A few years after successfully expanding the handheld gaming market with the Steam Deck, Valve is again trying its hand at a console-like experience.
Valve announced several new hardware products yesterday, one of which is simply called the Steam Machine. This is actually Valve’s second attempt at such an idea (the first being nearly a decade ago), but this time the conditions seem a little more right, especially with Xbox’s future a little uncertain. The Steam Machine is, essentially, a console version of the Steam Deck: It runs the same software, SteamOS, and will play games from your Steam library when plugged into a TV like the console.
However, there’s some bad news: We don’t have a price or release date for it yet. Stay tuned for that.
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Of course, the main difference between it and the deck is that the Steam Machine will be much more powerful. According to Valve, it is six times more powerful than Steam Deck. Here are the details of the valves released for the Steam Machine:
CPU: Semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C/12T
GPU: Semi-custom AMD RDNA3 28CUs, 2.45GHz max sustained clock, 110W TDP
16GB DDR5 + 8GB GDDR6 VRAM
Two storage options: 512GB SSD and 2TB SSD
2x USB-A ports on the front
2x USB-A ports on the back
1x USB-C port on the back
Valve is promising visuals and performance in the neighborhood of 4K and 60 frames per second with this device. Right now it’s hard to say whether it compares in terms of power to the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series. Of course, it also has the advantage of being able to play on a large scale Library of PC games spanning multiple decades.
It may be a while before its release, but there are plenty of reasons to be excited right now.