u/ericwdhs

I think it's fine if VR stays niche. The tech alone is compelling enough to not disappear even if Valve themselves never make another headset, and the work by hobbyists and tinkerers keeps getting better and more expansive every year, so the path is upwards regardless.

I notice you left off any mention of VR mods. I think some of those are actually the best VR experiences available today, so please give them a look if you haven't.

I agree with the other guy. Beat Saber is not a novelty game. It's easy to have short, self-contained experiences with it, but that's not the same thing. It's extremely fun on its own merit and worthy of putting dozens to hundreds to thousands of hours into it. I would also put it at the very top of the "exercise game" genre (see a lot of stuff on the Wii), because of how well it masks being very active behind just being fun and because getting better at the game ties more directly to *you* physically getting better than just about any other game.

That said, I think it's only a 10/10 game if you're willing to mod it to add custom songs (there's literally hundreds of thousands the community has mapped) and a 6/10 game if you aren't. I haven't bought any of the DLCs, so maybe it's an 8/10 with those. I think the modding is extremely easy, but I also know there are a lot of people not interested in doing that even when it's literally a couple clicks.

Yeah, but that's not abnormal stuff. Every anticipated hardware device has people digging into documents, patents, etc. for clues ahead of release, tracking milestones, etc.

Then again, I was an active participant in similar efforts for both the original Steam Deck and Valve Index releases, and I follow a few other tech spaces that see this continually even right now, so maybe my standards for "normal" are way off.

They were targeting sub-$1000 before things got crazy. If it was going to be exactly $1000 and it sees the 40% jump the Steam Machine did, that would be $1400. I think storage and RAM are a lower percentage of the Frame's cost which would theoretically push it down further, but then again, that may be countered by the market continuing to get worse. Still, I'll be very surprised if they price it a ton higher than $1500.

Obviously, my experience is anecdotal, but I got both Valve-developed headsets at launch, the HTC Vive and the Valve Index, the latter of which I think is still very close to the sweet spot for VR tech 7 years on. I've purposely avoided all the Meta headsets.

The stock Vive only using straps for support was indeed a little uncomfortable to wear, but the experience was still compelling enough to use it for hours. I did eventually do the welding mask mod for it that greatly improved the comfort and added over-ear speakers like the Index later got.

Fast forward to the Index, and I still use it off and on. It was comfortable enough out of the box to never modify, and I've even fallen asleep a few times in the thing. The Frame further shrinking the front and moving weight to the back for balance can only be better.

I think VR overall is only a failure for those who bought into the hype that it's an evolution that would eventually replace flat gaming (see the Ready Player One vision). That's never going to happen because the abstraction that allows you to press a button, move a mouse, tilt a stick, etc. to simulate an action taking much more energy to perform in the real world is a huge convenience we're never going to give up en masse. It's perfectly fine for VR to remain a niche, adjacent medium.

I peeked. It didn't seem that bad, just memes and shitposts.

I also don't mind releases taking the "when it's ready" approach. It's kind of refreshing actually.

I've never used any of this and can't find documentation on the hardware sync plugin, so forgive the maybe dumb question. How far can the configuration realistically go? Let's say my ideal setup is splitting the 17 LEDs into something like:

6 for CPU usage with red as the active bar marking out 50% to ~100% usage and blue as negative space

1 spacer

3 for temperature going up from blue to red

1 spacer

6 for GPU usage with red as the active bar marking out 50% to ~100% usage and blue as negative space

How close would I be able to get to that?

As far as I understand it, there's no actual "official" definition. Second-party can mean both:

From the main supplier but retaining a different supplier's branding (as opposed to rebranding, which makes it first-party again even if the manufacturer doesn't change).

OR

The buyer, analogous to the second-person point of view ("you"), so in that context, a second-party battery would be one you build yourself.

