There’s no way around it, the Steam Machine is extremely expensive for the level of performance you get out of it. I still think that anyone who’s only looking to play games would probably be better served with a PS5 or an Xbox Series X, especially if you don’t already have a Steam library. In general, the Steam Machine performs very similarly to the PS5, even if it falls short in some of the games I’ve tested.
As a follow up to my review of the Steam Machine, I pulled up four games to test side-by-side with the PS5 in ‘Performance’ mode, which typically locks games to a solid 60 fps, to see exactly how well Valve’s mini PC holds up.
And while there are certainly moments where Valve’s little cube falls on its face a bit, I’m still surprised by how much power Valve was able to get into such a tiny package.
Consoles vs PC
It’s so hard to directly compare the PS5 and the Steam Machine. PCs, like the Steam Machine, have way more room for adjusting the way that games look and perform, while consoles will typically have two preset options that don’t really give you a good idea of what’s changing.
In general, console games tend to be optimized around specific frame rate targets, changing the internal resolution in order to maintain it. There are some games that’ll let you do that on PC, for sure, but typically it’ll just automatically adjust the upscaling factor for DLSS, FSR, XeSS or whichever other upscaling method the game uses.
For the games that don’t support dynamic resolution, you have to dial in the settings yourself. Typically this means you can scale down the image quality enough to get more than 60 fps in most games – including on the Steam Machine – but particularly busy scenes might cause the frame rate to drop below that target. That doesn’t sound great, but that’s just PC gaming, baby.
Usually, when I’m running weaker hardware, particularly when I’m reviewing something like a handheld gaming PC, I try to target a frame rate higher than 60 when possible, so that when intense effects pop up out of nowhere, I don’t drop to 30 fps. It’s not a perfect solution, and sometimes it straight up doesn’t work, but it’s just a rule of thumb anyways.
How Does The Steam Machine Perform?
To test the Steam Machine against the PS5, I set quality settings to each game’s ‘medium’ preset. Then, I set the outgoing resolution to 4K (3840×2160) with FSR set to ‘Performance’. That’s not a perfect 1:1, but it does give a good baseline of how the Steam Machine performs compared to the PS5. Because while most developers will make finer adjustments to things like shadows or global illumination, generally speaking, the ‘medium’ preset is pretty close to what you’d see on the PS5.
I tested four games; Cyberpunk 2077, 007 First Light, Resident Evil Requiem, and Death Stranding 2. Surprisingly, at least in Cyberpunk and Resident Evil, the Steam Machine had no problem matching the console. However, the other two didn’t quite hold up.
In Cyberpunk 2077, the Steam Machine averaged 68 fps at the medium preset with FSR 3 set to Performance at 4K. There are a couple moments where Valve’s mini PC dips down to 56 fps, but most of the time it’s running at an extremely smooth 60-70 fps instead.
That’s exactly what the PS5 version does, too. CD Projekt Red have put in a ton of work over the last five years and optimized Cyberpunk to run super well on everything. And on the PS5, it runs at a completely locked 60 fps. So it doesn’t quite have the same highs that the Steam Machine version does, but it doesn’t have the same lows either.
However, when I zoom in on Cyberpunk, the PS5 version looks a little bit better than what’s running on the PS5. If I zoom in on Jackie’s earring, you can see much more detail on the PS5 version. Likewise, zooming in on the wallpaper behind him, the little designs are more blurry on the Steam Machine. This is a side effect of the lower texture quality on the Medium preset, and there is probably enough VRAM budget left on the Steam Machine to tweak that.
Likewise, in Resident Evil Requiem, the Steam Machine averages 60 fps, well, 59.74 if you want to be exact. I tested in the first part the game, where you’re walking through a rainy street, leading to the Wrenwood Hotel. There are a couple moments where the Steam Machine drops to the low 50s, like when Grace is talking to the cop in a cutscene, but for the most part the Steam Machine has no problem staying locked between 58 and 63 fps.
