Steam Machine Live Journal

[Will]

So my Steam Machine is finally in hand after spending a few weeks with @EposVox for the review. (Video and thread here: Why would you EVER buy a console again? Steam Machine Review (Console & PC Gamer POV) ) Most of my first impressions align with his review but I want to put down some thoughts of my own and I’ll likely put together some kind of text review myself.

That said I’m going to publicly journal my thoughts after each session here before I go back and try to turn all this into some kinda review.

So, right off the rip I gotta say Valve really knows how to make regular cardboard feel special. I can tell there is a lot of effort put into making all this as sustainably as possible but they still manage to make all their products feel like a spectacle when you open them up. The cute designs on the boxes, the way everything opens up to you and displays to you. I don’t want to gush too much about cardboard here but its part of what makes this console feel so special.

Starting the console up I would highly recommend using the HDMI cable that comes with the unit as the other HDMI cables I had in my media center already were not playing nice as far as handshakes go. I don’t think there’s anything wrong there as I went on to play the steam machine for a few hours just that if you plug yours in and it shows no image with a pulsing blue light bar: power down and use the HDMI that came with the unit.

There was about 30 minutes spent getting everything logged in and updates flowing and after that I was ready to start installing games. I tried the following titles last night:

• Jotunslayer
• Marvel Cosmic Invasion
• How Many Dudes
• Warhammer 40k Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters

I also installed but did not have time to get to:

• Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
• Gears Tactics
• Baldurs Gate 3

It’ll probably come as no surprise that games like Cosmic Invasion and How Many Dudes run great given these are pretty casual 2d games but I used this as an opportunity to also test out the clipping features on the Steam Machine. Using the default configuration I’m able to hold a cache of about 120 minutes and I configured the clip shortcut to grab the last 60 seconds. About half way through setting that up I had wondered how I was going to get this clip off the Steam Machine only to be surprised by the ability to send clips directly to my phone via the Steam app.

cosmicinvasionsteammachine

Quality is obviously a bit degraded when you do this but in a pinch if you just want to send a cool clip to someone this is very well done and pretty seamless. There’s also nothing stopping you from transferring the full quality clip to an external drive if you want/need it.

It did not take long before I was up to my old BS again as I quickly found myself diving deep back into Jotunslayer now that I can play my main save again but this time in the living room.

jotunslayersteammachine

This also is a decent opportunity to shout out the pretty solid media player integration that is here. Obviously Jotunslayer does not by default use the God of War: Ragnarok soundtrack but since it was included in my purchase of that game it just automatically shows up in media player section. My only complaint is I wish I could stream these albums rather than dedicate precious SSD space but this is something I will hopefully resolve soon with an added microsd card and external SSD.

Jotunslayer ran fantastic with no frame drops and I honestly felt like I could dial it up to native 4k if I wanted but I kept almost everything I played at 1440p and scaled that to 4k @ high settings. I gotta say coming from the Switch 2 version, which I have been playing for the past week or so, this is really just a stellar experience by comparison. (Context: Switch 2 port is 1080p30 and it doesn’t really hold that 30fps at all.)

The last game I tried was also quite heavy and that was Warhammer 40k Chaos Gate. I love a good tactics game be it XCOM, FF Tactics, Midnight Suns, or Gears Tactics I love them all. And I was surprised to discover that someone had made a tactics 40k game and even more surprised that I’d never heard of it. Built on the unity engine this 2022 tactics game looks and runs fantastic. Highly detailed models and maps, tons of blood and particle effects, really slick looking real time cutscenes, all accompanied by great voice acting and music. I again ran everything at 1440p scaled to 4k but I did notice some frame instability as the game defaulted me to the highest graphics settings. I turned down texture settings to medium as well as Far Clip Distance and Debris. I saw no noticeable change in visual fidelity and that was enough to lock everything to 60fps.

I spent about 4 hours with the Steam Machine in my initial time with it and came away thoroughly impressed. That said though the next couple of games I’ve lined up to test on it are ones that I’ve been dying to get back to and have been waiting for this little cube of magic to arrive to do so.

That’s all for now, will be back.

[EposVox]

Very excited to see where this goes.

