Valve gives news of its Steam Machines, PCs/consoles designed for gamers. Initially questioned about their configurations, with some doubting the hardware’s capabilities, Valve responds with a few statistics indicating that these new machines are perfectly capable of running games. Valve goes even further, stating that these configurations outperform 70% of PCs on the market.
Steam Machine: more powerful than 70% of PCs on the market!
Broadly speaking, these new devices feature a special configuration based on processors running a semi-custom Zen 4 architecture. The CPU features a total of six cores, backed up by RDNA 3 graphics. The latter contains 28 compute units, i.e. a total of 1792 stream processors… This configuration is slightly lower than that of an RX 7600 XT, while the GPU is equipped with 8 GB GDDR6 and the central RAM with 16 GB DDR5.
Valve says it based its console on the results of its survey of gamers’ hardware. Valve’s objective was to offer a machine that would satisfy as many users as possible. In fact, the brand is aiming for a configuration that is superior or equivalent to 70% of PCs on the market. According to the brand, the challenge has been met.
If we look at the typical configuration used on Steam, the survey results indicate that gamers operate a 6-core processor running from 2.3 GHz to 2.69 GHz. PCs are equipped with 16 GB RAM, while graphics are handled by an RTX 3060. That’s the typical configuration with the highest percentage of components. However, if we look in more detail, the RTX 3060 is present in 4.3% of the PCs used on the platform, compared with almost 30% for 6-core CPUs, while 41.49% of machines have 16 GB RAM!
In short, when you take the platform’s stats into account, the fact that the Steam Machine outperforms 70% of PCs on the market is quite credible. It remains to be seen under what conditions the console will run games… And, of course, what about the price!