14 DAY TRIAL // A big new report has appeared online concerning Valve's upcoming announcements, confirming that on Wednesday the SteamBox mini-PC will be revealed to the world, while on Friday the last confirmation will be for Source 2, the new game engine from the studio.
Valve is currently teasing two of three big announcements concerning its Steam service, with the first having been revealed yesterday, in the form of the SteamOS operating system that will launch in the near future and focus both on Steam and on gaming.
Now, a supposed insider from Valve has leaked a lot of details on popular website 4chan, which have been rounded up on Reddit.
The employee confirms a few things about Valve's choice to use Linux as a basis for its SteamOS and goes on to reveal that the next two announcements are for the SteamBox on Wednesday, and for Source 2 on Friday.
More specifically, on Wednesday the studio will present the SteamBox mini-PC, which will have a reference configuration made by Valve in collaboration with AMD, for the CPU, and Nvidia, for the GPU.
That's not all, however, as all sorts of components and hardware can be used to create a SteamBox, although they need to meet a baseline performance standard that's set by Valve.
The company initially wanted to make a deal with Intel for the CPU, but the latter has been quite negative and wanted to be paid by Valve for the privilege of using its components. Meanwhile, Nvidia has been extremely forthcoming and even allowed Valve to use the streaming mechanic employed by its Shield portable console in SteamOS.
On Friday, the last announcement will be for Source 2, the next iteration of the company's video game engine. As a first, it won't have any sort of DirectX component within it, meaning it will run the same across the PC, Mac, and Linux (SteamOS) platforms.
A PlayStation 4 port of Source 2 is also in the works but the employee notes that it might not be revealed in the near future.
Last but not least, a free game will be bundled with Nvidia cards that can be redeemed on all SteamBox computers.