[BerrieV]

Very interesting to read this already, and also nice to read that you’ve enjoyed your time with it so far! I’m curious to know what other games you’re about to play on it and how they perform. Are you planning on playing any non-Steam games as well?

[EposVox]

Fun timing: RetroArch is now on Steam and Deck Verified. You’d still need desktop mode for moving in BIOS and ROMs and such, but hey it’s something.
RetroArch on Steam

[Will]

Day 2 Update:

Spent time playing Baldurs Gate 3 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth last night and this morning.

We’ll start with the good first:

Baldurs Gate 3 ran with high settings @ 1440p60 scaled up to 4k. I was also using FSR in the quality mode though I tried it both with and without and did not notice any performance change. I played the opening hours of the game and for nearly all of it framerate remained locked to 60fps and it looked as clean and sharp as it does on my main PC rig.

Just for context I’m comparing against my main PC and the PS5 Pro as far as visuals and performance are concerned.

Main PC Specs:

• 4080 Super
• AMD 7950x3D
• 64gb DDR5

Only performance hiccups I saw were exclusively in cutscenes and it was barely a 1-3fps drop.

Unfortunately Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth did not fair as well. I’ve got a save with about 130 hours on it and I’m much later in the game. I’ve tried a bunch of different configurations to make this game run a bit better but unfortunately I think this is actually an issue with the game and something Square Enix is going to have to address. To put it simply: this game has a severe VRAM usage issue in that if you have less than 10gb of VRAM available it will not run well. You may not notice it right away either as the opening sections of the game are a bit more bare but as soon as you get into any of the major hub areas or in the open sections it becomes very apparent.

In my current save I’m in Cosmo Canyon and I can’t take more than a few steps before I see intense framerate stutter. Now I also have my old living room PC to compare against which previously had a 2070super in it but I upgraded it to a 5060. Both of these cards have less than 10gb of vram and both showcased the same issues I described above. The only difference is with the 5060 I was able to achieve locked playable 60fps by setting texture resolution to low. All other settings could be set at anything else up to high but textures had to be on low settings. The only caveat to this is there was still shader compilation stutter and frame drops present.

It would be so easy to just say this is because the Steam Machine is underpowered but I really don’t think that’s the case. Even on my main PC which should be more than capable of running this game fully maxed out in native 4k experienced intense shader compilation stutter and framerate drops in bigger hub areas. My main PC has literally double the VRAM available to it and experiences the same issues. So with that said I’m confident this is something Square Enix needs to address with an update.

Just comparing visual fidelity to the other platforms I have the game on I’d put this somewhere between the PS5 Pro and a higher end PC. Steam Machine produces a very clean and crisp image, but its really just the weird performance issues that drag the experience down. I’m going to explore some modder created performance tweaks to try and clean up the experience a bit but I may be taking this playthrough back to the PS5 Pro until Square Enix fixes the PC port of this game.

So one genuine surprise with BG3 and one confirmation of what I kinda already knew with FF7Rebirth. Gonna sink some time into BG3 heading into this weekend and might finally get back to DBZ: Kakarot.

That’s all for now, more to come.

[Will]

Day 3ish update:

Ok so this next update brings with it my first honest to goodness bit of friction with this thing. But I’m happy to say it is more on the game dev for the specific game I’m about to talk about and not actually on Valve.

So wednesday night I was playing FF7 Rebirth and the game just randomly stopped reading all inputs. All aspects of steam worked fine, I could bring up the overlay just fine, exit/launch titles, access all settings, but as soon as I’d get in game FF7 Rebirth would not register input. Looking online this seems to be a new bug that was introduced with the latest update where the game has trouble detecting and switching to whatever input you are using.

Mouse and keyboard always works, but controller input might disconnect and never reconnect.

I tried every solution I found online including:

• Trying Xbox, DS4, DS5, and Nintendo Pro controllers all of which work in steam and work in every game but did not work in FF7 Rebirth.
• Switching to the steam beta branch
• Switching back to the stable branch
• Unpairing my controller and repairing it.
• Connecting it with a cable
• Upgrading the firmware
• Forcing steam input
• Disabling steam input
• Rebooting

And the last thing I was going to try was reinstalling the game which I really didn’t want to do since it’s like 130 gigs and I’m trying to play tonight. So what did work?

