With Valve announcing its new Steam Machine today, the good folks over at Digital Foundry have been hands on with the device as part of the reveal, and they've also shared a list of specs to give us an idea of its potential horsepower.
That also means we can do some comparisons with the Xbox Series X and S! Before we get too technical (which to be honest, is not our strong suit here at Pure Xbox), it's worth highlighting that Digital Foundry says the specs hint at performance that lies somewhere between the Xbox Series S and PS5, perhaps slightly favouring the PS5.
"It's slated to launch in the relatively near future as a fixed-spec box manufactured and sold by Valve, and at first glance, its spec sheet suggests performance at some mid-way point between Xbox Series S and the standard PlayStation 5, perhaps skewing more closely to the Sony console, with a few caveats."
So, let's take a look at those Steam Machine specs! Here's what Digital Foundry has them listed as:
| Steam Machine | |
|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Zen 4 CPU clocked at "up to" 4.8GHz, 6 cores, 12 threads |
| Graphics Core | AMD RDNA 3 with 28 compute units up to 2.45GHz, 8 GB DDR6 VRAM |
| Power Draw | 30W TDP (CPU), 110W TDP (GPU) |
| Memory | 16GB DDR5 RAM |
| Storage | 512GB or 2TB M.2 2230 storage |
| Output | DisplayPort 1.4, up to 4K/240Hz or 8K/120 Hz; HDMI "2.0," up to 4K/120 Hz |
"Steam Machine supports M.2 storage replacements in both 2230 and 2280 form factors along with hot-swapping microSD cards used in other SteamOS devices. Additionally, Valve engineers confirm that select HDMI 2.1 features like HDR and AMD FreeSync are active, despite the official spec listing HDMI 2.0."
And now, here's a look at some similar specs for both the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S:
| Xbox Series X | Xbox Series S | |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Eight-core AMD Zen 2 - 3.8GHz/3.6GHz (SMT on) | Eight-core AMD Zen 2 - 3.6GHz/3.4GHz (SMT on) |
| GPU | AMD RDNA 2, 52 compute units at 1.825GHz (12.2TF) | AMD RDNA 2, 20 compute units at 1.565GHz (4TF) |
| Memory | 16GB GDDR6 RAM - up to 560GB/s bandwidth | 10GB GDDR6 RAM - 224GB/s bandwidth |
| Storage | 1TB Custom NVMe SSD | 512GB Custom NVMe SSD |
| Output |
HDMI 2.1, up to 4K/120Hz |
HDMI 2.1, up to 4K/120Hz |
Now, Digital Foundry points out that Valve has yet to reveal specific model numbers for its CPU and GPU, choosing instead to refer to them as "semi-custom." Digital Foundry reckons the CPU's Zen 4 architecture at the stated clock speeds should fare well in terms of the system's 4K/60FPS target (a target that only applies with AMD FSR in play), but there's concern that the "most comparable" GPU is usually only associated with 1080p and 1440p gaming.
The outlet's biggest worry relates to the Steam Machine's 8GB of VRAM, which apparently is a matter of "affordability" but could limit the system's ability to remain future-proof. Here's how DF describes it:
"The decision to opt for 8GB of GDDR6 memory has been proven to be a limiting factor on many modern mainstream triple-A games and falls short of the maximum VRAM pools and memory bandwidth available on both Xbox Series X and base PS5. To accommodate 8GB on affected games, paring back settings (particularly texture quality) and steering clear of ray tracing is frequently required."
"Factoring out the growing wave of triple-A titles that do present best with more VRAM, there is certainly an argument that 8GB will be fine for the vast majority of the current Steam library, but explicitly laying out a 4K 60fps FSR target for the hardware reminds us of similar claims made by console manufacturers in the past. It's a claim that can only fall short when games have so much scalability built in and where every title has its own level of baseline performance. We'd need to go hands-on, obviously, but experience of what this level of horsepower achieves based on our GPU reviews suggests that expectations should be tempered in this regard."
So, based on what we're looking at so far, it seems like the Steam Machine is going to fall somewhere between the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X in terms of performance, and now all that's left is for Valve to slap a price on it.
Digital Foundry hopes it's going to land at around the $399 mark at launch in 2026, but wouldn't be surprised if market conditions force that number to be higher. Keep in mind that the Xbox Series S already retails for $399.99 right now, so if Valve can manage to equal that price point, it's going to match the cheapest next-gen console on the market.
"After a brief in-person demonstration of the system and its accompanying, updated Steam Controller (also available for sale separately), we're left quite impressed, and we think Valve has something here in terms of delivering (mostly) sufficient PC-gaming performance and further disrupting the Windows OS chokehold on gaming PCs. But we still have questions, not least of which is, how much is this system going to cost?"