Valve announced three new hardware devices – a game console Steam Machine, a virtual reality device Steam Frame and game controller Steam Controller. The devices are scheduled to go on sale early next year. The cost has not yet been announced.
The Steam Machine console is equipped with the SteamOS distribution, based on Arch Linux and providing two interface modes – the Steam shell and the KDE Plasma desktop environment. To speed up the launch of games, a composite Gamescope server based on the Wayland protocol is used. The distribution comes with a read-only root file system, uses an atomic update installation mechanism, supports Flatpak packages and uses the PipeWire multimedia server.
The hardware is based on a SoC specially designed for the device with a desktop-class processor based on the AMD Zen 4 microarchitecture (6 cores, 12 threads, 4.8 GHz) and a GPU of the RDNA3 family (28 computing units, 2.45GHz, claimed performance is 6 times higher than the GPU from the Steam Deck). The device is equipped with 16 GB of RAM and 8 GB of video memory, as well as a 512 GB or 2 TB SSD storage, depending on the model. Ports and expansions include: micro SD slot, DisplayPort 1.4 (4K 240Hz, 8K 60Hz), HDMI 2.0 (4K 120Hz), Gigabit Ethernet, one USB-C 3.2 port, 4 USB-A ports, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. The size of the console is approximately 15x16x16 cm.
The Steam Machine has a built-in wireless interface for interaction with the Steam Controller game controller, which, depending on the configuration, is included in the package or can