Valve

Valve initially revealing the Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and Steam Frame at the same time felt like a co-ordinated strategy for three products intended to release simultaneously to usher in a new ecosystem, but the harsh reality of our technological landscape forced it to aggressively pivot. It sucks, and I have to wonder how the same circumstances are going to impact the next generation of PlayStation and Xbox. If I was Valve, I would move the planned launch back until prices stabilise and continue to iterate on upscaling technology using tools that already exist. PSSR 2 feels like magi

Valve's Steam Machine runs on a custom AMD Zen 4 CPU with 6 cores, 12 threads, and a 30W TDP. Attached are integrated custom AMD RDNA 3 graphics, with 8GB of VRAM and 28 compute units. All Steam Machine models come with 16GB of DDR5 system memory, and the introductory models start with a 512GB SSD (upgradeable to 2TB for those with deeper pockets). Circling back to the custom graphics, testing by our friends at Tom's Hardware revealed that it fails to pull ahead of the AMD Radeon RX 7600 discrete GPU while coming out just ahead of the AMD Radeon RX 6600. How does that performance compare to th

Power and storage aren't everything. It's how you use it, particularly the power, and maybe the minds over at Valve have figured out a way to harness that power better than it's harnessed on the PS5 Pro. Well, no, seemingly that's not the case either if early tests showcasing how demanding games run on the Steam Machine are anything to go by. Cyberpunk 2077 continues to be the go-to for testing just how well a game looks and runs on new hardware, and based on test results shared by Play4Index, it doesn't look good for the Steam Machine. The demanding CDPR title ran at just 28 FPS. Black Myth W

Van Dreunen says that he wasn't shocked at all to see Valve breaking the $1,000 barrier. "In fact, I predicted in March that we'd see the price of gaming consoles breach $1,000," he says. "If anything, I underestimated the speed: even in my most pessimistic February revision, I had the top SKU near $899, and the entry price alone cleared that. It's disappointing, certainly, because Valve prides itself on accessibility and fair pricing for consumers. But unless Valve is willing to heavily subsidize its upcoming device, it has to price in the runaway cost of memory and storage like everyone else