Valve’s upcoming Steam Machine is much more a console than a PC of any kind. As much as the PC gaming audience wants to keep Valve as their personal favorite, so too do its creators. half life And Steam cares more about attracting a new, more casual audience to SteamOS than providing more gas to the same gamers who already have hundreds, if not thousands, of titles in their Steam library.
The PC gaming crowd on places like Reddit have focused their anger on the Steam Machine’s specifications. The “GabeCube”, as some call it a combination of Valve CEO Gabe Newell and the Nintendo GameCube, uses a “semi-custom” SoC or system on chip designed by AMD. While its CPU specs use the latest Zen 4 microarchitecture, the GPU is based on older hardware. The graphics processing unit is based on AMD’s older RDNA3 architecture. The experts at Digital Foundry compared this GPU to the 2-year-old AMD Radeon RX 7600 GPU, not even the desktop version but the RX 7600M, the mobile version available for laptops. It has fewer compute units than the older GPU – named AMD’s Core Cluster – and will run on a lower power window.
All that is to say, this Steam Machine will not perform at the level of a PC designed for modern gaming. Valve has claimed that the console can reach 4K resolution at 60 fps in some key games, although this will depend on AMD’s upscaling technology. This means that the console will work best when running the game at a lower resolution and then pitching the image to the AI to make it appear as if it is at a higher resolution. The bigger issue for PC gamers is that the Steam Machine will be limited to 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, or video random access memory. More VRAM means the system will be better able to handle higher resolutions. The Steam Machine may work best running games at 1440p or lower.
This hardware is likely to be slightly slower than the PlayStation 5. This way, Valve will focus more on pricing the device competitively to take up space under your TV. While the PS5 claims to use 16GB of VRAM, depending on the game it often uses between 10 to 12GB at a time. The Xbox Series Even two more gigabytes of VRAM can make a big difference in some modern, demanding PC games with higher resolutions.
But the thing is: console gamers aren’t concerned about whether games run at native 4K or not. Most people don’t want to adjust graphic settings at all. As long as they are promised a seamless experience, they will take what the developers give them. Hardcore gamers who necessarily want to push their hardware to the max will have to spend more. If you want to outfit your own Steam Machine with the console-like ease of the SteamOS software, you can choose between the companion Linux fork Byzite or a version of SteamOS. How well the latter works may depend on whether you’re using AMD components.
Valve’s whole reason for creating a new hardware ecosystem is to push a new crowd of gamers onto Steam. This is how the company makes its money. The Steam Deck was relatively cheap for its hardware at launch in 2022, and Valve has not increased the price despite Trump tariffs prompting every other console maker to do so. Of course, you should complain every time Nvidia or AMD releases a new GPU for $550, like the GeForce RTX 5070 with only 8GB of VRAM. But the Steam Machine is a complete system in a box. If Valve keeps the cost around what we pay for the PS5, it could still make a case for itself when it has access to the entire Steam game catalog.
Consoles are not outputting games at native 4K. They also rarely achieve the promised 60 FPS limit. Even on the PlayStation 5 Pro, with its advanced GPU with almost twice as many computing units as the 2020 console, the system struggled with modern titles like Unreal Engine 5. Metal Gear Solid: DeltaPC gamers can continue their obsession with increasing their frame rates as high as they can without the need for AI upscaling or those funky “fake frames,” otherwise known as frame generation, The console gaming crowd just wants a clean, simple experience, That’s what Valve has to focus on, at least for now,