Steam Frame

> And it's the actual GPU that's outputting a HDMI signal over the Displayport connector, which the adapter than rewires in to a HDMI shaped connector.

There are two kinds of DP to HDMI adapters. The passive ones are like you said, they need special support on the GPU (these ports are usually labelled as DP++), IIRC they only do some voltage level shifting. The active ones work on any DP port (they don't need AFAIK any special support on the GPU), and they do the full protocol conversion.

I was able to use this adapter to get my 2070s DisplayPort output to send 4k120hz to my TV, which only has HDMI ports.

Club 3D active adapter: https://www.amazon.com/Club-3D-DisplayPort1-4-Adapter-CAC-10...

It will, I’m doing DP to HDMI 4:4:4 4K@120Hz (and expecting HDR in the near future) from an RX 7900XTX to an LG C3 on Linux.

I’m using the Club3D active adapter, which is the only one I found in reviews to reliably work. And it does, 0 problems whatsoever.

you run FEX, not direct ARM games

Drivers are not an issue for quite some time (but its always good to have latest nvidia ones for example for optimizations focused on given game).

But its trivial to run into some .NET or Visual C++ redistributable hell when you just get a cryptic error during starting and thats it. Just check internet. I have roughly 20 of them installed currently (why the heck?) and earlier versions would happily get installed over already-installed version of same for example as part of game installation process, not a stellar workmanship on MS side. Whats wrong with having latest being backward compatible with all of previous ones, like ie Java achieved 25 years ago?

Talking about fully updated windows 10 and say official steam distros of the games.

I'm guessing you have a very positive experience with gaming PCs; I wish I could say the same. My Windows PC:

  - Randomly BSODs because of (I think) a buggy Focusrite audio interface driver (that I can't fix and Focusrite refuses to)
  - Regularly 'forgets' I have an RX 5600 XT GPU and defaults to the integrated graphics, forcing me to go into the 1995 'Device Manager' to reset it
  - Occasionally just... stops playing audio?
  - Occasionally has its icons disappear from the taskbar
  - Regularly refuses to close applications, making me go into the Task Manager to force-quit them.

These are just the issues I can think of off the top of my head. I've been playing PC games for like 15 years and this is just par for the course for my experience.

I can't speak for the other poster, but I actually recently "abandoned" PC gaming. For me, it wasn't a deliberate decision but more of a change in behavior that occurred over time. I suspect the key event was picking up a PS5 Pro. For me, it's the first console that's felt powerful enough to scratch a similar itch as PC gaming -- except I could just plug it into our Atmos-equipped "home theater" set up and have it not only work flawlessly but be easily accessible to everyone, not just me. Since picking it up, between the PS5 Pro and handheld gaming devices, I just have not played a game on my gaming PC a single time and am currently planning on retiring it as a result.

There may be a connection here with age and the type of games I play too. I'm in my mid-30s now and am not interested in competitive twitch shooters like Call of Duty. In many cases, the games I've been interested in have actually been PS5 exclusives or were a mostly equivalent experience on PS5 Pro vs. PC or were actually arguably better on PS5 Pro (e.g., Jedi Survivor). In some cases, like with Doom: The Dark Ages, I've been surprised at how much I enjoyed something I previously would've only considered playing on PC -- the PS5 Pro version still manages to offer both 60 FPS and ray tracing. In other cases, like Diablo IV, I started playing on PC but gradually over time my playtime naturally transitioned almost entirely to PS5 Pro. The last time I played Diablo IV on my PC, which has a 4090, I was shocked at how unstable and stutter-filled the game was with ray tracing enabled, whereas it's comparatively much more stable on PS5 Pro while still offering ray tracing (albeit at 30 FPS -- but I've come to prefer stability > raw FPS in all but the most latency-sensitive games).

One benefit of this approach if you live with someone else or have a family, etc., is that investments in your setup can be experienced by everyone, even non-gamers. For instance, rather than spending thousands of dollars on a gaming PC that only I would use, I've instead been in the market for an upgraded and larger TV for the "home theater", which everyone can use both for gaming and non-gaming purposes.

Something else very cool but still quite niche and poorly understood, even amongst tech circles, is that it's possible to stream PS5 games into the Vision Pro. There are a few ways of doing this, but my preferred method has been using an app called Portal. This is a truly unique experience because of the Vision Pro's combination of high-end displays and quality full-color passthrough / mixed reality. You can essentially get a 4K 120"+ curved screen floating in space in the middle of your room at perfect eye level, with zero glare regardless of any lighting conditions in the room, while still using your surround sound system for audio. The only downside is that streaming does introduce some input latency. I wouldn't play Doom this way, but something like Astro Bot is just phenomenal. This all works flawlessly out of the box with no configuration.

I'm quite confused too, that doesn't align with my experience in the last couple years as well. There's notably been a few very good and long lived video cards and also as time goes on there's an ever deepening library of older games that can be played with very affordable cards.

I'm wondering when and with what hardware they had that bad experience.

There's not currently a way to officially put SteamOS on Steam* hardware. Plenty of people have done it but there's the usual compatibility issues where the image is built for the very specific hardware Valve installs it on so there's often wake from sleep and fan control issues. All solvable but it's not the level of turn key of even a mainline linux distro.

probably the "slapping steamOS" part of that

The hardware is not, but the implications are pretty close (major gaming company is pushing a first party product of open hardware + open software with a linux box). It is literally the year of linux desktop.

This thing is meant for a living room media center. A prebuilt PC with discrete GPU is a much bigger profile (and probably cost). You could say, fine, go buy a small Mini PC. But a system with the current best AMD Strix 890m GPU not only is expensive at $700-1000, but would only have half the performance of the Steam Box if its conjectured performance is similar to an RX 7600.

I don't think a lot of people realize how big of a deal this is. You used to have to choose between wireless and slow or wired and fast. Now you can have both wireless and fast. It's insane.

Not just stress WiFi 7, even if the theoretical limit is 23Gbps, you’re not getting anywhere close to that sending to just one device.

I believe the standard way is to downgrade the sampling density outside the area you're looking, see https://docs.vulkan.org/samples/latest/samples/extensions/fr... . Optimally you could attach multiple buffers with different resolutions covering different parts of clipspace, saving vram bandwidth. Sadly this is not supported currently to my knowledge, so you have to write to a single giant buffer with lower sample resolution outside the detail area, and then just downsample it for the coarse layer.