Valve claims Steam Machine outperforms 70% of all PCs on Steam

Valve recently unveiled the Steam Machine, a new dedicated PC gaming system in the shape of a console, and on the heels of the announcement a Valve hardware engineer has revealed what the company was considering when designing the device.

In an interview, Yazan Aldehayyat, a hardware engineer at Valve, explained that one of the things Valve looked at when choosing the components for the Steam Machine was the Steam Hardware Survey. For those who don't know, the Steam Hardware Survey is an opt-in survey that Valve conducts on all Steam users, which amounts to approximately 147 million monthly active users.

The survey involves Steam scanning the hardware and software of the system it's installed on and sending the results back to Valve, which then turns them into data for public viewing. Valve updates the Steam Hardware & Software Survey every month. With it, the public can see interesting information such as which operating system the majority of Steam users are running, average RAM size, average CPU speed, most common GPU, primary display resolution, and much more.

According to Aldehayyat, Valve looked at the survey before choosing the components for the Steam Machine, as the company wanted to gauge where people's home devices are in terms of performance. The components that Valve landed on are slightly better than the average Steam user's PC, with Aldehayyat saying, "The Steam machine is equal or better than 70% of what people have at home."

Notably, the Steam Machine rocks an AMD RDNA 3 GPU with 28 compute units up to 2.45GHz clock speeds, and 8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM.