- Valve says the Steam Machine will be faster than 70% of PCs on Steam
- The company has its hardware survey to help judge where the specification for the incoming mini PC should pitch
- A valve engineer shared this information and also emphasized how this will be an entry-level unit with an affordable price
Valve assures PC gamers that the new Steam Machine will not be underpowered as some fear, and that the cube will be faster than most gaming PCs.
Notebookcheck.net featured an interview on Adam Savage’s Tested YouTube channel (it’s embedded below) in which Valve engineer Yazan Aldehayyat explains the philosophy behind the Steam Machine and how the spec was set up.
As you might imagine, there are a few moving parts in there, but Aldehayyat confirms an obvious point regarding Valve’s thinking here.
Namely, that Valve has a key resource at its fingertips – the Steam hardware survey, which is conducted every month with a portion of the gaming PCs that use the platform. It provides a useful overview of what’s in the average PC gamer’s rig, and that information can and has been used to inform decision-making around the Steam Machine’s spec.
Aldehayyat tells us that the Steam Machine was specified to equal or better than 70% of the gaming PCs used on Valve’s platform.
At the same time, the engineer acknowledges that the Steam Machine will be an entry-level device, and that’s because affordability is an important aspect. In fact, it’s clearly crucial if Valve wants this compact box spread across living rooms across the globe.
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Analysis: Steam Machine dream?
As mentioned, there’s been quite a bit of heat directed at Valve for some of the spec choices with the Steam Machine, primarily for the central CPU and GPU combo and how it’s a little weak sauce. A lot of that criticism boils down to Valve running an RDNA 3 GPU (the current generation is RDNA 4) and only attaching 8GB of video RAM (which has become a famously unpopular loadout these days, especially since Nvidia has stuck with it for more modest RTX 5000 GPUs).
But much of the flame comes from more enthusiast players, who are not the target audience. This is something I discussed yesterday in light of comments from a senior executive at Larian Studios (producer of Baldur’s Gate 3). Michael Douse pointed out that more casual gamers will look to buy the Steam Machine – and more hardcore types will either build their own living room PC or buy a custom model. The latter comes from third-party manufacturers like Asus who want to make more powerful versions of the Steam Machine formula. After all, it’s just a mini PC running SteamOS at heart.
However, I think the Steam Machine will be more powerful than its bare-bones specs suggest. The Zen 4 CPU should be peppy enough, and as for all the nagging about the GPU, let’s not forget that it’s a semi-custom model, meaning it’s been fine-tuned to work well with Valve’s software here – don’t underestimate how much of a difference that can make. (Note that semi-custom refers purely to tuning, this is not actually custom silicon, as Aldehayyat makes clear).
Does this mean that the Steam Machine will really realize 4K gaming at 60 frames per second (fps) in the living room when using AMD’s upscaling technology (FSR)? I’m not sure this kind of bragging—which Valve has been pushing as part of its opening marketing salvo—is a wise thing to do, since it’s clear that this little cube isn’t going to run every game at nearly that framerate. But at the same time, this boast has to be representative of something – and the broad goal of letting casual gamers play all of their Steam titles without issue in a relatively smooth manner. (Some of which run at 60 fps, upscaled to 4K).
Also, don’t forget that most PC gamers have relatively underpowered rigs – and expectations are set at a much lower level than a typical enthusiast. You only have to look at the Steam survey to see that 8GB of RAM is still the most common video RAM load (and Valve did just that – in fact, only about 30% of Steam players have more than 8GB).
In any case, we can’t know the real truth about the Steam Machine’s performance until we get fully benchmarked. More crucially, we need the lens of the pricing valve pins on the Steam Machine to see how the whole package stacks up – and as Aldehayyat again emphasizes here, affordability is key.
Honestly, from the way the company and its staff are talking, I can’t see Valve not making this work as it has made the Steam Deck a prominent place in the handheld arena. My main concern is still not the specs of the Steam Machine, but the current inflationary costs of SSDs and memory, which could screw up the pricing equations that Valve is currently balancing behind closed doors. (Although it is also true that the prices of similar units will also be affected).
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