Valve’s upcoming Steam Machine is far more of a console than it is any variety of PC. As much as the PC gaming audience wants to hold onto Valve as their personal darling, the makers of Half-Life and Steam care more about attracting a new, more casual audience on SteamOS than providing more gas to the same gamers with hundreds, if not thousands, of titles in their Steam library already.
The PC gaming crowd on places like Reddit has focused their ire on the Steam Machine’s specs. The “GabeCube,” as some have taken to calling it as 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 more recent 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, and not even the desktop version but the mobile version available to laptops, the RX 7600M. It has fewer compute units—the name for AMD’s core clusters—than the older GPU and will run at a lower power window.
© Valve
Which is all to say, this Steam Machine will not perform on the level of a modern gaming-ready PC. Valve has claimed the console can hit 4K resolution at 60 fps in some major games, though that will rely on AMD’s upscaling technology. This means the console will work best when running games at lower resolutions and then pitching the image to AI so it can appear like it’s at a higher resolution. The bigger issue at hand for PC gamers is the Steam Machine will be limited to 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, or video random access memory. More VRAM means the system will be better for higher resolutions. The Steam Machine may work best running games at 1440p or lower.
This hardware is likely going to be slightly slower than a PlayStation 5. In that way, Valve will likely be more focused on pricing the device competitively to take up space underneath your TV. While the PS5 claims to use 16GB of VRAM, it more often uses between 10 to 12GB at a time, depending on the game. The Xbox Series X is limited to 10GB of GDDR6 VRAM. Even two more gigabytes of VRAM can make a big difference in some modern, demanding PC games for higher resolutions.
But here’s the thing: console gamers aren’t nearly as concerned about whether games are running at a native 4K. Most don’t want to adjust graphic settings at all. They will simply take whatever the developers give them so long as they’re promised a smooth experience. The hardcore gamers who necessarily want to push their hardware to the max will end up spending more. If you want to craft your own Steam Machine with the console-like ease of SteamOS software, you can choose between fellow Linux fork Bazzite or a version of SteamOS. How well the latter works may depend on if you’re using AMD components or not.
© Valve
Valve’s whole reason for creating a new hardware ecosystem is to push a new crowd of gamers onto Steam. That’s how the company makes its money. The Steam Deck was relatively cheap for its hardware back at launch in 2022, and Valve has not increased the price despite Trump tariffs pushing 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 an entire system in a box. If Valve keeps the cost at around what we pay for a PS5, it can still make a case for itself when it has access to the entire Steam games catalog.
Consoles aren’t outputting games at the native 4K. They’re rarely able to hit the promised 60 fps threshold, either. Even on the PlayStation 5 Pro, with its enhanced GPU with nearly twice as many compute units as the console from 2020, the system struggled with modern Unreal Engine 5 titles like Metal Gear Solid: Delta. PC gamers can continue to obsess with pushing their frame rate as high as it will go without needing AI upscaling or those dastardly “fake frames,” otherwise known as frame gen. The console gaming crowd just wants a clean, easy experience. That’s all Valve has to focus on, at least for now.