u/sp3ctr4l — sp3ctr4l

Ah, sorry, I'm just explaining the joke then, woops!

(cough maybe trying to trigger any console fanboys cough)

One can unintentionally spread misinfo, but sure, I hear you.

'Dubious claims' is maybe a less harsh phrasing.

Consoles are usually just weird, cheap, locked down, underpowered pcs, that only play certain brands/formats of games, and have unique cases, lol.

It basically means 'thing that is (usually) for your living room what plays video games and such'.

Ah so Rbnsft is spreading misinfo.

I'm not able to find anything that corroborates Canuck's claim that prompted my question.

At this point I'm assuming they were also talking out their ass.

Disney got them at a discounted price?

Well... no.

Thats... Sony and MSFT raised prices on all of their hardware too, same with Nintendo.

We're at the point where being a huge player... can only get you priority in the queue for chips and parts.

It can no longer secure bulk pricing discounts.

That's how bad this is.

_The Enrichment Center reminds you that the Weighted Companion Cube will never threaten to stab you and, in fact, cannot speak._

99% certain this is what will end up happening.

Its not even a 180.

Its... you used our IP without asking, please go to the back of the line, fill out the form where you properly ask for permission to use it, and wait in the queue again.

All they had to do was ask permission _first_.

Huh, you're right, I didn't know that.

But yeah, looks like the jailbreak process only works up to firmware v6-ish... which means you'd have to have a PS5 that was mfg'd before, and hasn't been connected to the internet since basically December 2022.

And, apparently, because this doesn't actually overwrite the PS5's OS, you have to do some fuckery to boot into SteamOS every time?

https://technave.com/gadget/Developers-have-found-a-way-to-turn-your-Sony-PS5-into-a-Steam-Machine-46446.html

Got nothing to add other than you know this shit better than I do, appreciate the specificity!

EDIT:

I apparently do have something to add:

https://technave.com/gadget/Developers-have-found-a-way-to-turn-your-Sony-PS5-into-a-Steam-Machine-46446.html

https://github.com/ps5-linux/ps5-linux-loader

Yes but... they have varying degrees of nonstandard busses and timings and weird, proprietary, basicslly custom hardware, as well as often having weird, propietary implementations of that hardware, that often only work with a bunch of other weird custom drivers on other components...

This is why emulation is hard, you habe to reverse engineer all that shit and then basically virtualize it and then try to map it to actually standard hardware.

Making a linux distro runs into many of thr same things, just, without (as much of) the virtualization parts.

Well actually no, because consoles tend to have very divergent, oddball architecture, compared to normal PC x86_64, where it tends to be fairly to extremely difficult to basically reverse engineer the drivers... because the normal drivers there are propietary, Sony keeps em secret.

Instead, they seem to have been collaborating with AMD and basically some open source hackers to get FSR4 working on RDNA 3 GPUs... 7000 series AMD GPUs, the Steam Machine, etc.

Let's pick Oct 2025 as our 'pre RAMpocalypse' time frame.

Data source: pangoly.com

(I removed BestBuy from the visuals because it is an extremely erratic dataset that basically bounces around the average of others, but makes the graph nearly unreadable)


16GB DDR5 Crucial RAM

Oct 2025: ~$50

Jun 2026: ~$275


2TB NVME M.2 Crucial SSD

Oct 2025: ~$140

Jun 2026: ~$300 (if you remove Adorama)


512GB NVME M.2 Kingston SSD

Oct 2025: ~$50

Jun 2026: ~$200

---

$275 - $50 = $225

$300 - $140 = $160

$225 + $160 = $385

Thus, the 2TB variant has an effective ~$385 upcharge due to the RAMpocalypse.

2TB variant MSRP is $1349, thus it would be ~$964 pre-RAMpocalypse, meaning that the RAMpocalypse % upcharge is ~39.9%

---

Do the same with the 512GB variant:

$275 - $50 = $225

$200 - $50 = $150

$225 + $150 = $375

$375 effective RAMpocalypse upcharge.

MSRP of 512GB variant is $1050, thus it would be ~$675 pre-RAMpocalypse, % upcharge of ~55.5%

---

Obviously this methodology is not perfectly correct, but I'd argue its quite reasonable 'napkin math'... you could maybe make a more exhaustive index of all prices of all brands of RAM/SSD in exact performance spec matches to be slightly more accurate, but yeah, roughly, the RAMpocalypse made the Steam Machine, about $380, or 40% to 55% more expensive than it otherwise would have been, depending on 2TB vs 512GB.

Also I guess we are here just assuming Valve is just selling these things basically at cost, neither subsidizing nor gouging the price, in all scenarios, which I am also confident is and always was basically the plan.

Also also, economist brain says:

~50% inflation in less than a year for pretty much an entire segment of the CPI is uh... pretty fucking bad, to use the 'formal' terminology.

Can you clarify what you mean by this?

Are you saying... $10b annually in harware sales?

Using the $1128 price for the 512GB SM + Controller, that'd be uh... ~8.8m units sold annually.

That's totally absurd, imo.

