When Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine hardware last month, some eagle-eyed gamers may have been surprised to see that the official spec sheet lists support for HDMI 2.0 output, rather than the updated, higher-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 standard introduced in 2017. Now, Valve tells Ars that, while the hardware itself actually supports HDMI 2.1, the company is struggling to offer full support for that standard due to Linux drivers that are “still a work-in-progress on the software side.”
As we noted last year, the HDMI Forum (which manages the official specifications for HDMI standards) has officially blocked any open source implementation of HDMI 2.1. That means the open source AMD drivers used by SteamOS can’t fully implement certain features that are specific to the updated output standard.
“At this time an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation is not possible without running afoul of the HDMI Forum requirements,” AMD engineer Alex Deucher said at the time.
Half-Life 3, the non-existent sequel to one of the most legendary video game series of all time, has achieved an almost mythical status. It’s been 18 years since Half-Life 2: Episode 2’s cliffhanger ending, without a word from Valve about a follow-up since. However, over the past year, rumors and theories have swirled about Half-Life 3 being announced before the end of the year.
By Valve’s admission, its upcoming Steam Machine desktop isn’t swinging for the fences with its graphical performance. The specs promise decent 1080p-to-1440p performance in most games, with 4K occasionally reachable with assistance from FSR upscaling—about what you’d expect from a box with a modern midrange graphics card in it.
But there’s one spec that has caused some concern among Ars staffers and others with their eyes on the Steam Machine: The GPU comes with just 8GB of dedicated graphics RAM, an amount that is steadily becoming more of a bottleneck for midrange GPUs like AMD’s Radeon RX 7060 and 9060, or Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060 or 5060.
In our reviews of these GPUs, we’ve already run into some games where the RAM ceiling limits performance in Windows, especially at 1440p. But we’ve been doing more extensive testing of various GPUs with SteamOS, and we can confirm that in current betas, 8GB GPUs struggle even more on SteamOS than they do running the same games at the same settings in Windows 11.
After Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine living room box earlier this month, some analysts suggested to Ars that Valve could and should aggressively subsidize that hardware with “loss leader” pricing that leads to more revenue from improved Steam software sales. In a new interview with YouTube channel Skill Up, though, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais ruled out that kind of console-style pricing model, saying that the Steam Machine will be “more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market.”
Griffais said the AMD Zen 4 CPU and RDNA3 GPU in the Steam Machine were designed to outperform the bottom 70 percent of machines that opt-in to Valve’s regular hardware survey. And Steam Machine owners should expect to pay roughly what they would for desktop hardware with similar specs, he added.
“If you build a PC from parts and get to basically the same level of performance, that’s the general price window that we aim to be at,” Griffais said.
Valve’s second big foray into first-party PC hardware isn’t a sequel to the much-imitated Steam Deck portable, but rather a desktop computer called the Steam Machine. And while it could go on your desk, Valve clearly intends for it to fit in an entertainment center under a TV—next to, or perhaps even instead of, a game console like the Xbox or PlayStation 5.
Depending on what it costs—and we can only guess what it will cost—the Steam Machine could be a good fit for people who just want to plug a more powerful version of the Steam Deck experience into their TVs. But for people who like tinkering or who, like me, have been messing with miniature TV-connecting gaming PCs for years and are simply tired of trying to make Windows workable, the future promised by the Steam Machine is already here.
If you ask random gamers what price they think Valve will charge for its newly announced Steam Machine hardware, you’ll get a wide range of guesses. But if you ask the analysts who follow the game industry for a living the same question… well, you’ll actually get the same wide range of (somewhat better-informed) guesses.
At the high end of those guesses are analysts like F-Squared‘s Michael Futter, who expects a starting price of $799 to $899 for the entry-level 512GB Steam Machine and a whopping $1,000 to $1,100 for the 2TB version. With internal specs that Futter says “will rival a PS5 and maybe even hit PS5 Pro performance,” we can expect a “hefty price tag” from Valve’s new console-like effort. At the same time, since Valve is “positioning this as a dedicated, powerful gaming PC… I suspect that the price will be below a similarly capable traditional desktop,” Futter said.
DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole similarly expects the Steam Machine to start at a price “around $800” and go up to “around $1,000” for the 2TB model. Cole said he expects Valve will seek “very low margins” or even break-even pricing on the hardware itself, which he said would probably lead to pricing “below a gaming PC but slightly above a high-end console.”
In the wake of the success of the Steam Deck, a portable gaming PC aimed at a casual audience, it was inevitable that Valve Software would dip its hands back into the hardware market. It just wasn’t expected quite this soon, or that Valve would pick quite so many fights at once.
