're Nintendo and they ship tens of millions of Switches while Steam Boxes will not sell in such numbers to warrant this level of extra developer effort.
Good if you're only intro playing older games or are willing to stomach a lot of upscaling and low graphics setting or must have a just-works linux PC, but given the price and performance this isn't gonna be a mass appeal product.
>and that's mainly Valve having a really bad luck with timing once again.
You know the saying "you make your own luck? Or the saying "luck is opportunity meets preparation"?
So, no, it's not bad luck, it's that the problem with Valve is they just take forever to launch a product. Which is fine for stuff like Steam or games that you can keep delaying and delaying until you get it just right exactly the way you want it, but HW has a limited shelf life where it's most valuable and once you lock in a BOM, you're on the clock to get it out the door and need to haul ass. See the titanic efforts Microsoft put into launching Xbox and Xbox 360 on schedule, it was a rootless bloodbath, as all consumer HW is, but if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
So there's no bad luck here, just bad preparation on their part. Valve could have easily launched this earlier if they just spent less time trying to engineer everything from scratch with custom parts just to fit the HW inside a cube as small as possible just to flex their HW design skills, and instead just focus on quickly getting the HW in another boring VCR box into consumers hands ASAP the way MS did it with the first Xbox.
The whole point of the Steam Box is the Steam ecosystem centered around just-works Linux emulation of windows games, not the box being an engineering and design marvel, so speeding so much time on perfecting the form for a first gen product, was pointless endeavour that cost them the product launch.
I would say they got it all right with the Xbox one. Then the series came out and is a good example of what valve is doing with the steam machine. AAA Games will be optimized for the steam machine (and consequently for the coming shortage in memory components) with power players in custom rigs getting the full 8k, hdr 4.0, DLSS 6.5 etc
No, it wasn't a GPU problem, it was semiconductor manufacturing and package assembly and soldering issue, that a lot of the electronics of that era suffered, from the early PS3(YLOD), to early Wii, to Macbooks and gaming laptops.
They all ran very hot back then in that 90nm era and since the industry switched to ROHS solder around 2005-2006 but the fabs hadn't yet mastered a realizable assembly process with the new solder, so early device it would lead to CPUs and GPUs desoldering off their ball grid array from the heat and the weak solder, until these kinks were ironed out over the years via 65nm die shrinks to lower power usage and better packaging and soldering techniques had evolved.
So this isn't an issue Valve could have faced as they weren't using brand new innovative HW using new manufacturing techniques, but older components that were already tried and tested. They were just too slow and lazy and prioritized form over function.
> AAA Games will be optimized for the steam machine
I fully doubt it. It's a niche product that won't sell well and game devs are stingy in the current industry market plagued with mass layoffs for cost cutting.
And the proof is in the pudding when you see how badly some AAA games run even on top end PC HW. Studios just don't put in any optimisation effort anymore and just ship Unreal Engine defaults.
> You cannot play two different games at the same time with your 50ft hdmi cable.
Why not? The use case of the Steam Machine is that it gives a great out of the box PC gaming experience for the living room (which is great for most people), not that it enables things impossible to configure on a PC (it's just a PC itself).
I am suggesting that having a PC + a Steam Machine, you can play 2 different games at the same time from 2 different people.
With a 50ft cable from one pc, you can play at most 2 instances of the same game using Nucleus coop on Windows (so, not SteamOS), but you cannot play 2 different games without an enormous effort (it is technically possible to do the same of what Nucleus coop does, but that doesn't exist yet)
Ive been using Moonlight on my Apple TV, with a 8bitdo controller connected to the Apple TV. My gaming computer is running bazzite and runs Sunshine as streaming server and it handles basically any game. I did use Steam Remote Control earlier but i found it quite unstable and slow compared to Sunshine which basically just works out of the box. Ive beaten Silk song and Elden ring on the setup. Its just wired 1gb networking. In the future i might upgrade to faster networking to get down the latency but its not really needed as long as i dont stream in 4k (my computer doesnt really do 4k that well anyway). The computer(s) have nvidia and amd gpus, both work just as fine.
