Inside A Simulated Steam Machine: 27 Games Tell The Real Story

If this last set of games seems like they don't fit in any particular category, that's because they don't. These are extra titles we tested for specific reasons, which we'll now enumerate below.

Console Emulators And Corner Cases On The Simulated Steam Machine

Counter-Strike 2 is the last of the games in our list that has a native Linux version—naturally, because it's Valve's game. The title defaulted to "High" settings with 4x MSAA, and that (unsurprisingly) didn't fly at 4K. However, manually swapping out MSAA for CMAA got us to a frame rate hovering around 100 FPS. Notably, this game still doesn't have any kind of gamepad support, so it's not particularly well suited for the Steam Machine, but there's nothing stopping you from hooking up a mouse and keyboard to click some heads if you're so inclined. It's a PC, after all.


We were really curious if the Master Chief Collection would work correctly on Linux. This is sort of Microsoft's baby, after all. It turns out that it was completely painless. There aren't many settings to configure as far as graphics go, at least for Halo: Reach, but we set the game to 4K resolution and its "Enhanced" graphics mode, and away we went. Frame rates were high and stable, well over 60 FPS. This one could be a fun replay when the real Steam Machine comes out.


We really didn't know if this game was going to work. It's a real Unreal Engine 5 title, with all that implies—hardware Lumen lighting, Nanite virtualized geometry, the works. Imagine our surprise when the game defaulted to High settings; we simply enabled XeSS at Performance mode and away we went. We haven't played enough of this game to know if the opening level is among the most demanding, but we never saw many dips below 40 FPS throughout the first mission, and the relatively slow pace of the game (you are Robocop, after all) means that this performance was broadly playable.


Live-service action-RPG Warframe is still in open beta going on 13 years since its launch in 2013. It's quite a weird game in many ways, and one of the most pertinent is its performance profile. There's content in Warframe that was developed as far back as 2011, and possibly even earlier. There's also content that just came out two days ago as of this posting. These parts of the game do not perform similarly at all. For our performance testing, we used the demanding Warframe 1999 part of the game, and we found that, as long as you're willing to use FSR2 in "Performance" mode, even 4K is manageable. Digital Extremes' "Evolution" engine is pretty well optimized.


Our last PC game is Warrior All-Stars, which is sort of like Koei-Tecmo's take on Smash Brothers, except it's a musou game like Dynasty Warriors. It features a wacky variety of characters from across K-T's properties, including historical heroes from Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors, JRPG heroines, William from Nioh, and compulsive gambler Rio. Warriors All-Stars was originally a PlayStation Vita game, so it's not too demanding, but there are no upscaling options. As a result, native 4K is pretty tough for the little Navi 33 GPU and it drops frames quite a bit. However, you can maintain a locked 60 FPS in 1440p, even on max settings.


Warriors All-Stars uses quite a few videos. Unfortunately, it's programmed such that it relies on the system multimedia handlers to play back its videos. Those codecs simply aren't present in Linux by default due to licensing issues, so if you haven't installed them manually, you'll end up with weird screens like the above, where the background, which would normally be a video, is replaced by a test pattern. It's easy to fix, especially on Nobara Linux where they provide you a convenient utility to automagically install the necessary codecs. It does have to be initiated manually by the user, though.


Finally, we wanted to check the emulation performance of the little Phoenix 2 CPU. We elected to test Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 3 emulation, because those are two of the most demanding systems to emulate. We picked two of the most demanding games for each system and tried them out.


Astral Chain is notorious for its use of extremely high-detail textures that could never be fully appreciated on the original Switch. It doesn't affect performance on that system due to its use of hardware-accelerated ATSC texture compression, which is not supported on PCs (for the most part). Eden Emulator is capable of decoding these textures on the GPU, though, and performance is now very good in this title. Using a 2x linear scale factor, which results in 4K resolution in docked mode, we were able to achieve over 90 FPS when unlocking the frame rate. Unfortunately, the method we were using also speeds up the game, so it's not suitable for playing.


