Valve surprised everyone when it announced a new Steam Machine last week. While gamers are curious to see how good it is, a Valve engineer says the device can outperform most PCs out there.
That's a pretty big claim. Here's a brief recap of the Steam Machine's internals. The device is powered by a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 processor with 6 cores, an AMD RDNA3 graphics card with 28 compute units, 8GB GDDR6 VRAM, 16GB DDR5 RAM. The Steam Machine runs on SteamOS 3, has a desktop mode, fast suspend and resume, and is capable of delivering 4K 60 fps with FSR. Games on Steam will carry a Steam Machine Verified rating if they are rated for the new gaming device. It is fully compatible with the new Steam Controller that has dual trackpads.
I came across a post on Techpowerup that discussed a video posted by Adam Savage's Tested on YouTube. The video reveals the parts inside the hybrid PC/console. It appears that the storage and the memory of the Steam Machine are upgradable, though you'd need to dismantle the unit a bit to get to the parts. The device has a massive heat sink, and vents to help the device's temperature levels in check.
Norman Chan from Adam Savage Tested interviewed two Valve engineers at the company's premises. Around the 14:25 mark in the video, Yazan Aldehayyat, an engineer at Valve, says that based on the Steam Hardware Survey, the Steam Machine is equal to or better than 70% of computers that gamers have.
I'm not convinced that it is that much better than most PCs, but I kind of get what he is saying. Gaming PCs are expensive to build, and gaming laptops aren't cheap either. Plus, we are talking about playing on a big screen, i.e, TV or monitor. The main problems with gaming laptops are poor thermal level management, and low wattage, which means GPUs aren't very powerful. Both of these result in an experience that is inferior to the performance of a real PC. The Steam Machine is not a true gaming PC, its specs are clearly on the entry-level side of things. Still, its performance should be equal or better than most gaming laptops, due to the gigantic heat sink, and vents, which should offer a better thermal experience, and on paper should offer better sustained performance, and could be comparable to low or mid-range PCs.
Coming to the raw numbers, according to Steam's Hardware Survey, about 33% of gamers have a GPU that has 6GB or 4GB of VRAM or lower, another 33% have an 8GB graphics card, while the other 33% have 10GB VRAM or more. About 18% of gamers have a quad-core, i.e. 4-core CPU or lesser, while 28.69% have a 6-core processor. The Steam Machine has a 6-core CPU and an 8GB GPU, it's no spec monster, but that's pretty impressive. Consider the fact that it runs on the Arch Linux-based SteamOS 3 which is optimized for the hardware, it's probably going to be a lot faster than a Windows-powered device with the same specs.
But is the Steam Machine going to be as good as a real gaming PC? No, it is meant to compete with the Xbox and PS5, without the user having to worry about can I run this on my PC? You don't need to build a gaming PC from scratch, or upgrade your PC's parts. That's exactly what consoles do, offer games that are optimized for the hardware with a no-nonsense experience. You switch it on, and your games are ready to play. I think that's what Valve's going for. And if it can, it is going to be better than most PCs.
The Steam Machine could be priced affordably, it is an entry-level gaming machine, and can't have a huge price tag like a gaming PC.
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