Valve
Valve quietly scrubbed a bold 4K gaming promise from the Steam Machine product page after its hardware launched to real-world scrutiny.
That claim had been central to how Valve positioned the $1,049 machine since announcement, so pulling it without a word said a lot. The Steam Machine was sold on the premise that most players could expect 4K gaming at a stable 60fps using FSR upscaling, and Valve repeated that target as recently as February in an official FAQ.
Since launch, though, critics and technical analysts have found the reality considerably messier than the marketing suggested.
The 4K 60fps promise
Specifically, Valve updated its official Steam Machine product page to swap the phrase “4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR” for the considerably softer “Up to 4K gaming with FSR 4.1.”
The change carried no announcement and drew no statement from the company, and it was only users on X and the ResetEra forums who noticed.
In a Steam Machine FAQ earlier this year, the company stated that “in our testing the majority of Steam titles play great at 4K 60FPS with FSR on Steam Machine,” while acknowledging some titles might need to drop to a lower framerate with VRR at 1080p internal resolution, but the reviews that followed told a different story.
Linus Tech Tips’ Linus Sebastian found newer games generally landing between 40 and 50 FPS at 4K settings, with ray tracing performance described as a significant weakness, and argued that Valve had relied heavily on upscaling and lower graphical settings to hit its targets in testing. He also compared the Steam Machine unfavorably to the PS5 on value, a console that starts at a considerably lower price.
At the time of writing, Valve has offered no explanation for the change, and it has not responded to our request for comment
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Ultimately, the update lands at an already sensitive moment for the device. Starting at $1,049, the Steam Machine already faces hard questions about whether its price holds up against existing consoles, and Valve has previously explained its decision not to subsidize the hardware the way Sony and Microsoft do.
