Valve’s Steam Machine has earned more than its fair share of skeptics, thanks to performance claims and more recently its unfortunate pricing. More recently, though, Valve has seemingly taken some of this criticism to heart and silently changed some of those performance claims on the Steam Machine product page. Where the performance claims on the product page once read “4K gaming at 60 FPS with FSR,” they now say “Up to 4K gaming with FSR 4.1,” removing any mention of FPS and softening the claim with the classic “up to.”
As shown in a number of performance reviews, the Steam Machine sometimes struggles to hit 60 FPS at 1080p in certain games when using maximum or ultra graphics quality, and 1080p would be upscaled to 4K when using FSR 4 in Performance mode. It makes sense that Valve wouldn’t want to misrepresent the performance of the Steam Machine in order to avoid litigation, but many fans are drawing comparisons between the 4K/60 FPS claims and Sony’s 8K marketing for the PS5. It’s also worth noting that this change seems to have been made on June 25, which is the same day that Valve cut off reservations for Steam Machine pre-orders.