Review: Valve Steam Machine

Valve claims the Steam Machine can hit “up to 4K at 120 Hz” on supported displays via HDMI 2.0 connections (albeit using AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling tech, rather than at native resolutions), but the Steam Machine Verified label it will be applying to games on the Steam Store is based on a 1920 x 1080 benchmark.

I’ve been testing it on a 55-inch 4K OLED TV and a 27-inch 1080p desktop monitor, both with 120-Hz refresh rates, both using HDMI. I used four games as references: Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, Crimson Desert, Lego Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, and Japanese RPG Granblue Fantasy Relink: Endless Ragnarok. Frame rates were tracked using the Steam Machine’s built-in monitor, accessed by tapping the “…” button on the Steam Controller and activating the “Performance Overlay.”

On the TV, Spider-Man defaulted its output resolution to 2048 x 1152 but hit a smooth 60 frames per second (fps). Manually switching to 3840 x 2160 (full 4K) without AMD’s FSR active and all graphics settings at “High” dropped performance to 30 to 45 fps. With FSR on and “Dynamic Resolution Scaling” set to a 60 fps target, the Steam Machine delivered, running in 4K at the desired frame rate, with no noticeable image degradation. My HDR-enabled TV also allowed for improved colors and contrast. On the PC monitor, the Steam Machine easily pushed out a 1080p image at 60 fps, though the panel lacks HDR, so everything looked a little muted. Overall, this would prove to be the best-performing game of the lot.

Crimson Desert is interesting—a notorious resource hog and officially unsupported on the Steam Machine. However, it boots and loads just fine. With graphics quality set to a demanding “Ultra,” FSR on, and upscale resolution at “Native Anti-Aliasing,” it pushed out a not-terrible 40 fps … in menus. In-game, that dropped to a juddery 20 to 25 fps. Dropping quality to “High” saw a marginal improvement to 25 to 30 fps, but introduced screen tearing during cutscenes.

Cutting the upscale resolution to “Quality” squeezed out 30 fps, and cutting further to “Balanced” saw the game brushing up against 60 fps, but image quality began to suffer, particularly with environmental details like foliage and water.

On the 1080p monitor, things were much better, serving a solid 60 fps even with settings at “Ultra” and advanced features like shadow ray tracing and advanced weather effects active. Still, not bad for a game that Valve says you can’t run on the Steam Machine at all.

Lego Batman on the TV, at 4K with FSR on and graphics quality set to “High” (rather than “Epic,” its best setting), saw wildly variable frame rates of 15 to 45 fps. Focusing FSR on performance got a reliable 45 fps, occasionally spiking to 75 to 90 fps, but dropping below 30 fps for vehicle sections. On the monitor, at 1080p, with settings at “High” and upscaling to “Ultra Performance,” I finally got a sweet 60 fps, but any attempts to improve image quality tanked it back down to around 30 fps. However, getting good results was just as problematic on the powerful MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ gaming handheld, which convinces me that the game is poorly optimized on PC—and therefore that the Steam Machine can’t handle poorly optimized games.