Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin and today we're here at CES I'm not looking at you and we're all going to be talking a little about steamos and steam machines so who is this guy okay who's the song oh hey guys it's me Linus no don't do that pyrokinetics Vitra here marques Frank a PhD so we literally just all just met up here over the zotac booth so we decided let's talk a little about steamos so how many seen machines have you seen so far like there's a there's a gigabyte one and there's the zotac Oh steam machines okay in terms of actual hardware yeah I guess almost anything's a steam machine but in terms of ones that are really more optimal I guess I've seen the one here I've seen the tiny little bricks Pro over it Intel and then I was taken into the back room at Coolermaster where unspeakable things happened and in addition to that in exchange I got to see sort of an upcoming maybe design of some kind of chassis that might make sense for some kind of a CMOS implementation but that's all the only one I've seen actually running the OS is over it Intel cool how about you if you see any steam machines alienware is releasing one and I'm sure that's gonna be sort of popular along the Dell fanboys I mean there's a Haley were so you only only Dell fanboys clearly yeah but it's obviously targeting being targeted towards that the market like what they're like the x51 I asked him this is going to be replaced to x51 from alien where be sure biggest also small pad factor it's running Windows vs steam OS and they said no no it's it's completely different things but I think it's going to be you know they're they're basically the same thing running different OS interesting all right well we've actually been hang out the whole time we haven't seen yet together we've seen only this one behind us yeah so let's talk about this one so this one is actually have to behind this right there's one iris pro and there's one with nvidia graphics um or is that the intel one is not technically a steam machine right so tech has a lot of different little Z boxes the one that we were looking at right there is iris pro graphics iris pro graphics alright so do you think iris pro graphics is about the sweet spot for where a steam machine should be as far as graphics you know obviously keeping in mind needs to be small and fairly cheap or do you think they may be like throwing in like a cheap little AMD or Nvidia core might be idea well the problem is we've actually set up steamos on a machine and the issue is that you can play some games on it right now but two of the critical features that are going to be coming aren't there in the beta yet one of them is the account sharing so you can actually share your games and then the other one is the game streaming feature that will allow you to stream from another PC yeah if that features outstanding then you can probably run steamos on like a watch it came to that good and you could leverage the power of something else as long as you have an h.264 decode engine on it yeah so it'll really depend on how well that feature works and how low the latency is for me to even speculate yeah I don't know I mean we both tried the Nvidia shield have you tried the shield yes okay so all for us so what do you guys think if they streaming service is kind of similar to shield you think it's gonna be good enough do you think needs to be better cuz I noticed for me with the shield it was good about within 10 15 feet of the router but like I went a rumor so over I started getting like drop frames every little while like what do you think it needs to be better like do you think technologies to advance a bit more water on that side this time other side of these guys alright so what do you think well streaming I think is uh like the shield technology there they showcase the demo in the video press conference where they were streaming from France and the gameplay was laggy I'm gonna be on it wasn't as smooth as we come to expect but they're showcasing that this sort of streaming across the ocean as possible and I think that the next thing for streaming in the living room in the consumer home is based on your router and expanding that signal kind of like what ACS is doing with their motor business stuff yeah any thoughts yeah I mean for as long as I've had the shield I've actually never used the gaming streaming from my PC so and if I were to talk about shield will be all about the games that are already playable on it but I get comments all the time about people who are trying this kind of stuff and saying you know my internet connection I don't know if it's good I don't know if I'm going to be able to enjoy the experience fully so I think one that's once that's good enough it's going to be really important for love you cool yeah I know I what do you like yeah it depends on how it goes like I said like with the shield I haven't had the best experience so I've got like an AC router in the whole deal but that being said I think the steam OS like you can run that pretty much or anything like you could technically do it on a Windows box or pretty much anything I feel like the real value of steam OS is actually being able to run games on the box I mean streaming is kind of nice but so as far as the game support so there's something about there's about like 10% of Steam titles are actually are ready for valve or I'm sorry ready for now ready for links right now like what do you think is like the support because I know I was trying when the steam the first steam of West's release I tried a couple games bling left4dead as well as Metro last light and I was really not impressed with the performance or the optimization that much like do you think that games have a long way to go or do you think that once these come out will be pretty much rate a plug and play and that's exactly the trick isn't it