News - Steam Box "Piston" prototype in use by Call of Duty creators

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Infinity Ward posts pic of its Xi3 Steam Box development hardware.

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Read more.

I am interested to see how this progresses, but also with the consoles having a negative impact on PC game innovation, these machines appear to (I assume) have a lack of horsepower (potentially sitting slightly above the current 360 or PS3 in terms of grunt).

The advantages being, smaller, less power, better online connectivity and sufficient grunt to make a game look 'good enough' - rather than re-invent or innovate it's simply refining what we have today I guess.

I hope it allows for keyboard/mouse gaming combo's for FPS :)

This could also be the future of things to overclock and benchmark as PC's become less and less important.

Could PC Overclocking becoming a thing of the past?

There's simply no need for the masses to have such power available, it's more about connectivity between devices now....coupled with rising energy costs people just want the best productivity at the lowest possible cost of ownership.

PC games and products may well be ported from their low power rivals to enable multiplatform/multiplayer experiences - something which could dominate the gaming/apps industry in the next three years....again negating the need (by the masses) for overly powered CPU/GPU or APU combos.

maverik - yes it does :)

Maybe the Steam Box will use that cut-down PS4 APU from AMD?


It should be no slouch.

Really hoping this develops - would love to see as many games as possible ported to and developed for Linux.

Been using Linux almost exclusively for many months now and very rarely have a need or desire to boot into Windows. Only thing I've found missing is games - rarely play any at the moment but the more that appear in Linux the more I will play.

The launch of Steam for Linux was a massive boost and this sounds even better. Nothing against Windows but the more choice there is, the more boundaries broken then all the better for us as end users.

I think these boxes were just the AMD Fusion platform in a quirky form factor. Make you wonder why they bother handed them out as dev boxes, though I guess it's good publicity over a normal FM2 CPU and mobo...

Pretty sure that we'll see a Steam "console" option as the end result, which will tie in nicely with the Big screen approach taken recently. After all, I'm running modern PC games quite happily on a 5 year old computer, and it doesn't take all that much hardware to get a "good enough" level of graphics and game play.

My only wish is that there was a way to keep Keyboard + mouse control options whilst playing in front of a TV.

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Originally Posted by Lucio

My only wish is that there was a way to keep Keyboard + mouse control options whilst playing in front of a TV.

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Plug a pc into your tv?