I use similar setup (CachyOS, Apple TV, Moonlight/Sunshine), but I play on a projector instead of a TV, which results in slightly higher latency. With that in mind, I connect gamepad via Bluetooth to my PC rather than to the Apple TV to minimize input latency; all single-player games are fully playable without any noticeable lag.
I have a very similar setup. On Ubuntu (wayland only) I had to build sunshine for support. There is also always the bootstrapping issue for logging in when locked. Yes, I can physically log in, but I'd like something a little easier. Remote desktop is actually quite a bit of a headache and locked down in annoying ways by gnome.
I have some terrible NixOS hacks on my desktop machine which bridges Home Assistant via MQTT to some configuration around which video and audio outputs should be used, and whether my login manager should automatically log in as my user account running Steam Big Picture or wait for auth before starting Niri. Its certainly not anywhere near as smooth as having a Steam Machine under the TV, and I don't love that I have to run a machine that makes the room several degrees warmer while running, but it does have the advantage of being free apart from the time spent making it work.
yea, i wanted as little friction sa possible. I landed on Bazzite so that i didnt need to spend any time tinkering, and the little tinkering i needed to was easy to do with claudes help. Ive used to just use the same a my daily driver (i use arch btw), but i wanted something that "just worked". Really impressed with bazzite for the gaming streaming setup, kudos to that team and their great work.
Oh and i use a virtual display, which was easy to do in wayland.
I haven't had luck with mouse, but you can actually connect a bluetooth keyboard to the Apple TV. I use a little handheld unit from Rii and it works great.
For mouse, if you have an iOS device you can use the "Remote" widget on your phone as a mouse, and it works in the Moonlight client well enough to click through prompts etc.
Mine is moving my Razer laptop from my office to next to my TV and picking up my controller which is slightly annoying but at least I can play games at a good FPS which the Steam Machine cannot do
If you already have Ethernet at both ends I cannot recommend enough game streaming. With the right setup it is almost identical to having my computer plugged in physically, and I am very sensitive to input latency.
I can get 4K HDR 120Hz running over gigabit Ethernet without visually sacrificing too much on bitrate, but you can squeeze more bitrate at lower fps or 1440p (obviously) if that is your preference. You can also tune these settings per-game with the setup I have which is quite useful.
Hardware wise, I'm using a Steam Deck as the streaming client in a docked setup (ala Nintendo Switch). It seems to handle everything I can throw at it, and it has the bonus of being able to run simpler games without streaming anything.
I have a third-party (UGREEN) dock providing power, USB and gigabit Ethernet, display (though unfortunately no HDMI-CEC to turn the TV on automatically (I worked around this using a janky automation script)). The official dock has HDMI-CEC but costs ~2x as much with less IO. I'll deal with my jank script.
For software, I'm running MoonDeck for game streaming via Sunshine on my gaming PC. The Steam Remote Play streaming is good, but not quite _as_ good, sadly.
With Sunshine (I looked at it ages ago but totally forgot about it), do you have to be logged in order to accept clients? With Steam remote play streaming it won't let me stream unless I'm logged in - which is a problem given that I leave my PC (Windows 10). in my bedroom and I don't want to leave it unlocked.
I find the Sunshine clients to be much better. You can set them up with much more granularity than Steam client, which can help a lot depending on the type of game you want to play. You also have a variety of clients not just Moonlight, for ex, on iPad I can recommend VoidLink which is really well made and handle touch events beautifully, turning the iPad into an actual MS Surface with multi-touch support when streaming Windows.
I actually have an interesting setup to play Civ 4 with the family (best civ game, change my mind): the games are running on virtual machines on a headless servers and we play on iPads using the native touch controls. It's really nice user experience and I was surprised it worked so well on such an old game.
what settings are you using? Game streaming from my PC to my steamdeck over ethernet for me feels like absolute shit. The quality gets destroyed every time i rotate the camera even on 1080p
Steam Remote Play sadly breaks down if anything involving Admin comes up. Task manager, admin prompt, etc.
Sunshine / moonlight can work but you need to run them as admin.
Sunshine / moonshine also have problems with the full DualSense features, you need to be wired, have VirtualHere set up, and even then it might not all work with all clients.