because if the streaming works just great then who cares because you can have a Windows box sitting somewhere else in your house in a closet for all you care and that'll handle all the gaming horsepower as it is I think my Steam library has around 45 supported games on steamos most of them are ones it's like indie games and stuff like that but I'm just going to sort of take a moment here and go ok I'm going to be in completely the opposite camp out of all of you and game stream is absolutely amazing our issues you do need the hardware for it I actually have a $300 ubiquity AC access point waiting for me when I get back now from what I heard from Wendell a text into kit he's saying that if you want a truly wired grade obviously no wireless is ever wired great but if you want more like a wired grade wireless experience there's either the ubiquity or there's like $1,000 plus Linksys AC access point and that's what you're pretty much looking at so I'm going to be evaluating it from that standpoint because I had a strong dual band router and I couldn't get more than 5 feet away from it then I went to an Asus strong dual band end router and all of a sudden I could get to my bedroom and I'm playing Super Meat Boy on Sheol all streaming not natively on Android and the fact that I'm like up you know 1 and a half through one and a half world using shield should be at all you need to know about how all the latency is the fact that you can do anything in that game with shield on game stream should be all you need to know now with steamos I don't think that the latency of your internet connection the latency of your wireless connection is relevant at all because there are plenty of options for getting a wired connection to your steam box in which case we're talking about Layton sees of less than one millisecond over the network and given that you can stream 720p and even 1080p over ten hundred Ethernet using an on-the-go dongle on the back of shield doing it over gigabit on a PC seems completely trivial so if you have very little latency if the bandwidth is enough then I don't see it being an obstacle at all it should be outstanding but it's going to depend on the technology I know NVIDIA has actually probably done more work on the software than they have on the hardware oh yeah when it comes to game stream if you guys have tried limelight it's a terrible experience the leg is very tangible whereas game stream works incredibly well and limelight claims to be using the same h.264 decode engine that's built into either Qualcomm Snapdragon chip more into the nvidia tegra chips okay that's my take on it so streaming okay so let's just take a step back from the streaming doh do you think that people are going to buy steam OS steam machines to stream on like do you think that that's going to be the number one thing because I feel like there's there's other ways you could stream like I just don't think that that's like the killer app I feel like the killer app has got to be a cheap small form-factor PC that's actually in your living room or whatever I don't see a lot of people who are going to buy a steam machine and also going to have a 2000 our system in their other room like do you think that's really going to be a really big thing or I think steam OS is going to be for nerds at the beginning I think that they're probably just gonna already own a PC so we're not talking about a purchasing decision that goes am I going to buy one am I gonna buy two pcs or am I gonna buy one we're gonna be talking about I have a PC I'm gonna add this okay and I think that because of the limited support for Linux titles the fact that performance isn't great back that's gonna have to be the killer app okay what do you guys think well I think for the steam machine I think the biggest thing aside from getting supported more games for the steam OS would be the form factor a lot of people you know you're looking for a lot smaller form factor yeah compact everything and that's going to be the the major sort of your purchasing decision one thing would be based on that now just who can make the smallest thing most powerful thing I guess with iris we're seeing it's delivering actually pretty acceptable performance even though it's 720p you can tone down the settings a little bit to get you know you're looking at 40 perhaps so 60 and FPS and value at four yeah that's the gigabyte bricks Pro yeah so Marcus what would actually it take you because I know you're not quite a massive gamer will it take you to buy a steam machine I was going to say on top of all that key word would be cheap yeah rice price for performance when people are looking at you know adding something to what they already have like I said people already have a computer the decision to make that extra purchase is going to depend entirely on how affordable they can get this stuff to be yeah so that's what I would add to that as it has to have to be really cheap that is exactly it because that's why that's what will make steamos makes sense streaming from crap you already own as opposed to buying a two thousand dollar gaming box that sits under your TV where you using once in a while so got you hit the nail on the head all right so I think we've got it so if you guys want to know more from these guys so where can I find juicer um well there's like a cave and I live in it sometimes I come out of the cave and the light it blinds sorry - tech tips on YouTube at Linus tech on Twitter or Linus tech tips comm if you want to join our community forum all right and marques youtube.com slash mkbhd or anything else slash I'm giving anything else anything else except for again right - comm plus I ran it right - all right and you Harbor Canucks so YouTube / our Canucks and haru-kun XCOM right my guys haven't be sure to go check these guys out and we will catch you next time maybe probably not