According to Valve, its forthcoming Steam Machine desktop is not aiming for exceptionally high graphical performance. The specifications indicate satisfactory performance in the 1080p-to-1440p range for most games, with 4K potentially achievable with the help of FSR upscaling—roughly what one would anticipate from a device equipped with a contemporary midrange graphics card.
However, there’s one specification that has raised concerns among Ars team members and others watching the Steam Machine: The GPU features only 8GB of dedicated graphics RAM, a quantity that is increasingly turning into a limitation for midrange GPUs such as AMD’s Radeon RX 7060 and 9060, or Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060 or 5060.
In our reviews of these GPUs, we’ve encountered some games where the RAM limit hampers performance in Windows, particularly at 1440p. Yet, our more extensive testing of various GPUs with SteamOS has revealed that in the current betas, 8GB GPUs face even greater challenges on SteamOS compared to running the same games with identical settings in Windows 11.
On a positive note, Valve is developing solutions, and having a stable platform like the Steam Machine to target should facilitate improvements for other hardware with comparable configurations. The downside is that there remains significant work to be done.
The statistics
We’ve evaluated a range of dedicated and integrated Radeon GPUs under both SteamOS and Windows, and we’ll provide more detailed results in a future article (along with broader SteamOS-versus-Windows insights). For now, the two GPUs that most effectively illustrate the issues are the 8GB Radeon RX 7600 and the 16GB Radeon RX 7600 XT.
These dedicated GPUs are nearly identical to what Valve is planning to include in the Steam Machine—32 compute units (CUs) instead of Valve’s 28, but the same RDNA3 architecture. They are also, crucially for our discussion, quite similar to one another—sharing the same physical GPU die, with just slightly increased clock speeds and more RAM in the 7600 XT compared to the standard 7600.