In the game specific steam settings, which can be found by clicking the cog on the game screen shown below:

Select “Properties” > Go to controller settings > disable steam input on this game specifically.

Then use literally any other controller than the steam controller. Yes this solution is kind of a bummer because I really enjoy how the steam controller feels but the alternative is this game just straight up doesn’t work. I find this work around to be completely unacceptable on Square Enix’s part and I’m honestly kinda shocked such a popular game is in this state on PC. Hopefully Square Enix releases an update addressing this soon.

The other thing that didn’t click to me until tonight was what the steam internal render resolution setting was actually doing. At a glance it looks like you are setting your console to run in 1080p but what its actually saying and doing is it is a setting for the internal render resolution that Steam Machine will then upscale to your displays native resolution. So while the game is technically running at 1080p internally the final rendered output is a crisp 4K (or 1440p if that’s all you have) image that both looks and plays great. Having access to this game on both P55 Pro and on my main PC I went and took a look at both just to refresh my memory. PS5 Pro and my main PC both turn in the results you’d expect: a great looking game. But where the PS5 Pro version fails a little is there is a very noticeable sharpening filter applied over the image that doesn’t look great. But aside from that the frame rate is rock solid and this game running on a 4080 super is about as good as you’d expect.

I say all this because prior to discovering these menus this game ran absolutely horrid for me. And I found this confusing given the amount of videos showing it running at 1440p and above at 60fps on high settings. FF7 Rebirth notoriously has a memory issue where GPU’s with 10gb of VRAM or less just run exceptionally poorly requiring you to bump texture resolution down to low. But here is steam machine running the game mostly maxed out and really the only setting that needed to be changed was the internal render resolution.

[edit]

Hey so I forgot there was one other thing: I disabled steams capture function while playing this game. I think FF7 Rebirth might be right on the performance line where it is just barely holding 60fps and Steam Machine can’t really handle much else in the background. Thought this was a CPU limitation but after talking to Addie it might be a GPU one. Either way: save yourself about 10fps and disable background recording while playing FF7 Rebirth.

[edit]

I think that most people who read through the spec sheet and maybe even saw these menus just fundamentally did not understand what was being stated and what these settings do which has forced this really toxic discourse around this things specs. People who have never tried it/wont try it and folks that just want to hate for hates sake despite the fact that they’ll happily use FSR/DLSS/PSSR in other games as if that’s not literally the same thing.

Anyway I’m back to my run in FF7 Rebirth at this point via the DS5 and enjoying myself but man I wish Square was better about their PC ports. I hope they fix this game, but I will probably be done with it by the time they do.

That’s all for now, more to come.

[Will]

Small update today cause I didn’t get as much time last night to play much of anything but I did want to take a second to call out the storefront UI and I guess the Steam Machine’s UI in general. I don’t know when the last time you logged into your Xbox or Playstation was but they have truly gone above and beyond to make sure they can sell you as much stuff as humanly possible.

Full screen banner ads with a prompt, banner ads at the top and bottom, widget ad inserts next to functional widgets (like the battery level on on PS5), animated promos that pop up on boot, message spam selling you things (I literally have more messages on xbox FROM xbox about stuff to buy), and the list goes on.

That is just not the case on SteamOS and frankly is not the case on Steam either. You can disable basically all notifications and that includes the steam home screen popup telling you about sales and new releases. This is such a breath of fresh air to not be treated like a commodity. Which brings me to todays update: I went poking around in the store and I found the SteamOS store UI to be honestly quite nice. Now to be clear I’m not sure if everything I saw presentation wise is also available on the main steam client, it probably is in Big Picture Mode, but for me this was my first time seeing it. One section in particular that I appreciated was an updated calendar showing big releases on specific days:

And even better it also shows what is already in your library and what you have wishlisted so you don’t have to waste time buttoning into each title. I know its such a simple thing but again: it is really nice not being treated like the only value I offer is my money. Kind of sad that we’re at a point where the bare minimum is a surprising thing to see.

Hoping to play some more FF7Rebirth tonight but might be a day or so before I get some time do that.

That’s all for now, more later.