So yes both can work, but both have downsides that can be alleviated with an HDMI cable.
Dualsense's main advantage is the built in trackpad and gyroscope but if you want to play wirelessly you are probably better off switching to the Steam Controller at this point which also has a trackpad and gyroscope. Or if using Windows standard Xbox controller if you don't need a trackpad or gyroscope, as Xbox controllers have first class support.
I just disable UAC. Yada yada bad practice yeah I know. I'm sick of constant slight annoyance due to hypothetical threat. If I get pwned I get pwned; hasn't happened yet lol
> can get 4K HDR 120Hz running over gigabit Ethernet without visually sacrificing too much on bitrate,
While I agree game streaming can work well, in practice on a modern game the frame rate will vary if you try to get 4k hdr 120k and I don't believe a game stream can use variable refresh rate. In practice what do you do if playing a modern AAA game? Do you set the frame rate to a locked 60?
I used to do game streaming but ended up buying a 50 foot HDMI cable and USB and ethernet to link two rooms. One advantage of this is I don't need to worry about what frame rate to set the stream at and my Xbox adapter (or any adapter really) can be used natively on USB without worrying about controller compatibility over Ethernet.
I have a gaming PC and a steam deck. My goal was to use my steam deck as a steam link (their old streaming hardware) w/ a Xbox controller
Both are connected via Ethernet and actually the video quality was very very good, and input lag was completely fine.
Unfortunately there were so many issues. I want a console like experience where I can just decide that i want to pick up a controller and play.
With this setup I have to unlock windows which is annoying. Also often times something gets stuck so I have to walk to the desktop to fix/click around, or it plays audio via PC, or I have to disable HDR, etc.
Along with the complexity you mention, a real dealbreaker for me is controller support for couch co-op/multiplayer.
It's the biggest difference and flaw between steam devices and traditional consoles. Even hugely popular multiplayer titles like Overcooked either don't work, or require hours of research and configuration.
This is such a baffling claim? I've had very close to zero issues with couch gaming with my steam deck + wireless xbox controllers. They overwhelmingly just work. Including Overcooked?
The issue in your setup is Windows^tm. (what I do) gaming machine's shell profile,
if [[ $(tty) == "/dev/tty2" ]]; then
<insert your steamOS session invocation/args here>; sudo chvt 1; exit
fi
then all you need is some event(s) to trigger changing to tty2 on the target machine. perhaps when a controller connects, or your tv changes input, or you press a button on your tv/tv box remote.
I run Moonlight directly on my Apple TV and it's great! Apple TV is so wildly better than any smart TV on the market that I'll always have it be the brains of any TV I own for the foreseeable future anyway.
I tried using the official steam client on my TV (running some google/android TV OS) which was hard-wired in (100 Mbps) which should be sufficient for 1080p/60 if not 4K/60 but there is some android TV bug that adds an unacceptable audio lag. Video quality was fine. (https://steamcommunity.com/app/353380/discussions/0/62441675...)
Seems like a waste to use a steam deck for this when the TV hardware seems more than powerful enough but if it works it works, and my steam deck is gathering dust anyway. Thanks for the idea.
I also have a Pulse Eight CEC adapter in the chain, but I had to swap its included HDMI cable for full bandwidth.
Since I've switched to Linux I haven't had a chance to set up the software side for CEC though, does anyone happen to have recommendations?
https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/Baz...
https://youtu.be/O9QPecpLcnA
Someone on HN posted a more official link recently but I can't find it right now.
I really hope Corning eventually make a TB5 cable.
It's also quite nice that HDMI keeps basically all the logic and signaling the same as VGA (blank periods, EDID etc.), so actually making use of the signal is much easier.
FTFY. VGA uses analog signals, HDMI uses only digital signals.
For example, some monitors crash if you read any value from the monitor, so you can only blindly send brightness or volume levels. Some internally use 255 instead of 100. Some have crappy flash and you will wear it out by sending values constantly. Etc, etc.
Modern games probably have something in the newer steam APIs for controllers, but without that explicit support, there was not a preexisting game API for notifying your host machine that you need an onscreen keyboard.
