Valve admits its upcoming desktop Steam Machine won't exceed expectations in terms of graphics performance. The specs promise decent performance from 1080p to 1440p in most games, with 4K occasionally achieved via FSR upscaling – about what you'd expect from a box with a modern mid-range graphics card.
But there's one specification that has caused some concern among the Ars staff and others looking at the Steam Machine: the GPU has just 8GB of dedicated graphics memory, and that amount is slowly becoming a bottleneck for mid-range GPUs like the AMD Radeon RX 7060 and 9060 or the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 or 5060.
In our reviews of these GPUs, we've already encountered some games where the RAM ceiling limits performance on Windows, especially at 1440p. But we've done more extensive testing of different GPUs with SteamOS and can confirm that in the current betas, GPUs with 8GB of memory struggle even more on SteamOS than when running the same games with the same settings on Windows 11.
The good news is that Valve is working on solutions, and having a stable platform like the Steam Machine should help improve the situation for other hardware with similar configurations. The bad news: there's still a lot of work to do.
Numbers
We've tested a variety of dedicated and integrated Radeon GPUs under SteamOS and Windows, and will share more detailed results in another article soon (along with broader observations comparing SteamOS and Windows). But for our purposes, the two GPUs that most effectively highlight the issues are the 8GB Radeon RX 7600 and the 16GB Radeon RX 7600 XT.
The benefit of these dedicated GPUs is that they are almost identical to the ones Valve plans to ship with the Steam Machine: 32 Compute Units (CUs) instead of Valve's 28, but the same RDNA3 architecture. They're also, most importantly for our purposes, very similar to each other – the same physical GPU die, just with a slightly higher clock speed and more RAM for the 7600 XT than the regular 7600.
