It's funny - if you look at the most recent steam hardware survey results this new steam machine almost exactly matches the median system - 16gb ram, 8gb vram, 6 physical cores, and the GPU looks like be roughly similar in perf to a 3060 too.
If this gets enough adoption for gamedevs to prioritize support when testing games that's likely not going to be a huge problem. 16gb ram + 8gb vram is also similar to what all the current gen consoles have, although all three have the advantage of it being unified between the CPU and GPU so they can use more than 8gb vram if needed (16gb, 16gb, 12gb total system ram for PS5, XSX, Switch 2 respectively)
It's close to an RX7500/7600 paired with a Ryzen 5 7500/7600. Depending on the price it can be fine for gaming. Nobody expects enthusiast performance. It has to be priced to be competitive against consoles and lower end DIY PCs.
This is my concern as well. I suspect this will struggle versus a PS5 because even though the PS5 only has 16GB total, its unified, so it can be allocated more towards VRAM if needed.
If they are selling this for $300-400, it will be a hot item and I cant fault them at all. If it sells for $500+, its hard to recommend over a PS5 for most users.
1080p is already a struggle for some games with 8GB of VRAM in 2025, and this will probably be expected to have a service life of 5+ years.
The Steam Machine looks to me like it'll become a great optimization target to hit (if it becomes popular enough, which it probably will). Solid, predictable targets are always great, and now we have yet another one that doesn't have the downside of being in some insular, exclusive dev space like PlayStation, Xbox or Nintendo. It's just a PC, in an open eco system, with predictable and decent hardware.
This is the real answer. Vram is largely dependent on the resolution you're running, and at 1080p 8gb vram is fine. People who want 20GB vram are probably going to build their own machines anyways, the steam machine is meant to be a console replacement to my understanding.
I'm thinking maybe it's unified memory? They posted "16GB DDR5 + 8GB GDDR6 VRAM" as the specs as RAM. Typically you'd put the GPU-only VRAM together with the GPU, but the GPU has it's own separate row in the specs. Kind of suspicious how they placed those together like that, isn't it?
foresto|3 months ago
It might be easy to forget, but most gamers are not using the higher-end hardware that enthusiast discussions tend to focus on.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
Perhaps an 8GB limit will encourage game studios to allow more time for optimization, which seems to have fallen out of fashion in recent years.
I imagine this will also help keep the price down, which is always nice.
p1necone|3 months ago
p1necone|3 months ago
close04|3 months ago
dwood_dev|3 months ago
If they are selling this for $300-400, it will be a hot item and I cant fault them at all. If it sells for $500+, its hard to recommend over a PS5 for most users.
1080p is already a struggle for some games with 8GB of VRAM in 2025, and this will probably be expected to have a service life of 5+ years.
lelandbatey|3 months ago
The steam machine will be a very good upgrade!
59nadir|3 months ago
MitPitt|3 months ago
guywithahat|3 months ago
Banditoz|3 months ago
embedding-shape|3 months ago
Rohansi|3 months ago