Microsoft surprised many of its fans with a peek at the future of Xbox. Instead of announcing the new Xbox console, they revealed two powerful Xbox Ally

    • ampersandrew@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Valve isn’t making their next Steam Deck anytime soon because the technology doesn’t exist yet. You can crank up the wattage and put in a bigger battery, but those things make the handheld larger, heavier, and hotter, so they’re not interested. This is a bottleneck from AMD and their R&D.

      But especially due to live service anti cheat and Game Pass, I agree that there’s a potential market for this strategy. There’s certainly no way they compete with Sony by doing what consoles have always done.

      • atomicpoet@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        I own the original LCD Steam Deck. Still a fantastic device.

        But after trying the newer handhelds, I have to admit: the upgrades are anything but minor. Visually, it’s a bigger leap than the jump from DS to DSi. The difference is immediately obvious.

      • novibe@lemmy.ml
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        3 days ago

        Apple does have the technology though… imagine a steam deck with the m series chip? An m4 pro could run basically all modern games on a small screen at 60+ fps with the right software…

        • ampersandrew@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          I’m imagining a lot of regression in compatibility and performance loss, as that’s what I’ve heard of the state of Apple’s new CPU architecture.

          • novibe@lemmy.ml
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            3 days ago

            Performance-wise apple’s chips are way ahead of amd and any other arm based chip as well. Not sure what you’re talking about.

            And compatibility ofc, that’s what I meant good software. Like optimizing steamOS to run on the m chips.

            But that would never happen of course.

            • ampersandrew@lemmy.world
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              3 days ago

              Way ahead of other ARM chips doesn’t mean that they’re ahead of the best that x64 has to offer, so that’s why games are still built for x64. The transition to ARM may happen someday, but Apple jumped the gun from a gaming perspective. Solving the software problem isn’t just getting SteamOS to run on it, but to get games built for x64 to run on it, and that’s not an easy problem to remedy. Even if it was solved, it likely would not result in better performance than we can get out of AMD’s x64 chips for x64 games on handhelds.

            • thelittleblackbird@lemmy.world
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              3 days ago

              Performance wise AMD and Intel run circles around the m4, there is not any compititiom here.

              Performance Watt per instruction is where the m4 really shines and still I have my reservations

        • emax_gomax@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          That’s not really how any of this works. Apples m4 are ARM CPUs. Games have to be built specifically for arm to run correctly. Most games in the PC ecosystem are built for amd64 or x86-64. If those same games were built specifically for arm then they’d probably run quite well but since most aren’t and game devs aren’t likely to go back and port an already finished and sold product to a new cpu architecture they’ll probably run worse. Apple did provide a compatibility layer for other archs to arm IIRC but that’s more overhead for the same games and I don’t know how that’ll impact performance. My point is really just it’s not a clear cut situation of “my games will run better on more efficient cpus”.

        • ampersandrew@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          The point being that it will resume when the technology exists; it’s not that they lost interest in it.

          • Tony Bark@pawb.social
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            3 days ago

            I tried to make similar points in regards of it being too early in the console’s lifespan.

                • ampersandrew@lemmy.world
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                  3 days ago

                  Yes, I did. I also didn’t read between the lines and take that to mean that they’re not working on it, investing in it, etc. It just means that we can’t predict the future, and what makes sense now might not make sense in a few years when the technology does exist. The Outlook section was the author’s conjecture of what could come to pass, but he can’t predict the future either.

    • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      They may very well be on to something (anyone who thought about this for a bit after the first announcement, could figure out this strategy, but it doesn’t include an important factor). Xbox is predominantly a console that lives in the living room. The most expensive Xbox series x is currently available is $729.99. The handheld they modeled this off is currently $899.99. The price increase when this handheld and it’s predecessor consoles have been popular in majority US markets, during a financially unstable time where there exist things like the switch 2 and the Lenovo Legion series of handhelds, not to mention ROG’s other handhelds may make this untenable to consumers. It’s a great idea for them to drop a handheld with an Xbox interface. It’s not a good time.

    • Tony Bark@pawb.social
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      3 days ago

      Hell notice valve has made it very clear they are not making another steam deck anytime soon,

      FFS. I don’t care.

      • katze@lemmy.cafe
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        3 days ago

        Okay? That wasn’t the central point of their message. It seems somewhat disrespectful to respond that way, ignoring everything else they said. They have a valid point.

        • Tony Bark@pawb.social
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          3 days ago

          We’ve had this discussion before, and they tried to argue this same point.

            • Tony Bark@pawb.social
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              3 days ago

              I’m sorry as well. It’s just I’ve been treated poorly for having a Deck as it is. I was just recently gifted a PS5 and Series S after having One S for god knows how long now. So, yeah, forgive me for snapping, but I have no interest or motivation to upgrade. I just want to have fun.