That can't excuse the onscreen keyboard being nonfunctional though. Steam is already middlemanning control APIs so it should always just work to inject keypresses.
My problem is that in weird cases, the Steam+X shorcut doesn't work for me. I added firefox on my steam deck as a "game" in steam so I could open it without going into desktop mode, and sometimes invoking the onscreen keyboard will bring it up and then immediately close it. I have to quit and restart firefox.
I can state from experience that drilling a hole through a wall, installing brush plates on both sides to make it look neater, and passing display and input cables through, works pretty well and costs very little. I was using wireless input devices, but still had input cables through the wall with the other end of the wireless link plugged into them, as the range limits of the devices' radios was problematical otherwise.
If you sometimes need to use the machine in its own location as well, then you need a screen there with the pair set to mirror the same output and a local set of input devices, sharing/switching audio output might be a touch more faffy.
Less practical if the device and screen are not near enough to the joining wall, or are in rooms that don't share a wall, of course.
More interesting is a USB setup at this distance. I picked Ethernet - USB 2.0 converter and a simple USB hub with external PSU in the living room, $30. This enables BT, xbox360 dongles, keyboards. I didn't go with USB 3 as its expensive and unnecessary.
EDIT: It's easier to find under 'usb extender over ethernet', and I double check mine ATEN UEC260 costs closer to ~100$ now, way more expensive compared to what it used to be. It requires a dedicated CAT5 cable, it cannot go through any networking devices.
Maybe it's possible to order an aesthetically-looking cube sculpture even. Or make one with Legos.
The first cable I bought was 150ft! Too long! Really hard to coil.
I've been on sunshine/moonlight mostly these days (updating to Apollo/artemis is in progress), but I do sometimes wire my desktop to my patio with this cable & wireless input devices these days. That spot is pretty sun exposed so it needs a real sweet spot, where-as the streaming just works anywhere & is easy, but sometimes it's nice enjoying the flawless low latency.
Can't people see any usecase for the steam machine?
I understand, you are not in the market for it.
I am, I have a good usecase which possibly will make the cost drop below a ps5 over the years (if you include games cost)
Also this thing is literally designed for running on TVs and everybody uses their TV at 4K resolution...
More like you can throw the console in the trash if you can't run current day games on it well, when those games mandate RT.
A lot of AAA games have started mandating RT since 2025, like Doom the dark ages for example, and the number of games doing that will only increase moving forward as devs just take the easy way with Unreal Engine, instead of optimizing for performance with baked in lighting like it's 1999. So the already mediocre performance of the console will only get worse and worse over the years in the upcoming games.
I like Valve, but there's no need to larp for Valve and run defense for them when they make mistakes, like with the steam box.
This isn't the case with games that require RT. Doom Dark Ages can even run the RT entirely in software, implemented in AMD's Linux drivers: https://youtu.be/R5G2bYiA1hk
So I think it's fine to ignore benchmarks that mention RT, meaning it's basically testing the game at "ultra quality" settings.
Running RT in Software doesn't mean it's free, it just draws the performance penalty from the rest of the system.
And the demo in the youtube link you shared shows this. Like sure, it's playable, but it looks like game from 2009. It looks fine for playing on a small handheld device like the steam deck, but not on a 27"-60" monitor/TV.
That's what I mean by "market", I don't think they are targeting the global segment
There's a potential meme image demanding to be made.
One shows the steam machine user playing a game with resume feature in just 2 panels. One sitting down and pressing the controller, the next playing.
The other half of the comic has 10+ panels. One sitting down. One facepalming. One standing up and turning on the pc elsewhere, one sitting down, one opening steam link one staring at the screen waiting for the pc boot, one facepalming, one going to the pc to launch steam, one sitting down, one waiting to connect to steam big mode, one waiting for the game to launch because no resume feature.
Wake on Lan is also a thing.
-> I have a steam machine since 2023.
Booting the htpc can be a pain; personally my best solution has been wake on lan via phone. I've also used universal remotes before cec was reliable, and I had to control the screen separately.
... do you spend a lot of time playing 2 different games at the same time?