The PS5 version, just like with Cyberpunk, is just locked at 60 fps on its performance mode. But while the console version technically doesn’t have the same lows, you probably wouldn’t notice the difference when you’re actually sitting down and playing the game.
The Steam Machine really starts to struggle with 007 First Light, though. I talked about this game a little bit in my review, but the new James Bond game averages 53 fps at 4K, with FSR set to ‘performance’ and a mixture of medium and low settings. However, the base PS5 stays locked at 60 fps on its performance mode. That seems pretty close at first glance, but there are moments where, for instance, lots of explosions go off, where the Steam Machine drops to about 35 fps for a moment.
That’s a lot worse than the PS5, but by dropping the final resolution to 1800p on the Steam Machine, the frame rate goes up to around a 70 fps average, without the same drops. And, even with that lower resolution, the Steam Machine version actually looks a bit better.
For instance, here if you zoom into the explosive barrels and crates in the scene I tested, they actually look cleaner and less fuzzy on the Steam Machine than the PS5. After all, rather than allowing for a lower frame rate, the PS5 drops the internal resolution as low as 720p to keep the frame rate as high as possible.
But even when 007 First Light isn’t pushing either system super hard, the Steam Machine still has a sharper image. At the beginning of my sample, when Bond is walking through the woods, zooming in on his character model shows some extreme aliasing, particularly on his left arm. Then, next to him, vegetation has more robust shadows on the PS5, but at the cost of resolution.
You can make that same trade off on the Steam Machine too, but I, for one, wouldn’t take slightly better shadows at the cost of a fuzzier presentation. Then again, being able to make that choice in the first place is what PC gaming is all about.
The Steam Machine fares its worst in Death Stranding 2. I set the resolution for 2160p, with FSR set to performance and the Medium preset, and only got an average of 35 fps. Some of that boils down to the scene I tested, what with it being night time and having a lot of vegetation and water. But in that same scene, the PS5 is again locked at a steady 60 fps.
But unlike 007 First Light, where it was just a question of tweaking with the resolution to get it to run at the same level as the PS5, I straight up could not get this game running at a steady 60 fps. Dropping the resolution down to 1440p and lowering the settings to the ‘Low’ preset, the game still sat around 45-50 fps.
It wasn’t until I lowered the output resolution to 1080p at the ‘Medium’ preset and enabled Dynamic Resolution Scaling that I was able to get a stable 60 fps in Death Stranding 2. And, that was while I was still playing on a 4K display – that never bodes well.
Looking at this tweaked version of Death Stranding 2 next to the base PS5 on performance mode, it’s a night and day difference. While staying at a locked 60 fps, the PS5 has more dense vegetation and better global illumination and shadows. Meanwhile, the Steam Machine makes Death Stranding look like something from the PS4 era – if not earlier.
It’s still a functional way to play the game, but it looks like what you’d expect from a handheld gaming PC, rather than a desktop machine, no matter how small it is. Keep in mind, though, that Death Stranding 2 was one of the biggest PS5 games last year, so it’s not crazy to assume Kojima Productions put in a bunch of extra work really making it look great on the base PS5. But even then, that gap is still hard to look at.
Still, for the most part, the Steam Machine and the PS5 typically perform at around the same level, plus or minus a few percentage points in Sony’s favor. Even after this testing, I still recommend anyone that just wants a pure gaming machine to stick with consoles for now. The Steam Machine still is, at its core, a mini gaming PC.
Any PC that’s as small as the Steam Machine is – and it’s really small – is going to have some kind of trade off. It’s worth remembering that the Steam Machine is nearly a third of the PS5’s size, and doesn’t get anywhere near as loud under load. That’s still not going to be enough to make the $1,049 price tag worth it for a lot of people, but if you’re in that niche, you’re really not losing that much performance by buying a Steam Machine – at least if you’re not playing Death Stranding 2.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
