By Valve’s admission, its upcoming Steam Machine desktop doesn’t stand out with its graphics performance. The specs promise decent performance from 1080p to 1440p in most games, with 4K sometimes achievable with the help of FSR upscaling, which is about what you’d expect from a box with a modern mid-range graphics card.
But there is one specification that has caused some concern among Ars staff and others with their eyes on the Steam Machine: the GPU comes with just 8GB of dedicated graphics RAM, an amount that is increasingly becoming a bottleneck for mid-range GPUs like AMD’s Radeon RX 7060 and 9060, or AMD’s GeForce RTX 4060 or 5060. Nvidia.
In our testing of these GPUs, we’ve already encountered some games where the RAM cap limits performance on Windows, particularly at 1440p. But we’ve done more extensive testing on various GPUs with SteamOS, and we can confirm that in current betas, 8GB GPUs struggle even more on SteamOS than they do running the same games at the same settings in Windows 11.
The good news is that Valve is working on solutions, and having a stable platform like the Steam Machine to aim for should help improve things for other hardware with similar configurations. The bad news is that there is still a lot of work to be done.
The numbers
We tested a range of dedicated and integrated Radeon GPUs under SteamOS and Windows, and we’ll share more detailed results in another article soon (with broader observations on SteamOS vs. Windows). But for our purposes here, the two GPUs that highlight the issues most effectively are the 8GB Radeon RX 7600 and the 16GB Radeon RX 7600 XT.
These dedicated GPUs have the advantage of being almost identical to what Valve plans to deliver in the Steam Machine: 32 computing units (CU) instead of Valve’s 28, but the same RDNA3 architecture. They are also, and importantly for our purposes, quite similar to each other: the same physical GPU chip, just with slightly higher clock speeds and more RAM for the 7600 XT than for the regular 7600.