[Will]

Day… whatever update:

Took a break from FF7 Rebirth to check out MGS4 now that it’s finally available on modern platforms. Man do I have some serious nostalgia for this game. I haven’t played it since 2008 but lemme tell you I did absolutely all there was to do in this game at that time. Beat the game on the hardest difficulty’s, unlocked every weapon, every music track, ever bonus gadget. And put an equal amount of time in on Metal Gear Online as well. But it being stuck on the PS3 meant I wasn’t really booting it up as much. I still have my original PS3 BC console just in case I’d want to play MGS4 so needless to say I’m stoked that we can play this on PC now.

This game has always had some incredible art design but seeing it for the first time in 4K @ a flawless 60fps it is really just taking me right back in time. I feel like I’m seeing this game for the first time. Oh yeah and as mentioned I bumped the resolution up to 4K as I wanted to see just how well the Steam Machine can handle some 4K games.

METAL GEAR SOLID 4 Guns of the Patriots Master Collection Version 2026 08 28 10 42 15 PM

I continue to be thoroughly impressed with what this thing is capable of.

Oh and that video was edited and posted from the steam machine. The clipping functions that Valve have given us here are seriously impressive.

That’s all for now, more later.

[EposVox]

It’s kinda crazy that it still feels so futuristic to run games from a console from 20 years ago, but it does!

[Will]

Ok I’m back with another update.

Spent some time exploring my library a bit over the last two weeks and at this point I think I’m more surprised when something DOESN’T run or runs poorly. Games I tried:

Onimusha: Way of the Sword
Zone of the Enders: 2nd Runner MARS Edition
TerraTech: Legion

I come with a bevy of screenshots for Onimusha mostly because I think at this point my focus is entirely on proving this thing is more than capable for most games and probably most people. I’m not really enjoying the discourse surrounding it which thus far appears to be: too expensive, underpowered, not worth it. I think an argument can be made for the first one for sure but the other two? I’ve yet to find a game outside of Halo Campaign Evolved that both looks and runs bad. (And that specific example has issues on all platforms so hardly an example of what to expect with the majority of titles.)

But don’t take my word for it, see for yourself:

These are all taken from the Steam Machine running internally at 1080p and scaled up to 4k. I ran the game on a mix of high and medium presets, no frame gen, and I used the quality mode within the game as well. I did bump it up to 1440p as well and while the framerate mostly held solid I had to lower a few settings that I felt impacted the visuals too much so I left it at the 1080p internal render that the above screenshots were taken at.

These were taken on my main PC which as a reminder my main rig runs a 4080 super, 64 gigs of DDR5, and a 7850x3d.

Does this look better? Absolutely! But I’m also running it at literally 4x the render settings that I have it set to on the steam machine. I’m frankly not surprised at all that it looks this good. But I think the point is that it is good enough or close enough especially when sat on the couch. I think that’s the one thing I wish folks who are down on this thing would just understand better: you’re not right up on the screen you don’t need the raw pixel count. The scaled 4k output is so impressive it is often times really tough to tell it’s not native unless you’re really looking for it.

And I’m kinda not sure where that thought process was lost along the way. It really isn’t like consoles aren’t employing similar techniques to achieve their visuals or literally any modern PC game that supports DLSS/FSR/etc. I dunno, I could rant about this endlessly (and kinda have with @EposVox lol) but I hope that the discourse surrounding this things specs matures a bit the more this thing becomes available.

Anyway onto the other two titles that saw the most play: TerraTech Legion and Zone of the Enders 2 MARS Edition.

TerraTech Legion is not fully supported at the moment but it runs completely fine natively in 4k, 1440p, and obviously in 1080p scaled outputs. Just to guarantee framerate stability I chose to run it at 1440p60 scaled to 4k at the medium preset but I was able to get the game running reasonably well in 4k with mostly high presets. Worst thing I can say about this experience is the load times are pretty terrible and border on the line of: is this broken? There were a few times where it hung on the loading screen for an excessive amount of time and it had me trying to figure out what Linux’s “ctrl alt delete” is lol. But that subsided after the first load and hasn’t done it since. I’m sure they’ll also iron that out if the game ever becomes officially certified.

