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Steam Machine

Valve recently pulled its home page links to Steam Auto listings, which led many of us to speculate about the end of that initiative. Now, Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais claims Steam Machines are non dead, and the company has large plans for gaming on Linux and the associated hardware platform.

Valve kicked off the Steam Machine initiative in 2013 when information technology announced SteamOS. Many of the tiptop gaming PC manufacturers intended to launch hardware, but most of those plans fizzled. Developers accept been boring to support the Linux-based SteamOS, and Steam Machines have proven too expensive because the express game support. Even those games that practice work tend to perform poorly compared with the Windows versions.

And so, it'southward no surprise that there isn't much interest in Steam Machines right now. They're expensive and game support is still severely lacking compared with Windows. Valve'southward landing page links to several systems that are no longer bachelor, and at to the lowest degree one other really runs Windows ten instead of SteamOS. According to Griffais, the link was pulled from the home folio considering traffic was extremely low. That doesn't mean Valve is giving upwards, but it's non exactly nifty news either.

391952-nextbox Steam Machine

The Nextbox, one of many Steam Machines appear several years ago.

In Griffais' post on the Steam Community lath, he says Valve is working to address the shortcomings in SteamOS and the existing Steam Machines. A large piece of the puzzle is support for the cross-platform Vulkan graphics API. Most Windows games employ DirectX, but SteamOS launched with OpenGL. Vulkan back up showed up in mid-2016, and Valve but recently rolled out Vulkan support for MacOS and iOS (via the MoltenVK driver). Valve likewise released shader pre-caching for Vulkan, which speeds upwardly load times and makes rendering smoother. By making Vulkan well-supported on all platforms, Valve hopes it can get developers to build more games on Linux.

The post also includes a teaser of upcoming initiatives from Valve. Griffais says the Linux gaming exosystem as a whole will benefit from what Valve has in the pipeline. The company will besides keep developing SteamOS to deliver those advances to its customers.

Griffais doesn't have whatever specific news on Steam Machine hardware, though. With the prices of GPUs still astronomical, this probably isn't the time to push depression-price PC gaming systems. While Valve might not be washed with Steam Machines, there's no major alter on the horizon to make these systems worth your time. Maybe 1 twenty-four hour period you'll game on Linux, but non today.