Are console loading times really still that shit? I haven't found PC loading times to be much of an issue since fast SSDs came around
The only problem with the Steam Machine is the price tbh, and that's mainly Valve having a really bad luck with timing once again.
Having a custom-made "Steam Machine" for the past 3 years thanks to ChimeraOS, it really changed the way I play for the better. I can play on my couch with my son and wife, and it made my wife (who wasn't really into gaming) buy a Steam Deck and enjoy my 500+ library instantly.
Now, I can play CS2 in my office, my son can play Astroneer in the living room and my wife The Witcher 3 next to him. The Steam ecosystem is simply amazing, it's a real shame Valve had to launch their machine during a worldwide component crisis.
It's not just the price, it's more like the hardware that is dated on arrival(weaker than a 2020 PS5) and customers are expected to use for 6+ years into the future when more and more new games are demanding RT.
Is not a problem for Nintendo to ship dated HW, sine one it's cheap, and two, since developers will walk through fire to optimize games for the Switch but that's because they're Nintendo and they ship tens of millions of Switches while Steam Boxes will not sell in such numbers to warrant this level of extra developer effort.
Good if you're only intro playing older games or are willing to stomach a lot of upscaling and low graphics setting or must have a just-works linux PC, but given the price and performance this isn't gonna be a mass appeal product.
>and that's mainly Valve having a really bad luck with timing once again.
You know the saying "you make your own luck? Or the saying "luck is opportunity meets preparation"?
So, no, it's not bad luck, it's that the problem with Valve is they just take forever to launch a product. Which is fine for stuff like Steam or games that you can keep delaying and delaying until you get it just right exactly the way you want it, but HW has a limited shelf life where it's most valuable and once you lock in a BOM, you're on the clock to get it out the door and need to haul ass. See the titanic efforts Microsoft put into launching Xbox and Xbox 360 on schedule, it was a rootless bloodbath, as all consumer HW is, but if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
So there's no bad luck here, just bad preparation on their part. Valve could have easily launched this earlier if they just spent less time trying to engineer everything from scratch with custom parts just to fit the HW inside a cube as small as possible just to flex their HW design skills, and instead just focus on quickly getting the HW in another boring VCR box into consumers hands ASAP the way MS did it with the first Xbox.
The whole point of the Steam Box is the Steam ecosystem centered around just-works Linux emulation of windows games, not the box being an engineering and design marvel, so speeding so much time on perfecting the form for a first gen product, was pointless endeavour that cost them the product launch.
Xbox 360 was rushed with gpu problems
I would say they got it all right with the Xbox one. Then the series came out and is a good example of what valve is doing with the steam machine. AAA Games will be optimized for the steam machine (and consequently for the coming shortage in memory components) with power players in custom rigs getting the full 8k, hdr 4.0, DLSS 6.5 etc
No, it wasn't a GPU problem, it was semiconductor manufacturing and package assembly and soldering issue, that a lot of the electronics of that era suffered, from the early PS3(YLOD), to early Wii, to Macbooks and gaming laptops.
They all ran very hot back then in that 90nm era and since the industry switched to ROHS solder around 2005-2006 but the fabs hadn't yet mastered a realizable assembly process with the new solder, so early device it would lead to CPUs and GPUs desoldering off their ball grid array from the heat and the weak solder, until these kinks were ironed out over the years via 65nm die shrinks to lower power usage and better packaging and soldering techniques had evolved.
So this isn't an issue Valve could have faced as they weren't using brand new innovative HW using new manufacturing techniques, but older components that were already tried and tested. They were just too slow and lazy and prioritized form over function.
> AAA Games will be optimized for the steam machine
I fully doubt it. It's a niche product that won't sell well and game devs are stingy in the current industry market plagued with mass layoffs for cost cutting.
And the proof is in the pudding when you see how badly some AAA games run even on top end PC HW. Studios just don't put in any optimisation effort anymore and just ship Unreal Engine defaults.
Why not? The use case of the Steam Machine is that it gives a great out of the box PC gaming experience for the living room (which is great for most people), not that it enables things impossible to configure on a PC (it's just a PC itself).
