Steam Machine takes on Sony PS5, Xbox Series X and Steam Deck in specs comparison

Valve has just introduced the Steam Machine, which is the desktop counterpart to the Steam Deck and offers significantly more performance than Valve’s gaming handheld. With an almost cube-shaped chassis measuring about 6.3 inches per side and a volume of roughly 3.1 liters, the Steam Machine is considerably smaller than the Sony PlayStation 5 Slim (from $499 on Amazon). Valve still manages to include an internal power supply, while the fans are said to be relatively quiet.

However, the performance is surprisingly modest. Although the PlayStation 5 is already five years old at this point, Sony’s console still delivers slightly more performance. Valve equips the system with an AMD Ryzen processor with six Zen 4 performance cores, boost clock speeds up to 4.8 GHz and a TDP of 30 watts. Furthermore, the company opted for an RDNA 3 GPU clocked up to 2.45 GHz, a power draw of 110 watts and 8GB GDDR6 VRAM. This configuration is roughly comparable to that of a laptop or mini PC with an AMD Ryzen 5 8640HS and an AMD Radeon RX 7600M.

Steam Machine is slower than Sony PS5 and Xbox Series X

As a direct comparison between the Steam Machine and Steam Deck OLED shows, Valve’s desktop device delivers more than five times the GPU performance thanks to the larger graphics card with 28 CUs and higher clock speeds. That said, both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X still offer more GPU power, by about 15.6% and 36.5% respectively.

According to our benchmark results, the AMD Radeon RX 7600M is quick enough to run games like Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2 or Dragon's Dogma 2 smoothly at 1080p resolution with high settings. To play at 4K as promoted by Valve, upscaling technologies such as FSR are required.