According to a Valve Engineer, the Steam Machine specs outclass the most common PC configurations. The company relied on its own hardware surveys to choose the system’s components. Even as an entry-level option, Valve claims that 4K/60 fps performance is realistic, despite a memory-limited GPU.
Nvidia is not helping, either. What they’re charging now is bonkers.
…Intel is trying at least. Battlemage is good, it’s just inexplicably not selling well. I’d have jumped on it a heartbeat if they made a bigger card.
I think Intel’s issue is that they’re focusing on the low end. Anyone with a 3060 or better would see the b580 as a lateral move at best, or more likely a downgrade. A b770 card would probably have gotten me to upgrade as long as they weren’t stingy with the ram.
They focus on the low end, but a lot of people who only want low end GPUs care about Minecraft, and their OpenGL performance is abysmal, so Minecraft runs like molasses. If you play a lot of Minecraft, Nvidia’s cards manage to be much better value. There’s no reason why this couldn’t be fixed if they’re willing to invest in writing native OpenGL drivers instead of going through a compatibility player or mitigated if they invested more in making the compatibility layer faster, but that would mean deciding they’re losing a lot of sales this way, as it wouldn’t be cheap.
…Yeah.
Ironically, they seemed to figure ‘low end’ is where the sales are at. Yet my guess is most ‘low end’ buyers pick Nvidia by default, and folks who are upgrading from anything aim higher than a B580.
I would’ve killed for a 512-bit Arc card (other than the unobtanium datacenter GPUs), but that’s a fever dream for now…