By Valve’s admission, its upcoming Steam Machine desktop is not optimized due to its graphical performance. The specs promise good 1080p-to-1440p performance in most games, with 4K sometimes available with the aid of FSR upscaling – about what you’d expect out of the box with a modern midrange graphics card.
But there is one specification that has caused some concern among ARS staff and others keeping an eye on the Steam Machine: The GPU only comes with 8 GB of dedicated graphics RAM, a quantity that is increasingly becoming a hindrance for midrange GPUs like AMD’s Radeon RX 7060 and 9060, or Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060 or 5060.
In our reviews of these GPUs, we’ve already seen some games where the RAM ceiling limits performance in Windows, especially at 1440p. But we’ve been doing more extensive testing of different GPUs with SteamOS, and we can confirm that in the current beta, 8GB GPUs struggle even more on SteamOS than running the same game at the same settings in Windows 11.
The good news is that Valve is working on solutions, and having a stable platform like the Steam Machine should help improve things for other hardware with similar configurations. The bad news is that there is still a lot of work to do.
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We’ve tested a range of dedicated and integrated Radeon GPUs under SteamOS and Windows, and we’ll share more comprehensive results (along with comprehensive SteamOS-vs-Windows overviews) in another article soon. But for our purposes here, the two GPUs that highlight the issues most effectively are the 8GB Radeon RX 7600 and the 16GB Radeon RX 7600 XT.
The advantage of these dedicated GPUs is that they are almost identical to the ones Valve plans to ship in the Steam Machine – 32 compute units (CUs) instead of Valve’s 28, but the same RDNA 3 architecture. For our purposes, the most important thing is that they are very similar to each other – the same physical GPU die, with a slightly higher clock speed and more RAM for the 7600 XT compared to the regular 7600.
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