Valve has finally broken its radio silence since the announcement of new Steam hardware, sharing that the Steam Machine could support unique upscaling capabilities, in addition to AMD FSR 3. Sadly, as much as the company was hoping to have shared availability and pricing information for its devices, including the Steam Frame and Controller, market forces have forced a change in plans.
In a Steam Hardware Blog post, Valve cites memory and storage shortages as reasons for the lack of news surrounding its forthcoming devices. The company candidly states that “the limited availability and growing prices of these critical components” mean it can’t confidently announce pricing or launch plans yet.
Stretching the definition of “early” 2026, Valve shares that its goal of shipping the Steam Controller, Steam Frame, and Steam Machine by the first half of 2026 hasn’t changed. Importantly, this isn’t a confirmation that the company will ship its devices by that time, but AMD’s CEO believes production is on track.
This development doesn’t come as a surprise. Many people, including me, have called for Valve to launch a barebones Steam Machine as far back as November 2025, in order to keep down costs for those already in possession of compatible hardware. I’m hopeful my initial Steam Machine price estimate of ~£700 holds true, but that’s perhaps optimistic considering current component costs.
While the lack of availability and pricing information is disappointing, Valve has provided some details on its hardware to tide us over. For instance, there’s potential for the Steam Frame to support the Index’s lighthouse base stations through third-party modifications.
Most interesting of all, though, is the brand’s commentary surrounding upscaling. The Steam Machine GPU is surprisingly weak, being based on a low-end RDNA 3 GPU, and it will be heavily reliant on upscaling features to achieve its ~4K/60fps performance targets. However, it looks as though these duties may not necessarily fall to FSR 3.
In its own words, Valve is “investigating improved upscaling” for the Steam Machine, alongside optimised ray tracing performance on a driver level. This could be a sign that the brand plans to bring bespoke FSR 4 support to the system, something we know is already possible on RDNA 3 and 2 GPUs, thanks to a prior FSR source code leak and downloadable FSR 4 mods.
There’s a performance cost to running FSR 4 on RDNA 3 GPUs, owing to the lack of FP8 hardware support in the graphics architecture, but it would greatly boost image quality. Personally, I’d happily sacrifice some frames in service of FSR 4 support on the Steam Machine, as the difference between that upscaler and FSR 3 is truly vast, as I illustrated in my Radeon RX 9070 XT review.
I’ve reached out to Valve to expand on its initial comments, but I wouldn’t expect further clarification anytime soon. More realistically, I believe the brand will share more when it’s ready to talk about the final Steam Machine release details. Here’s hoping we’re not waiting right up until June this year.
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