News - Valve confirms some 2014 Steam Machines will use AMD GPUs

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Also the Steam Controller has been tested and rated by SEGA execs.

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Read more.

Well I for one will be going down the NVidia route. Unless AMD get a handle on their drivers.

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Originally Posted by jnutt

Well I for one will be going down the NVidia route. Unless AMD get a handle on their drivers.

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With both Mantle and the AMD announcement (can't find the link atm) that they will be working on open source linux drivers with a larger team I can see AMD catching up nicely.

Don't know what the fuss was about to begin with, people read into things too much.

I would love to try the controller but I don't have many games that I would find better when played with a controller at the moment. It is an interesting concept and one I'm more interested in than the Play Station or Xbox controllers which I don't like.

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Originally Posted by jnutt

Well I for one will be going down the NVidia route. Unless AMD get a handle on their drivers.

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The mere fact that AMD felt it necessary to "lean" on journo's to get Valve to issue a clarification would seem to indicate that they (AMD) are taking Steam OS/Boxes seriously. In which case they'd have to be completely out of their minds not to ensure a good experience/performance with their hardware when the OS/Machines get out into the hands of consumers.

Personally I'm not sure that the Valve clarification was needed, because it was made plain that it was only the beta test boxes that were NVidia only. Although that still leaves a faint suspicion that SteamOS will "run best with NVidia" merely because that platform's been the most tested.

Good to see that Sega are willing to be quoted as being positive about SteamOS - since that's the big issue with it at the moment - lack of A list titles. Hopefully some of the other publishers will come forward too. At the moment I can't really see a downside to SteamOS, so I'm already thinking about how best to host it on my existing box.

I'm sure after the last steam survey i did (last week) i noticed that most users had nvidia gpu's in their systems so perhaps that's why valve only selected nvidia gpu's initially.

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Originally Posted by DemonHighwayman

I'm sure after the last steam survey i did (last week) i noticed that most users had nvidia gpu's in their systems so perhaps that's why valve only selected nvidia gpu's initially.

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No, it is because SteamOS is Linux based and AMD need to sort their Linux drivers out. Simple as that. Current AMD drivers are half the performance of Windows, NVidia are the same as on Windows (it should be, it is supposed to be the same driver).

At least AMD was not forgotten. I use AMD products as does many others. Now to see what happens.

This is gonna be epic

oh no...

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Originally Posted by Dooms

With both Mantle and the AMD announcement (can't find the link atm) that they will be working on open source linux drivers with a larger team I can see AMD catching up nicely.

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ATi has been catching up on a usable Linux driver for the last 15 years or so. Just don't hold your breath.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7412/r...steam-machines

"In 2014, there will be Steam Machines commercially available with graphics hardware made by AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel."

Graphics hardware by Intel?? That flies in the face of earlier comments that there would be usability certification.

I mean AMD Linux drivers have historically been slow, but Intel have a real mountain to climb in reliability before you even get to performance.