Valve announces 'Steam Machine' to take on consoles
It's what we have all been waiting for.
4 years after the announcement of the original Steam Deck, Valve officially announces their new Steam Hardware: the Steam Controller, Steam Frame (VR headset), and what caught my eye, the Steam Machine. All three are a continuation of the vision that Valve set out to accomplish with the Steam Deck – good performance, aggressive pricing, and Linux.
Its internals seem interesting. It has a 6 core semi-custom AMD Zen 4 CPU and a semi-custom RDNA3 AMD GPU. It comes with 16 GB of DDR5 and 8 GB of GDDR6 for VRAM. It also comes with either 512 GB or 2TB of NVMe SSD storage, with both storage tiers including a "high-speed microSD card slot." All of this contributes to the supposed power that has "over six times the horsepower of Steam Deck," which is a pretty bold claim, but hopefully a true one.
It seems as though Valve is targeting this Steam Machine as a home theater PC, essentially like a super-powerful game console. They say that it can do 4K60 with FSR, which feels more targeted for a TV, where 60Hz is still common. Also, the drop in quality with FSR isn't nearly as noticeable if you are a few feet away from the screen. Either way, while they do specify that it can be used as a normal computer, it is clearly targeted as a home theater PC. It also comes with an RGB light strip that is near the bottom on the front. It seems cool, and can even work when the PC is off, but it is something that feels more at home next to a TV where you want more ambiance.
It is also pretty clear that Valve is stressing the capabilities of SteamOS on Linux with all of this new hardware, but specifically with the Steam Machine. That's because the performance can be replicated pretty easily from the Steam Deck since they are both similar classes of devices. Contrastingly, it is less easy to port games over to a VR headset because of its tracking. The efficiency gains that Valve is touting over Windows (which is implied) sound pretty impressive, and Valve wants you to see for yourself just how much more efficient it is.
Either way, the Steam Machine, along with the new Steam Controller and Steam Frame, is really cool and is something many have anticipated for a long time. We will have to wait and see what Valve does soon.
