Valve claims that the Steam Machine can achieve “up to 4K at 120Hz” on compatible displays over HDMI 2.0 connections (albeit using AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology, rather than native resolutions), but the Steam Machine Verified label it will apply to games in the Steam Store is based on a 1920 x 1080 benchmark.

I’ve been testing it on a 55-inch 4K OLED TV and a 27-inch 1080p desktop monitor, both with 120Hz refresh rates and both using HDMI. I used four games as references: Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, crimson desert, Lego Batman: Legends of the Dark Knightand Japanese RPG Granblue Fantasy Relink: Endless Ragnarok. Frame rates were tracked using the Steam Machine’s built-in monitor, accessed by tapping the “…” button on the Steam Controller and turning on the “Performance Overlay.”

On television, spider man It set its output resolution by default to 2048 x 1152, but it reached 60 frames per second (fps). Manually switching to 3840 x 2160 (full 4K) without AMD FSR active and all graphics settings on “High” dropped performance from 30 to 45 fps. With FSR enabled and “Dynamic Resolution Scaling” set to a 60fps target, the Steam Machine ran in 4K at the desired frame rate, with no noticeable image degradation. My HDR compatible TV also allowed for improved colors and contrast. On the PC monitor, the Steam Machine easily displayed a 1080p image at 60fps, although the panel lacks HDR, so everything looked a little dull. Overall, this would turn out to be the best performing game of all.

crimson desert It’s interesting: it is a notorious resource consumer and is not officially compatible with Steam Machine. However, it starts and charges fine. With the graphics quality set to a demanding “Ultra”, FSR enabled and an improved resolution set to “Native Anti-Aliasing”, it managed a not-terrible 40fps… in the menus. In-game, that dropped to about 20 to 25 fps. Lowering the quality to “High” produced a marginal improvement to 25 to 30 fps, but introduced screen tearing during cutscenes.

Cutting the resolution higher than “Quality” squeezed out 30fps, and cutting further to “Balanced” brought the game up to 60fps, but image quality began to suffer, particularly with environmental details like foliage and water.

On the 1080p monitor, things were much better, offering a solid 60fps even with settings on “Ultra” and advanced features like shadow ray tracing and advanced weather effects active. Still, not bad for a game that Valve says you can’t run on the Steam Machine at all.

lego batman on the TV, in 4K with FSR enabled and the graphics quality set to “High” (rather than “Epic,” its best setting), we got widely varying frame rates from 15 to 45 fps. Focusing the FSR on performance yielded a reliable 45 fps, occasionally rising to 75 to 90 fps, but dropping below 30 fps for vehicle sections. On the monitor, at 1080p, with the settings on “High” and upscaling to “Ultra Performance,” I eventually got a sweet 60fps, but any attempts to improve the image quality brought it down to around 30fps. However, getting good results was equally problematic on the powerful MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ gaming handheld, convincing me that the game is poorly optimized on PC and therefore that the Steam Machine cannot handle poorly optimized games.