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Valve Claims Steam Machine Outperforms 70% of Current Gaming PCs
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this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2025
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I'm sure it does, considering even my old busted laptop has hit the Steam hardware survey before, but it's not one of my primary gaming PCs.
Another way of saying this is Steam Machine is slower than about 44 million gaming PCs (30% x 147 MAU, a very conservative number since that's monthly and number of users instead of number of computers).
The fact that its GPU is slower than the 5 year old PS5's, and it only has 8GB VRAM, makes me question Steam Machine's longevity. And it apparently can't do FSR4 cause it's RDNA3.
It needs to be cheap.
This thing has 1/6th the ongoing utility cost of a spec’d out gaming pc (assuming 850w psu and something like 4090 and 7900x3d). Granted it’s not much to run a pc like that, like 15-20 a month, but running this thing will cost like $2-3 at most. Its power supply is 43% smaller than a ps5s.
Not gonna be the deciding factor for most people but something to consider. Does 4k120 really matter vs 4k60? Do you really need to turn every slider to ultra? In a world that is boiling with energy costs that are ever increasing?
In my humble opinion, 4k is a bit of a joke. I pick a high as possible frame rate over 4k any day of the week.
4K is just another dumb marketing jargon to make people think something is better than what we currently have.
I always bring up the argument of transitioning from VHS to DVD, there were vast improvements there in terms of quality. DVD is still around, why? Because it just does good enough and that's what all anyone can ask for. Blu-Ray is incredibly old now and eventually will take DVD's spot someday as the 'good enough' standard because really streaming is dependent on internet connection speed which can vary the quality which exits itself out of the argument.
And with every gaming generation that comes and goes, it has become harder and harder to notice any groundbreaking differences. It began to get harder when we went from PS3 - PS4 for example. It is now all about just resolutions and nothing else.
At the moment the only noticeable problem in PC gaming is the existence of spinning drives. Least for multiplayer games.
In a lot of newer games it's become absurdly noticeable. You have a 5 min queue then your stuck waiting 10 mins on top of that cause some dipshit is loading off a spinning drive.
It's gotten to the point iv actually seen some Chinese games literally prevent you from installing the game at all. If you have ANY spinning drive in your system. And prevents if from booting the game if you have one in your system. Because it causes that much of a problem. Endless customer complaints of horrid queue and loading times cause your waiting on people with slow drives.
Hard drives no longer are in the just good enough group for new games. It's been a slow transfer but we are finally starting to see a hard line being draw in the sand. And I don't expect it to slow down at this point.
With AAA game graphics, 4K is kind of silly.
It kind of makes sense on consoles with fixed hardware when the devs design specifically to hit that target.
On a PC, I think high framerate 1440p is a much more reasonable goal, but frame generation and upscaling are sold to consumers like some magical solution to poor performance instead.
Yeah I tried playing Dispatch on my TV in 4k, and it sounded and felt like my laptop was going to catch on fire.
Lowered the TVs resolution to 1080p, and the game looks exactly the same and the fans barely even turn on.
That could be an optimization issue though I guess.
4k is 4x the resolution of 1080p, so that's not totally surprising. Good thing you did this too, because I was reading some comments just the other day about people's gaming laptops failing because of repeated/prolongued overheating.
Gaming laptops are notorious for dying from overheating. These things need to be meticulously maintained if you want to use them for their intended purpose for long.
Interesting, thanks for confirming!