I am suggesting that having a PC + a Steam Machine, you can play 2 different games at the same time from 2 different people.
With a 50ft cable from one pc, you can play at most 2 instances of the same game using Nucleus coop on Windows (so, not SteamOS), but you cannot play 2 different games without an enormous effort (it is technically possible to do the same of what Nucleus coop does, but that doesn't exist yet)
Can you show the parts list where you found this level of performance cheaper, with new parts, current prices?
Oh and i use a virtual display, which was easy to do in wayland.
Only downside is that keyboard/mouse can't connect to Apple TV, so it's controller-only.
For mouse, if you have an iOS device you can use the "Remote" widget on your phone as a mouse, and it works in the Moonlight client well enough to click through prompts etc.
I can get 4K HDR 120Hz running over gigabit Ethernet without visually sacrificing too much on bitrate, but you can squeeze more bitrate at lower fps or 1440p (obviously) if that is your preference. You can also tune these settings per-game with the setup I have which is quite useful.
Hardware wise, I'm using a Steam Deck as the streaming client in a docked setup (ala Nintendo Switch). It seems to handle everything I can throw at it, and it has the bonus of being able to run simpler games without streaming anything.
I have a third-party (UGREEN) dock providing power, USB and gigabit Ethernet, display (though unfortunately no HDMI-CEC to turn the TV on automatically (I worked around this using a janky automation script)). The official dock has HDMI-CEC but costs ~2x as much with less IO. I'll deal with my jank script.
For software, I'm running MoonDeck for game streaming via Sunshine on my gaming PC. The Steam Remote Play streaming is good, but not quite _as_ good, sadly.
I actually have an interesting setup to play Civ 4 with the family (best civ game, change my mind): the games are running on virtual machines on a headless servers and we play on iPads using the native touch controls. It's really nice user experience and I was surprised it worked so well on such an old game.
Sunshine / moonlight can work but you need to run them as admin.
Sunshine / moonshine also have problems with the full DualSense features, you need to be wired, have VirtualHere set up, and even then it might not all work with all clients.
So yes both can work, but both have downsides that can be alleviated with an HDMI cable.
My point is, streaming introduces compromises, while I chose PC gaming to avoid a lot of compromises.
Audio jack support has been in since 6.18 last November. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sony-DualSense-Audio-Handling
Come to the penguin side: we have the best drivers.
While I agree game streaming can work well, in practice on a modern game the frame rate will vary if you try to get 4k hdr 120k and I don't believe a game stream can use variable refresh rate. In practice what do you do if playing a modern AAA game? Do you set the frame rate to a locked 60?
I used to do game streaming but ended up buying a 50 foot HDMI cable and USB and ethernet to link two rooms. One advantage of this is I don't need to worry about what frame rate to set the stream at and my Xbox adapter (or any adapter really) can be used natively on USB without worrying about controller compatibility over Ethernet.
There are many many types of games (platformers) that can achieve and are preferable to play locked at 120 though.
Both are connected via Ethernet and actually the video quality was very very good, and input lag was completely fine.
Unfortunately there were so many issues. I want a console like experience where I can just decide that i want to pick up a controller and play.
With this setup I have to unlock windows which is annoying. Also often times something gets stuck so I have to walk to the desktop to fix/click around, or it plays audio via PC, or I have to disable HDR, etc.
It's the biggest difference and flaw between steam devices and traditional consoles. Even hugely popular multiplayer titles like Overcooked either don't work, or require hours of research and configuration.
more like couple seconds on protondb https://www.protondb.com/app/448510
Streaming has been ok, but I've had the same issues as the parent commenter, with the stream dying for whatever reason every hour or so.
I have a gaming PC connected to my living room TV, but sometimes I’m lazy and want to play games from my bed.
My solution is that my bedroom TV has a Steam Deck dock connected, so I take my wireless controller to the bedroom and stream the games there instead.
Second hand info though, I have a friend who swears by those but he didn't give me the details.
Seems like a waste to use a steam deck for this when the TV hardware seems more than powerful enough but if it works it works, and my steam deck is gathering dust anyway. Thanks for the idea.