Wednesday 9 January 2013

What is Steam Box?

What actually is Valve's Steam Box ?


valve steambox piston

CES 2013 brings with it Home Gaming Servers, yes that's it ! (really)

The One that is Featured here is developed by Valve and Xi3 and is a prototype device so the device that rolls out of Valve's Stables can be something different.

After Nvidia announced NvidiaGrid and Xi3 unveiled its Piston Gaming servers, now Valve's come up with its own Gaming Hardware called Steam Box.
Valve Co- founder Gabe Newell explained that valve really likes the idea of a single device streaming to multiple displays locally using networks.


Here is the quote from his interview with The verge

“The Steam Box will also be a server. Any PC can serve multiple monitors, so over time, the next-generation (post-Kepler) you can have one GPU that’s serving up eight simultaneous game calls. So you could have one PC and eight televisions and eight controllers and everybody getting great performance out of it. We’re used to having one monitor, or two monitors -- now we’re saying lets expand that a little bit.”

Normally any PC can stream to multiple display by itself, so, in future we have a single GPU streaming to around 8-9 simultaneous displays, it means 8 people can sit in different rooms with their own display and controllers, you have a single PC in home and everyone is enjoying Games on their displays (good for LAN Gaming party) according to me its The Super Computer of  Gaming. 




He also said that it is going to come with Linux, i.e.its a Linux server, but they are going to make it easy to put Windows on it, its not going to a locked device in any way.
They are going to be shipping it by themselves apart from making it for others like Xi3.

The preferred mode of control is going to be Fingers only, Newell doesn't seem to be a big fan of motion controlled gaming, he says that Fingers are the fastest part of the body that can control games so it should be that way only, but he really seemed interested with the idea of Gaze tracking.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.