SteamBoy Aims To Be The Handheld Steam Machine

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Little is known about the handheld Steam gaming system other than a vague teaser trailer from E3 and the promise of a 2015 release year. The concept is good, but limited in scope due to its small size. So, if this mobile platform unit ever makes it to fruition would it have a built-in ready to buy market or will it just be another ho-hum handheld?
 
Looks interesting. Is this supposed to run PC games? Not sure how well that's going to work though it should be ok for older and casual games.
 
I smell lawsuit.

importsteamboy.jpg
 
Yeah, says it will run most popular titles, but I assume in this package it would be a Linux device? I wonder if they are betting by the time it's released Steambox/SteamOS is in full tilt?
 
Looks interesting. Is this supposed to run PC games? Not sure how well that's going to work though it should be ok for older and casual games.

Probably just preparing for streamed gaming, where all the device has to be capable of, is showing a streamed HD frame, wouldnt take much, say a 286, naah, maybe a 386DX :D

No more super cpu's, no more super gpu's :(
 
bad name IMO, they could have come up with something more original and cooler sounding
 
Yet another thing to carry around with you for like 3 minutes of entertainment when you're waiting somewhere. People have portable gaming on their phones and those of us that don't are totally okay with staring off into space or reading something.
 
Let's hope it's not locked to Steam titles only.

IE: Can connect and download from the Google Play store to play Android games on it.
 
I sorta consider a ___boy game system to be a nintendo thing.

How long did nintendo have a ___boy game system on the market? 20years?
 
Who cares?
Valve has yet to get their controller to market.
All I'm seeing is a Nvidia Shield knockoff with controls that don't exist yet.
Get a Shield for $200, so long as you're running a GTX 750ti or better in your gaming pc and have a decent wireless network you can already stream your games whether they're Steam or not.
 
Would be interesting if it had a Intel CPU with Iris graphics. But you know it's going to be another ARM device that streams gaming.
 
You know, I've thought a low power/ heat AMD APU would be a good idea in a tablet, but they'd have to work on their Linux drivers first.
 
At that size they pretty much need to use a Baytrail chip. Which means performance will suck. It's all but confirmed by the fact that they say "a quad core chip", which preitty much means it's the slowest possible quad-core x86.
 
At that size they pretty much need to use a Baytrail chip. Which means performance will suck. It's all but confirmed by the fact that they say "a quad core chip", which preitty much means it's the slowest possible quad-core x86.

What other x86 chip can you put in something like this, other than an AMD low power chip?
 
What other x86 chip can you put in something like this, other than an AMD low power chip?

AMD doesn't even have a chip suitable for cellphone sized devices. It's the only option, which means it will be worthless for anything but streaming.
 
AMD doesn't even have a chip suitable for cellphone sized devices. It's the only option, which means it will be worthless for anything but streaming.

At lowest settings and 1280×800 and a little lower resolution there are quite a few games on Steam that can run decently on Windows 8.1 Bay Trail tablets with only 2 GB of RAM. You're not going to play Battlefield 4 on it or most modern games but some PC gaming is possible. And the next generation of Atom SoCs should be out when this arrives so the performance should be quite a bit better, plus it will have 4 GB of RAM. Of course another issue will be storage. PC games do tend to eat up a good deal of space, anything less than 64 GB even with Linux probably wouldn't cut it.

Of course running Linux on these things will cut the number of games available. Would be interesting if because of the size of this screen being under 9" if Valve couldn't put Windows on these things as an option as it's free at this screen size.
 
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