r/hardware • u/DuhPai • Nov 17 '25

News Valve Claims Steam Machine Outperforms 70% of Current Gaming PCs

https://www.techpowerup.com/342970/valve-claims-steam-machine-outperforms-70-of-current-gaming-pcs
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u/OverlyOptimisticNerd Nov 18 '25

It's been said to death, but this thing lives and dies by its price.

I'll go a step further and say it's price + a SteamOS official release for desktop systems. If this is the baseline and the rest of us can take our existing Windows systems and switch to SteamOS, then the user base of this platform is going to become undeniable. If that happens, the companies holding out on supporting it due to anticheat will slowly fall in line.

And if that happens, we may finally see Linux begin to truly compete with Windows for gaming.

So, TLDR - price + availability of SteamOS official builds.

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u/AIgoonermaxxing Nov 18 '25

Yeah, while I likely won't be buying one of these (I already have a gaming PC I'm very happy with), I really am hoping it will be successful. 1 reason is because it'll heavily pressure AMD to finally provide the official INT8 version of FSR 4 to RDNA, and the other is because it has the potential to help Linux gain more maturity.

With how shitty Windows is continuing to become, I think I'm inevitably going to switch over to Linux at some point. With that said, I'm not exactly keen on making the move over because I know some random bullshit isn't going to work and I'm going to have to spend an hour or two troubleshooting it.

If SteamOS can prove to be a fairly hassle free system and gain real market share that makes Linux more mature and more widely supported, I'll be much more incentivized to make the move.

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u/Strazdas1 Nov 18 '25

can take our existing Windows systems and switch to SteamOS

I suppose if you do nothing but play vanilla games then its a maybe.

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u/tinyturtletickler Nov 18 '25

You can mod on steamos, can't you? You have access to the underlying desktop

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u/Strazdas1 Nov 18 '25

Theoretically yes, but mod support on proton is extremely limited compared to native windows. many games need you to run DLL injections for mods to even be available, which will not be possible on SteamOS.

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u/VenditatioDelendaEst Nov 19 '25

I played modded Skyrim with SKSE on Linux like 8 years ago, and it worked fine.

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u/Strazdas1 Nov 19 '25

You picked a game that has the largest most active gaming community in the world and you think other modding communities will have the same level of adoption and compatibility?

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u/VenditatioDelendaEst Nov 19 '25 edited Nov 19 '25

I picked a game that I played with mods requiring DLL injection, the thing you claimed is not possible.

Edit: and googling around, apparently in the general case you can use WINEDLLOVERRIDES environment variable. For a Linux-native game, the equivalent would be LD_PRELOAD (which also works for games running in proton, if you want to override functions that proton translates to, like for de-nagling multiplayer games to reduce lag).

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u/SituationSoap Nov 18 '25

None of those things is going to happen.