Steam-powered
Ihate to give Valve even more press space after raving about the Vive, especially considering they stopped replying to my emails several years ago, but 2016 looks set to be the year that the Steam hardware revolution becomes a reality. Last issue I managed to get my hands on the new Steam Controller, which is due to launch around March of this year in Australia, and walked away incredibly impressed… once I’d spent the necessary time to adjust to its unique control method. I think Valve is onto a winner here, and it’s no surprise to see them leveraging some of the same technology in the unique motion controllers used with the Vive.
We’re also going to see the Steam Link, which is a beautifully simple and affordable way of dragging the PC gaming experience out of the study and into the living room. Sure, many of you good people have already got a gaming PC next to your flat-screen TV, but for US$50, Link makes it available to everybody who hasn’t gotten around to this. My only suggestion is to stick with an Ethernet connection, as Wi-Fi just isn’t fast enough to guarantee 1080p at 60Hz. Yes, even tri-band 802.11ac routers struggle, as I found out with the speedy ASRock G10 we reviewed a few months back.
Both of these products are minor footnotes compared to what Valve has up its sleeve as the big deal of 2016 – the Steam Machines. A couple of these have already launched overseas from the likes of Zotac and Alienware, and initial reviews have been mixed. It seems in their quest to hit an affordable, console-like price tag, they’ve skimped on one of the most important components, a speedy GPU. For example, Alienware’s Steam Machine has a GPU equivalent to a GTX 860M, which is downright slothful. On the flipside, it’s only priced at US$449 at the moment. There are a range of other makers lining up to get in on the game, including Maingear, Materiel.net, iBuyPower, Next Spa, Scan, and Syber. There’s just one small problem with that for Australians though – none of these companies currently offer products to our sunburnt shores. There’s no news yet of any Australian PC makers getting onboard, though we think Origin will be a likely contender.
There’s also the issue of the operating system, SteamOS, which is basically a custom version of Linux. If you buy a Steam Machine, this is the Operating System you’re stuck with; though hopefully some makers will deliver dual-boot systems. The reason this is such an issue is that only 1500 of the 6000 games currently on Steam work on SteamOS; the rest require Windows. The reason is that SteamOS uses the Vulkan API, which is based on OpenGL, while most PC games are designed for DirectX. Retrofitting such a huge back catalogue to work on the Vulkan API is a monumental task which simply won’t happen. Valve is hoping though that new releases will take advantage of the performance benefits and open-source nature of SteamOS and Vulkan, but whether that’s a big enough attraction to get gamers onboard is yet to be seen.
There’s no news yet of any Australian PC makers getting onboard, though we think Origin will be a likely contender