It's Here: Valve Steam Controller, Link, And Steam Machine, Hands-On

[heirdeux]

The wait is finally over. The first batch of Valve's Steam hardware is out for those who pre-ordered early, and we were able to spend some time on the Steam Controller, Link, and Machine.

It's Here: Valve Steam Controller, Link, And Steam Machine, Hands-On : Read more

 

[Alec Mowat]

Holy Dusty, Batman! Clean that thing, how old is that???

 

[jayracer7474]

I thought the same thing lol

 

[Dukestachio]

Would it kill you guys to wipe off the damn thing before taking a picture?

 

[mnivek]

Why on Earth would anyone buy a first iteration of a brand new, never before released HW / SW solution? Ok - maybe if you're a reviewer. Otherwise???

 

[dstarr3]

"For being in a house that only has a maximum of 18 Mbps, I was surprised at the Link’s performance."
Wouldn't the speed of your network be the variable here, and not the speed of your ISP? The Link isn't uploading to and downloading from Steam's servers, it's just going from client-to-client locally on your home network. So much more likely, your maximum is going to be something like 300/450Mbps, if not more.

 

[Kenneth Barker]

Haha! The dust is hilarious. How that got past the author is beyond me. Sort of shows the lack of attention to detail to the whole article.

I remember the days reviewers were adults who actually cared about the work they did. You can still find it rarely, but newer younger reviewers landing these jobs do a pretty terrible job at it. Straighten up and fly right kids. There are lots of people who could not only do your job better, but would take it seriously!

 

[kl0wn]

Your LAN is capped at 18Mbps?

 

[Eggz]

Wait, there's no vibration? That's one of the coolest parts about using a controller. Whatever, I already ordered some of the controllers a while ago.

 

[cknobman]

The local best buy had an Alienware Alpha machine out to play with. It was the cheapest Core I3 version.
I have to say the OS navigation and layout is very nice and very much like a console. There was a distinct difference between stepping from the Alienware software into Steam.

I think the worst part was the machine itself was sloooooowww. I blieve it was probably due to the I3 processor further gimped by only 4gb of RAM and the fact that its a windows based machine running custom software on top of it.
Going from Alienware software to Steam software took forever, there were menu hitches.
Playing Metro last light was a little choppy and it took about 5 minutes for the game to load.

 

[amateramasu]

Alienware launched their "Alienware Alpha" series before SteamOS came out--they used a custom system different from any Steam Machine that you will see out now, as they designed theirs earlier. New Machines don't have a Windows OS, which is why they can only play Linux games.

 

[Alec Mowat]

"For being in a house that only has a maximum of 18 Mbps, I was surprised at the Link’s performance."
Wouldn't the speed of your network be the variable here, and not the speed of your ISP? The Link isn't uploading to and downloading from Steam's servers, it's just going from client-to-client locally on your home network. So much more likely, your maximum is going to be something like 300/450Mbps, if not more.

Between this and the dust, this article should be deleted.

 

[DeadlyDays]

Yea I am pretty sure every single person who knows anything at all about networking just facepalmed as they read the middle of that article where its written he has 18Mbps connection and the system ran surprisingly well.

I mean srsly, I don't even know how you could write that if you knew even basic networking.

But I actually ran a edited version of the SteamOS(it added legacy drivers) on a 2008 gaming rig with a wireless N encore card(so probably only get preN speeds, it was 25$ at the time) and it ran Warthunder off my main PC just fine(mainPC had a 50' Ethernet cable to my core router at the time). Didn't notice excessive latency at all.

So I actually think Steam Gameplay Streaming is VERY viable, viable enough to want to try and run a nearly headless windows PC for steaming games to a Linux box, keeping the windows PC in standby or off when not gaming.

 

[arossetti]

That was Steam Dust shown in the picture. Early backers get a bag of it with their purchase. It's meant to remind people what happened to the money they invested in a first generation new system.

 

[Sea_Pig]

You couldn't even wipe the filth off the things before taking a picture?

 

[warezme]

It's HERE, straight from our grandmas garage, where we forgot we put it, 3 months ago.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

It actually looks like my slim PS2 - only less slim.

 

[beshonk]

The Nvidia shield console I have runs over my 100mbps network wt 1080p, 60 fps and I don't have to sacrifice any image quality (I have the streaming optimizations turned off). I don't see this beating the dedicated streaming capabilities built into the nvidia graphics cards. When i ran straight from steam to my shield instead of using gamestream i saw a 30% fps reduction.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

Streaming quality is usually dependent on the poor performance of wireless adapters if he was on wireless.

 

[Achoo22]

The controller looks like garbage, and it's shame since it looks as though Windows 7 users will never get the XBOne controller Microsoft promised. This offering from Valve just isn't good enough, though. Not even close.

The set-top boxes are a wonderful idea, but the network performance must be atrocious. In-home streaming works a treat w/ 54mb/s or worse wi-fi, so I'm not sure why these boxes would be so much more bandwidth hungry. The boxes also desperately need standalone support for video and music streaming... at the minimum, I wanna' see a Plex client, an DLNA client, a Pandora client, a Netflix client, and an Amazon Prime client.

As for the Steam Machines, no thanks.

 

[knowom]

sounds like a play station controller probably still most ideal

 

[Jeremy Kincaid]

Why on Earth would anyone buy a first iteration of a brand new, never before released HW / SW solution? Ok - maybe if you're a reviewer. Otherwise???

None of it is brand new. Steam OS has been available for a while at least in beta format and the hardware is just regular pc hardware. The controller is brand new and the streamer is kinda different but they are both concepts that aren't too hard to execute anyway.

 

[pocketdrummer]

"All you would need to do is follow Valve's instructions and you're ready to go."

This is incredibly misleading. If you do not have a computer with UEFI, you have specifically seek out a non-uefi version on google because it doesn't state anywhere on the SteamOS site that it even exists. Once you have the .iso, you burn the image to a dvd, slap it into the computer and you MAY get it to install, but most likely you'll have an issue like I did where it flat out refused to install part of the OS. In effect, SteamOS was dead in the water for me. I've heard of others getting it to work by messing around with the terminal, but frankly I'm not a Linux Guru, and everyone I've talk to about my particular issue said you would need to be one in order to wade through the crap to get it working. And Valve doesn't really GIVE you instructions past "unzip the contents to the USB flash drive and reboot".

This isn't to say I think SteamOS is a bad idea, it's just in beta (maybe alpha would be more appropriate, but what do I know).

I have tried using Ubuntu instead, but there's a problem there as well. Games that I've had no problem running before (team fortress 2) run SIGNIFICANTLY worse. I was averaging 15fps after installing steamOS. The system I installed it on wasn't particularly powerful, but on all low settings it should have done twice that easily.

 

[soccerplayer88]

Yeah... I think I'll stick with my DS4.

 

[Eggz]

Yeah... I think I'll stick with my DS4.

What are you using to support that? My DS3 controllers use DS Tool, and I want to avoid the "Better DS3 Tool" because it requires DS3 Tool anyway. Is there something simple and non-layered to support it? It think those controllers are very nice. The main reason I'm even moving away from DS3 controllers in the first place is becuase they have compatibility issues with Bluetooth 4.0 or newer via spotty support. My old Bluetooth won't run concurrently with the new one, so I'm just upgrading the the Steam controllers. But I'd consider DS4 for the rumble support. If those won't work, I'd be down to get an Xbox One controller when the wireless support device comes out, even tough those are a little boxy for my taste - take what you can get I guess.