Although it was pretty much only a rumor for the longest time, a new Steam Machine from Valve is now a cold hard fact. Valve announced its new SteamOS-powered gaming PC on the 12th of November 2025, and it looks like we’re about to see another Steam Deck-level market disruption.
The Steam Machine is almost everything we hoped
Valve had tried the Steam Machine concept years ago, but it failed for a few main reasons. For one, the hardware was too expensive and too underpowered, and Valve relied on third-party companies to make their own take on Steam Machines, based on reference specifications. Second, barely any games ran on that early version of SteamOS.
After Steam Machines crashed and burned, Valve spent years investing in open-source compatibility layers to let Windows games run on Linux, and when we got the first Steam Deck things went very differently. Now, the sales numbers for the Steam Deck don’t compare to something like the Nintendo Switch family. However, the Deck is certainly popular and has sold many units, but most importantly, it has lead to a new handheld PC market segment which was very niche before. Best of all, SteamOS is slowly starting to support handhelds that are not Valve Steam Decks. It’s what I run on my Lenovo Legion Go, which ships with Windows out of the box.
The Steam Machine is effectively just a (very) beefed up Steam Deck designed to sit under your TV or next to your PC monitor. The Deck has proven that the technology works, now it’s time to take on the likes of the PlayStation 5 in terms of horsepower and the ability to run current-generation games on large displays.
There’s a big potential flaw lurking in the spec sheet
Like the Steam Deck, the Steam Machine is a beautifully-designed system with carefully-chosen specifications and custom hardware. As I write this, we don’t know the pricing. However, I expect it will be very competitive, because, like the Steam Deck, Valve doesn’t have to turn a profit on the hardware. Also, while the Steam Machine is only “over 6x more powerful than Steam Deck”, the Deck has proven that under SteamOS and with careful use of the right settings and technologies like FSR, games don’t need as much outright horsepower to run well and look good.
As such, I don’t have any real reservations about the promised power and performance of the Steam Machine, except for one item on the spec sheet—the VRAM allocation.
As you can see, the Steam Machine currently has 16GB DDR5 RAM and 8GB GDDR6 VRAM allocated. This is very different from how the Steam Deck and other PC handhelds work, where a single pool of system RAM is used for both system RAM and VRAM. Which means VRAM can be dynamically allocated as needed on those systems.
I understand that using a fixed separate pool of VRAM has significant performance advantages, specifically total bandwidth, which is crucial for the 4K final output resolution this machine is designed for. The problem is that 8GB of VRAM is widely considered to be an obsolete amount of memory for modern games. In some cutting-edge games, 8GB isn’t enough even at 1080p, much less 4K or any other resolution in between. These days, common wisdom is that you need 12GB of VRAM for 1440p gaming and 16GB for 4K. That’s not to say you need that now, but if you were buying a GPU in 2025, you’d avoid an 8GB card like the plague because it would have no longevity.
So why isn’t this a problem on something like the PlayStation 5, which has less total memory than the Steam Machine? Well, that’s because the PS5 has 16GB of truly unified, high-bandwidth memory. If a game needs 10GB of VRAM, developers can manage things to allow for that. If it needs just 8GB, then that’s fine too. There’s flexibility to adapt.
With a hard limit at 8GB of VRAM, and a final output of 4K, it’s hard to imagine this Steam Machine being relevant in the medium term.
How can Valve work around this issue?
First, I have to acknowledge that Valve explicitly states “some specifications are subject to change ahead of availability,” so it’s feasible that the amount of VRAM could change. However, under the assumption that it doesn’t, how would this work?
First, this is just a PC, which means you can connect it to a 1080p or 1440p display and tune game settings accordingly. Second, Valve has qualified the “4K” target in its marketing materials, saying you may have to use scaling technology like FSR to get there. Which is par for the course, and not a problem. However, even if you’re scaling from 1080p to 4K using FSR, 8GB of VRAM can still be a problem at 1080p.
It’s important to remember that the games you play on SteamOS are still just regular PC games and not tightly optimized for any particular hardware the way console games are. So if a game is going to struggle at 1080p or 1440p with 8GB of VRAM on any other PC, it’s going to struggle on a Steam Machine. Unless there’s some new magic feature Valve is going to bake into SteamOS or Proton (the compatibility layer), I don’t see how you can work around 8GB of VRAM other than having significantly lower texture quality settings than you’d find on a PS5 or Xbox Series X.
I’m still very excited about the Steam Machine and what it means for Linux gaming, getting more people into PC gaming, and perhaps lowering the barrier of entry for PC gamers in the face of insane hardware prices. But having so little VRAM right off the bat gives me flashbacks to the Xbox Series S, which had plenty of CPU and GPU power, but ran into memory issues because it simply didn’t have enough of it.
- Dimensions
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298mm x 117mm x 49mm
- Weight
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640 grams
- RAM
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16 GB LPDDR5
- Storage
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512GB or 1TB NVMe SSD
- Wireless Connectivity
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Bluetooth 5.3, Wi-Fi 6E
- Headset Compatibility
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Bluetooth 5.3