The Steam Machine's weakness was never raw power. Valve's console roughly matches a PlayStation 5 on compute, which is respectable for a living-room box. The problem starts once the GPU runs short.
Like most hardware in its class, the Steam Machine relies on upscaling to reach 4K on a television. It renders at a lower resolution, then reconstructs the image. At launch the device used FSR 3.1, AMD's older upscaler, which reviewers placed below Nvidia's DLSS and below the reconstruction inside Sony's consoles.
The fix Valve had not guaranteed
Pierre-Loup Griffais confirmed to The Verge that Valve is working with AMD to add FSR 4. The company says the upgrade is coming soon and will not give a date. It calls the result a significant improvement in upscaling quality.
FSR 4 uses machine learning to clean up how games look in motion. That is the exact area where reviewers marked the Steam Machine down against Sony's hardware.
AMD spent months saying nothing
The confirmation also closes a real doubt. AMD built FSR 4 for its newest RDNA 4 graphics cards. The Steam Machine runs a semi-custom RDNA 3 chip, roughly an RX 7600 XT. For months AMD declined to say whether RDNA 3 hardware would get the upscaler at all.
That silence is why Valve had to work with AMD itself rather than wait for a driver. AMD has now shipped FSR 4.1 to RX 7000 desktop cards, and Valve's console sits in the same architecture.
The cost of the upgrade
The catch is performance. FSR 4's machine-learning model is heavier than the version it replaces. On a desktop card with power to burn, that overhead disappears. On the Steam Machine, where almost every game already needs upscaling to run well, it does not.
Owners may find FSR 4 is not a free switch. The better image could cost frames, leaving another setting to balance on a console built to a price.
If it lands as Valve describes, FSR 4 narrows the motion-clarity gap reviewers saw against Sony. It does not erase the fact that a $1,049 machine needed it.