That's roughly a quarter of 2025's PS5 (any variant) console sales numbers.

Valve would have to pivot into basically only/primarily being a hw manufacturer, they'd have to ... somewhere between 10x and 100x the amount of money/capital they're currently using to source components, do assembly and then ship things physically.

They do not have that much money.

Valve has like a total of less than 500 employees, their entire business culture is built around having a very small number of incredibly competent and often multi-domain skilled employees.

They'd have to radically shift the entire fundamental structure of what the company is, to do something like that.

... but perhaps I misunderstand what you mean?

Its actually not that expensive, for what it can do, and that's from the Steve directly, in that video.

He does a price comparison to nearest equivalent parts you can actually currently buy for a DIY PC.

He ends up with $979 for the DIY vs $1050 for the 512gb Steam Machine, a 7% difference.

There are currently, right now, many, many prebuilt PCs that cost this amount or more, with worse hardware.

... and also, this video here, from ETA Prime,.that I linked, that is this post, that apparently no one is actually watching, is also full of game test benchmarks, though not as much crazy specific technical.shit as Steve gets into.

It outperforms a PS5 Pro on say, RDR2.

1440p, high/ultra settings, _no fsr upscaling_, gets ~75 fps in complex/open areas, significantly better inside of rooms/houses/buildings.

And, as stated in the main post body... the Steam Machine is going to support FSR4 upscaling either on launch or very soon afterward, so you could use that, not lose much graphical fidelity, and get more frames.

A PS5 Pro cannot run RDR2 at a stable 60 fps, at 1440p.

It has to be locked to 30 fps to run 4K, which it does via upscaling, and a checkerboard rendering technique, which makes it not actually the same 4K as a PC would render, but w/e.

To get 60fps, it has to be locked at basically 1080p, though I think technically it is doing dynamic resolution scaling, so maybe effectively a slightly higher average resolution than that, maybe 1/4 or 1/2 way to 1440p.

A PS5 Pro costs $900.

If you think a PS6 is going to cost less than a PS5 Pro, you are wrong.

---

EDIT:

Now you can argue that a PS5 Pro, part of why it costs so much, is the 2TB SSD, vs the 512GB Steam Machine.

But, the PS5 Pro is the only PS5 variant with an RDNA 3 GPU, so its going to perform substantially better than the other PS5 variants with RDNA 2.

Right now, a 512 GB nvme ssd goes for about $200, a 2TB goes for about $300.

So basically you _could_ say that a more fair price/performance comparison would be to knock $100 off of the PS5 Pro's price, to $800, presuming a hypothetical PS5 Pro Lite variant, or something like that.

In that case, you're paying $250 more for... what, something like 35% higher framerates, if you just resolution locked this hypothetical PS5 Pro Lite to a consistent 1440p, and had it use its already existing upscaling on basically auto mode?

Yeah, I'm guessing they're also uh, in addition to the lottery, going to be attempting some backend strategy to attempt to weed out likely 'this is a fake account for resellers'.

... watch the video.

The majority of it literally is performance testing of various games.

I am totally open to other people having different stances, but at least for myself, _worth it_.

I already have an OLED Deck with a 1 TB drive... lost my old pc in lets summarily call it a _series of unforunate events_, been daily driving the Deck with a dock thingy and M+KB as my main PC for a few years now.

So, I can get the 512 GB + controller bundle, and just swap the drives, reflash em with appropriate OS.

$1128 for a 'pc' that can run RDR2 and Cyberpunk 77 at pretty darn good graphical settings, at 1440p, at or over 60 fps average? And fancy pantsy controller?

_Good enough_, my eyes are starting to go a bit anyways lol, 4K is very likely wasted on me, and I'd love to have a Steam Deck that's basically easier to hold and lighter, as a control option.

That'd be a steal, imo, looking at it in PC pricing terms... which is the way I'm looking at it, because that's the way I'll mostly be using it.

_Also I can dress it up as a companion cube._

_Ratman loves companion cube, cannot stop testing, needs to keep testing._

Yep.

I was initially hopeful that this thing might be surprisingly affordable, due to... basicslly the theory/rumor is that the 'semi custom' apu was initially intended to be used in a planned but cancelled Windows tablet/Surface kind of thing...

But yeah, then, tariffs, rampocalypse, strait's closed due to raids = shipping costs go up bigly.

I'm pretty sure the way Valve does their internal finances is that that 30% cut of all games?

Sure some of it goes toward Steam server costs, but I think most of it just goes into a giant war chest fund, from which they 'experiment', with things like this.

Makes sense to me that they at least want to break even... business wise, that works if it makes more people use Steam and/or increases their reputation as actually innovating in some way.

But being a loss leader would simply be too dangerous, too risky. They are small fries compared to the major console/pc hw manufacturers, and I am very sure the last thing they would ever want to do is owe some outside actor a lot of money.

Ahem, double post but _holy shit_:

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/71039901

Steam Machine price reveal, early waitlist open _for only this week_, and oh also it will be able to use/run FSR4.

... where is my soyfacewojack when i need it...