- Valve says the Steam Machine will be faster than 70% of PCs on Steam
- The company has its hardware survey to help judge where to pitch the spec of the incoming mini PC
- A Valve engineer shared this info, and also underlined how this will be an entry-level device with an affordable price tag
Valve is assuring PC gamers that the new Steam Machine won’t be underpowered as some fear, and that the cube will be faster than the majority of gaming PCs.
Notebookcheck.net highlighted an interview on Adam Savage’s Tested YouTube channel (it’s embedded below), where Valve engineer Yazan Aldehayyat explains the philosophy behind the Steam Machine and how the spec was pitched.
As you might imagine, there are a few moving parts therein, but Aldehayyat confirms an obvious point in terms of 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 using the platform. It provides a useful overview of what’s in the average PC gamer’s rig, and that info can, and has, been used to inform the decision-making around the Steam Machine’s spec.
Aldehayyat tells us that the Steam Machine was specified to be equal to or better than 70% of the gaming PCs being 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. Indeed, it’s clearly crucial if Valve wants this compact box widely adopted in living rooms across the globe.
Analysis: Steam Machine dream?
As noted, there’s been quite a lot of heat directed at Valve for some of the spec choices with the Steam Machine, principally for the central CPU and GPU combo, and how it’s a bit weak sauce. Quite a lot of that criticism boils down to Valve running with an RDNA 3 GPU (current generation is RDNA 4) and only attaching 8GB of video RAM (which has become a famously unpopular loadout these days, especially as Nvidia has stuck with it for more modest RTX 5000 GPUs).
However, much of the flaming comes from more enthusiast gamers who are not the target audience. This is something I discussed yesterday in light of comments from a top exec at Larian Studios (maker of Baldur’s Gate 3). Michael Douse made the point 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 will come from third-party manufacturers like Asus who’ll make more powerful takes on the Steam Machine formula. It is just a mini PC running SteamOS at heart, after all.
I think the Steam Machine is going to be more powerful than its bare specs suggest, though. The Zen 4 CPU should be peppy enough, and as for all the fretting over the GPU, we mustn’t forget that it’s a semi-custom model, meaning that it’s been fine-tuned to work well with Valve’s software here – don’t underestimate how much difference that could make. (Note that semi-custom refers purely to tuning, this is not actually customized silicon, as Aldehayyat makes clear).
Does that mean the Steam Machine will indeed realize 4K gaming at 60 frames per second (fps) in the living room when using AMD‘s upscaling tech (FSR)? I’m not sure this kind of boast – which Valve has pushed as part of its opening marketing salvo – is a wise one to make, as clearly, this diminutive cube is not going to run every game at nearly that frame rate. But at the same time, this boast must be representative of something – and the broad aim of letting casual gamers play all their Steam titles with no trouble in a relatively smooth fashion. (Some of which will run at 60 fps, upscaled to 4K).
Furthermore, 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 just have to look at the Steam survey to see that 8GB of RAM is still the most common video RAM loadout (and Valve did just that – indeed, only about 30% of Steam gamers have more than 8GB).
At any rate, we can’t know the real truth about the Steam Machine’s performance until we get full-on benchmarks. More crucially, we need the lens of the pricing Valve pins on the Steam Machine to see how the whole package stands – and as is stressed again by Aldehayyat here, affordability is key.
Frankly, 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 standout in the handheld arena. My biggest concern remains not the spec of the Steam Machine, but the current cost of inflation on SSDs and memory, which could throw spanners in the works with the pricing equations Valve is currently balancing behind closed doors. (Although it’s also true that pricing for equivalent devices will equally be affected).
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