That's possible, but I believe that Valve employee's exact wording was something like "we're trying really hard to beat the original Index price ($999)." To me that reads like beating the Index price wasn't a guarantee and that if they did beat the Index price, it wasn't by much, so I'm assuming the pre-RAMpocalypse price was $900 to $1000. The Steam Machine saw a 40% price increase due to the current market. RAM and storage is a lower percentage of the Frame's hardware, so I think it'll probably see a 20% to 30% price increase. That gives an approximate range of $1100 to $1300, but I'm guessing on the higher end to either not be surprised or pleasantly surprised. I don't think they're factoring in the (heavily subsidized) Quest 3 price much at all.

I'm an Index (and Vive and OG Controller and Link and Deck...) early adopter too, and it helps to remember this is all part of the same effort building on itself. Valve's hardware division was much less mature in the Index days. Don't forget that only a few years before, they basically developed all the tech for the Vive themselves, but still needed to partner with HTC for the manufacturing side. I'm glad the new stuff has better push.

The Index also didn't have what's basically a full ARM device inside, but yeah, I still think anywhere from $1200 to $1500 is most likely.

Yeah, the inverse problem also exists, multiple users on a single device causing that device to get over-reported. This is most commonly seen with cyber cafes in Asia. The effect is present all year (and is another reason to expect the actual Deck percentage to be slightly higher), but it spikes every February as Chinese cyber cafes get busy over Lunar New Year.

As I understand it, the survey flags a random sampling of logged in Steam user accounts to run the survey on each month. For each selected user, the survey prompt then pops up the next time they're online on the device they're online with as an offline device can't receive the survey notice.

Let's say I game with my desktop 20 times per month and my Deck 10 times per month, but I'm only actually connecting it to the Internet 2 times a month for updates. In that scenario, it seems the desktop would be 10 times more likely to get the survey even though that doesn't reflect the actual usage spread.

Edit: I should add that this is a slightly different issue than what your original question is getting at. You want the raw active user count, in which case I should be 100% reported in both the desktop and the Deck counts at the same time. As far as I know, Steam does not do that.

See my other comment here. I'm in the "active Deck user, but not as main PC" crowd.

I have a Steam Deck I would consider to be in active use, but it's a secondary system for me, and the times I'm using it most heavily are done without Internet. I don't believe it's ever been counted in a survey, and I imagine there's a bunch of users in the same situation.

The same kind of thing used to happen with VR headsets before they switched it to counting any headset used in the last 30 days (determined by whether the driver was launched). I always used to get the survey when mine wasn't plugged in, and it always annoyed me to not be counted in the VR userbase. Lol.

I just did some testing.

The game ran a quick benchmark and set stock settings of 1080p, medium preset, FSR scaling, and quality scaling mode to yield a steady 60 fps with about 70% GPU usage. Frame generation was enabled, but there was enough horsepower for it to not actually be used. The picture was a bit grainy however.

With both FSR scaling and frame generation disabled still at medium and 1080p, it'll play around 45 fps.

I would say the optimal settings are close to stock, but you'll want to upgrade from FSR 3 to FSR 4 released recently on Proton Experimental. This will probably be unnecessary later when FSR 4 gets rolled into the regular Proton releases. The game looked much less grainy with this.

To do this, on the Steam page for the game, you'll want to go to Settings (the gear icon) > Properties > Compatibility > enable "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool" > Proton Experimental. Do note the settings in game are currently hard coded to say FSR 3, so you won't see it mention running on 4.

There's probably more tweaking that can be done, but that's kind of getting away from the point of this thing. I have a beefy PC and would still be happy to play it as above.

Nice. I already have that one. I'll check it out in a few resolution/settings configurations later tonight.

I feel sorry for anyone that doesn't have at least one area they are enthusiastic enough about to splurge a little in. Still, can we really call it consumerism when Valve releases hardware so infrequently? Seriously. 11 years between controllers? 7 years between VR headsets? 6+ years expected between handhelds?

Well, I never claimed it filled a necessary niche. It's a luxury good by definition. I just don't mind having multiple options, redundancy, and overlap in hardware roles even if that means some of it gets underutilized. That said, I'm not planning to keep the thing under the TV indefinitely. It's going to justify its standalone performance at least occasionally.