And lastly I installed Zone of the Enders 2. I had a taste for some more good Kojima games after finishing MGS4 and similar to that game I hadn’t touched ZOE2 more or less since it came out. I bought the original HD remasters but was disappointed when I discovered how poor those ports were. The MARS edition of ZOE2 only includes that one game but it is a from the ground up port for modern systems. Modern graphics settings for just about every graphics option, all the cutscenes are real time, and all the anime cutscenes have been cleaned up and scaled to 4k. I dunno why I was so surprised by this game, maybe it was just not having seen it in a while or maybe it was the high quality motion blur that Cygames implemented but something about this game just blew me away from a visuals standpoint.

Yeah the textures are a little crusty and some of the voice acting hasn’t held up. But this game is so stylized and the gameplay so snappy and tight it can easily still trade blows with any modern mech game coming out today. Reinforced my long standing opinion that of all the games Kojima has produced: ZOE remains the best of his non MGS titles.

Not sure how many more updates I’ll be posting as I feel like I’ve reached a point where I think I know enough about this thing to maybe put together some kind of text review. But I think I’ll give it the remainder of September before I commit to that. I wanna try and play a game to completion entirely on the Steam Machine before I officially call it.

But that’s all I got for now, more later.

[Will]

This isn’t really an update so much as it’s gonna be a bit of a video dump. Wanted to show off some more titles running in 4k/1440p. All these videos were recorded in 4k unless specified otherwise. All clips were recorded with the Steam recorder and uploaded directly to youtube from the Steam Machine. Steam Machine’s recorder is a little crunchy with fine details (like the grass in the clip I’m about to show) but for the most part this is a good replacement for Shadow Play.

Possibly the most impressive one first: Death Stranding.

DEATH STRANDING DIRECTOR'S CUT 2026 08 30 2 22 56 AM

Highly detailed, highly cinematic, and best of all: high framerate. I’m running the game here natively in 4k on high settings. No tricks. We’re locked to 60fps here with a few exceptions mostly leaving/entering your base and at the start/end of cutscenes. But aside from that Steam Machine runs Kojima’s first outing with the Decima engine very well. I would recommend bumping this down to 1440p native and using FSR to get it back up to 4k just to iron out some of those remaining fps drops as well as letting you push the graphics settings out a bit.

Next up is Final Fantasy Resonance.

FINAL FANTASY RESONANCE DEMO 2026 09 05 6 26 52 PM

Once again running native 4k with all settings dialed up to high this, expectedly, ran great without issue. Square’s HD2D art style has been in use for a bunch of their retro remakes but we’re now starting to get entirely brand new games in this style. I really only scratched the surface of this demo but I’m excited to get in and play more.

Next up a throwback: Brutal Legend

Brütal Legend 2026 09 10 1 43 59 AM

I dunno why I always check this game, probably nostalgia. But I expected this to run perfectly in 4k and was not surprised.

Next title is a new Survivors like game called Wanderburg. Saw it as part of a few mutuals wishlists and a buddy ended up sending it to me. Reminds me a lot of Fat Princess, only played a few runs of this and haven’t really cracked the surface but visually I thought this looked great. The game is running in 1440p and I’m using FSR to bring it up to 4k. 4k didn’t seem out of reach for this game but later on when you’re getting swarmed it can get pretty intense.

Wanderburg 2026 09 10 2 09 53 AM

And the last game I wanna show here is one I spoke about in my previous update. I’d mentioned being surprised by how visually stunning ZOE2 still is and just wanted to get some footage up of it for those curious about what I’m talking about. 4k, all settings dialed up to the highest, just a really fantastic and cinematic mech combat game.

ZONE OF THE ENDERS THE 2nd RUNNER MARS ANUBIS ZONE OF THE ENDERS MARS 2026 09 10 1 49 07 AM

Not everything here is super heavy, but I think the point is: if you are afraid that Steam Machine can’t do 4k I’m here to tell you that simply isn’t true. You just can’t assume everything will run well in 4k. We need to get back to critical thinking a bit more, exploring those settings menus and tailoring the experience to the hardware we have. Feels like anymore most folks give up if its not an instant locked 60 on the four quality settings a game ships with.

That’s all for now, more later.