Valve Steam Console With A Radeon RX 9070 Rumored But Is It Too Good To Be True?
Folks absolutely love their Valve Steam Deck, which combines capable hardware in a sleek package. It also natively supports the most popular game store on the planet, Valve's very own Steam digital distribution platform. While Valve has attempted its hand at various pieces of hardware, one of the most promising rumors is the possibility of a Valve Console that could potentially give the Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 some competition.
It is very possible that a Steam Console may currently be in testing that would feature a powerful GPU based on AMD's RDNA 4 architecture. According to Spanish leaker extras1s, Valve has been working on drivers for the not-yet-released Radeon RX 9070. While we still await the release of the desktop Radeon RDNA 4 GPUs from AMD, we do know that they feature 16GB of VRAM and AMD's FSR 4 upscaling technology. The Steam Deck uses AMD's RDNA 2 and Zen 2 to achieve its performance, so RDNA 4 would be a big jump in performance in a potential console.
Combining the elements of what we love about Steam and the Steam Deck into a console would be excellent. After all, buying GPUs such as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series is proving to be a challenge and very expensive. Furthermore, Valve has done tremendous work with its SteamOS operating system which powers the Steam Deck smoothly.
It is very possible that a Steam Console may currently be in testing that would feature a powerful GPU based on AMD's RDNA 4 architecture. According to Spanish leaker extras1s, Valve has been working on drivers for the not-yet-released Radeon RX 9070. While we still await the release of the desktop Radeon RDNA 4 GPUs from AMD, we do know that they feature 16GB of VRAM and AMD's FSR 4 upscaling technology. The Steam Deck uses AMD's RDNA 2 and Zen 2 to achieve its performance, so RDNA 4 would be a big jump in performance in a potential console.
Combining the elements of what we love about Steam and the Steam Deck into a console would be excellent. After all, buying GPUs such as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series is proving to be a challenge and very expensive. Furthermore, Valve has done tremendous work with its SteamOS operating system which powers the Steam Deck smoothly.
It's difficult to judge if there is any merit to this rumor, especially since we have not fully seen the Radeon RX 9070 in the flesh yet. Consoles also typically do not get the full version of discreet GPUs, and instead lean on custom variants, for various reasons. These include form factor constraints, along with power and thermal limits. Cost is another factor, which is why Sony and Microsoft typically go with more tightly packaged AMD products in consoles.
Valve also excels at making what seems like under-powered hardware, such as found in the Steam Deck, perform well above its weight. Certainly FSR 4 would be a huge boon to a Steam game console, which would not be likely to run the same performance as a desktop Radeon RX 9070 GPU.
Valve could simply be testing the AMD Radeon RX 9070 because it is one of the first RDNA 4 GPUs we'll see out in the wild. It also is the lesser of the two versions, with an RX 9070 XT also coming. Valve could learn a lot about the AMD RDNA 4 architecture and how to plan for things such as FSR 4 in analyzing how they scale. They can then likely run calculations to deduce around what performance they'd need in a potential console.
Valve is no stranger to hardware, with various devices that include the Valve Index and Steam Controller in its past. It had previously also attempted Console-like devices, which did not do well overall. This is Valve after its popular Steam Deck however, and it is clear they do not plan to give up on the idea of a future console device.
Valve also excels at making what seems like under-powered hardware, such as found in the Steam Deck, perform well above its weight. Certainly FSR 4 would be a huge boon to a Steam game console, which would not be likely to run the same performance as a desktop Radeon RX 9070 GPU.
Valve could simply be testing the AMD Radeon RX 9070 because it is one of the first RDNA 4 GPUs we'll see out in the wild. It also is the lesser of the two versions, with an RX 9070 XT also coming. Valve could learn a lot about the AMD RDNA 4 architecture and how to plan for things such as FSR 4 in analyzing how they scale. They can then likely run calculations to deduce around what performance they'd need in a potential console.
Valve is no stranger to hardware, with various devices that include the Valve Index and Steam Controller in its past. It had previously also attempted Console-like devices, which did not do well overall. This is Valve after its popular Steam Deck however, and it is clear they do not plan to give up on the idea of a future console device.