Valve, headquartered in Bellevue, Wash., announced Wednesday that it plans to expand its line of Steam Hardware gaming products. In addition to the Steam Deck, next year will see the release of a new Steam Machine, which is designed for living room play; a new Steam Controller, a high-durability game pad with a similar design to the Deck; and the Steam Frame, an all-in-one VR headset.
We currently know very little about the three new pieces of Steam Hardware aside from their existence and, broadly, their specs. Valve has said the new Machine is “six times as powerful” as the Deck, for example. Other details such as pricing are currently planned for release early next year.
The pricing is the biggest X-factor here. It’s not discussed as often as other factors, but one of the major reasons behind the Steam Deck’s overall success is arguably its price tag.
You can walk away with a functional Steam Deck for as little as $399, although the higher-end models are worth the extra money. By comparison, competitors’ models such as Microsoft’s Xbox ROG Allystart at $599.99, and several break the $1,000 mark.
Valve can certainly afford to pursue a razor-and-blades strategy with its hardware. Depending on who you choose to believe, anywhere from half to 75% of PC gaming worldwide goes through Steam. While Valve has its share of controversies and detractors, it’s also found a real-life infinite money cheat.
While the PC sector of the games industry is currently smaller than the console and mobile markets, it’s still a multi-billion-dollar industry. It’s also growing, with larger numbers of both younger players and the Asian market shifting to PCs for their gaming. Appealing to those audiences with an all-in-one desktop device is a smart overall move, especially if Valve opts to keep the price tag as low as it did for the Deck.
If Valve takes that affordability approach, then the new Steam Hardware is potentially disruptive to several different areas within the gaming industry. It could pose particular issues for Microsoft, which has recently begun talking about plans for its next-generation Xbox, and to Meta’s current prominence within the VR space.
The rumored plans for the next Xbox, at time of writing, are that it’s coming in 2027 and will essentially be a small, ultra-specialized PC. The Xbox ROG Ally’s unique operating system is seen as a sneak preview of what’s next for the living-room model, which will abandon Xbox’s unique identity in favor of a Windows-based “Xbox Experience.”
Valve’s Steam Machine would theoretically ship with a similar overall feel. It would also have no capacity for physical media whatsoever, running entirely off of digital downloads from users’ Steam libraries.
Most crucially, it isn’t a Windows product. One of Valve’s stated goals for over a decade has been to promote PC gaming on Linux, in order to present players with an option besides Windows. With the next Xbox all but confirmed to be running Windows 11 (and thus Copilot), I’ve heard from a lot of players who are looking for alternatives.
For most of those players up until now, that alternative would’ve been buying a system from PlayStation or Nintendo. Now Steam is once again trying to take over consumers’ living rooms. If the Steam Machine is affordably priced, that could make it an attractive option for consumers who’re looking for a way out of Microsoft’s ecosystems.
Since the Steam Machine features the same plug-and-play options as the Steam Deck, it’s also an easy way to pick up a reasonably powerful computer that runs Linux out of the box. Plug a monitor, keyboard, and mouse into the Steam Machine and it automatically transitions into a Plasma desktop environment.
The Steam Frame headset. (Valve Image)
In a similar vein, the Steam Frame could not be more deliberately positioned as a competitive product for the Meta Quest line of virtual reality hardware. While the VR sector is still more active than people seem to realize, with steady growth in the market year-over-year, Meta currently controls an outsized amount of the conversation in the space. This is by virtue of selling the highest-end and most affordable headsets on the market.
Meta’s dominance in VR has actually been kind of a problem for me, because Meta is annoying. Meta Horizon is an obnoxious overall setup whenever I pull out my Quest; it keeps trying to shake me down for more personal details for some reason; and it’s got that inescapable Zuckerberg stink on it. If Valve can present a comparable option for a standalone headset, it could make some real headway in the space.
That having been said, I genuinely doubt that anyone at Valve itself is thinking in these terms. The general thrust behind the Steam Deck, according to its architects when I spoke to them a couple of years ago, was that it was done largely for the hell of it. While Steam higher-ups like Gabe Newell have always been forthright about their disdain for Windows, I’d be shocked if Valve’s new hardware venture is any kind of deliberate attempt at disruption. At most, it’s a new option.
It’s more likely that this round of Steam Hardware, and anything that comes in the future, is simply Valve finally kicking a project out the door. At this point in the company’s life, with no shareholders to appease, it’s still consistently content to pursue its own weird goals.
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