"I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my personal homebrew Steam Machine, a self-built desktop under my TV featuring an AMD Ryzen 7 8700G processor and a Radeon 780M integrated GPU. I wouldn't recommend making your own version of this build, especially with RAM prices as they currently are, but there are all kinds of inexpensive mini PCs on Amazon with the same GPU, and they'll all be pretty good at playing the kinds of games that already run well on"
"But this kind of hardware is an imperfect proxy for the Steam Machine that Valve plans to launch sometime next year-that box will include a dedicated GPU with 8GB of dedicated video memory, presenting both benefits and possible pitfalls compared to a system with an integrated GPU. As a last pre-Steam Machine follow-up to our coverage so far, we've run tests on several games we test regularly in our GPU reviews to get a sense of how current versions of SteamOS stack up to Windows."
"Our testbed(s) When we test GPUs, our goal is to have the best possible CPU, motherboard, and other components built around it so we can measure the graphics card's performance without running into bottlenecks from anything else. For this build, I tried a bit harder to replicate the kind of midrange components we can expect the Steam Machine to use in an attempt to control costs,"
Testing comparing SteamOS and Windows on identical hardware shows Windows generally delivers higher performance, sometimes by a large margin. SteamOS performs relatively better on integrated GPUs such as the Radeon 780M than on powerful dedicated GPUs with 8GB of video memory. SteamOS also more readily exhibits apparent VRAM-related limits, hitting RAM constraints in more games and at lower resolutions compared to Windows. A midrange testbed was used to approximate likely Steam Machine components while aiming to avoid CPU or motherboard bottlenecks, with 32GB DDR5 RAM present though 16GB should suffice for the tested games.
Read at Ars Technica
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