The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is an incredible game, but it's not a uniformly great experience on the original Nintendo Switch due to the fact that the game's frame rate hovers around the 28 FPS mark. Sure, Ocarina of Time ran at 20 FPS max, but that was a different time. Playing Tears of the Kingdom on an emulator with a mod that enables 60 FPS without adjusting the timestep was one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time. You could do the same on this machine; when uncapping the frame rate in 1440p, it jumps well above 60 FPS. However, 4K resolution is pretty heavy in this game on this GPU, and you won't see much above 30 FPS. It still runs better than a real Switch, though.


God of War III is notorious for being one of the most demanding PS3 games to run under emulation. That's because it's arguably the most lush visual showcase on Sony's seventh-gen console. Cranking the resolution up to 4K on older games often reveals visual flaws that were masked by the low resolution render of the day. Rendering God of War III in 4K just makes it look like that much more of a masterpiece, and this machine can just about handle it. The original game targeted 60 FPS on the PS3, but it rarely managed to get there. In fact, we can't really hit 60 FPS reliably on this system either, and it's not a GPU limitation if you're not doing a 300% (4K) upscale. Still, the title is absolutely more than playable at 50ish FPS, and it's highly recommended if you never have.


The original Red Dead Redemption game has a native PC version now, so there's not really much reason to emulate unless you simply don't want to pay for a game you already own, like the author. This is potentially the most demanding of all PS3 games; the only other titles in the running are Metal Gear Solid 4 and The Last of Us. This CPU is fast enough to propel it past its original 30 FPS cap, but only just so; trying to run it in native 4K actually exceeded the Radeon RX 7600's video memory capacity—possibly due to the multi-sample anti-aliasing that the game uses. Native 4K RDR isn't happening, at least in RPCS3, but if you're willing to live with 1440p or lower, the game is perfectly playable.


Lastly, we wanted to bring up two more games that we wanted to test but simply weren't able to do so. Those are F1 25, the latest iteration of Codemasters' F1 racing title, and Grand Theft Auto Online. Both of these games use restrictive anti-cheat options that specifically exclude Linux gamers. This is 100% a choice on the part of the game publishers, and even if you work around it, you're likely to be banned from online play for skirting the rules. This is just a fact of life as a Linux gamer; popular online titles like the above, as well as Fortnite, Battlefield, and many more are simply not playable on Linux. This is definitely a mark against the Steam Machine, but how indelible the mark is depends on your preference for these types of games.

Steam Machine Simulations: Our Thoughts On Valve's Mini-PC

After testing a wide variety of games, do we think the Steam Machine is obsolete before it even launches? Absolutely not. As we controversially said when writing about gaming on integrated graphics, what you can play on a given system really comes down to how much you're willing to turn down the settings. The two resources in shortest supply on this machine are video memory and video memory bandwidth. The fastest way to save video memory is to turn down texture quality, and the fastest way to cut memory bandwidth requirements is to reduce rendering resolution. If you have a high-resolution display, upscaling is your savior on a system like this (including the Steam Machine). 

Not that you need to do that. 1080p scales very nicely to a 4K display; you can simply set every game to max settings, 1080p, and you're probably going to have a good time—as long as "max settings" doesn't enable ray tracing. RT is memory hungry and also pretty buggy on Linux; this machine has the hardware to handle more ray-tracing than the PS5, but we didn't find it to be worth the effort in our testing, at least at this time.

You might have noticed that not many of the games we tested are brand-new. Elden Ring Nightreign, Monster Hunter Wilds, and Hollow Knight Silksong are the three newest games in our list; even Black Myth Wukong came out last year. All of the above titles are still getting regular content updates, though. That's the interesting thing about video games these days: they don't go away. There was a time when a game would come out, you'd buy it, play it, and then put it away, potentially forever. Games these days hang around, even across console generations. GTA V came out on the Xbox 360.

PC gamers are familiar with this concept. There are people who still play 1999's EverQuest to this very day. Because this is a PC, not a console, you can keep playing the games that you like on the same hardware, potentially forever. This system isn't limited to playing just the latest games, and that's a key consideration. There's a whole archive of classic PC games to explore, to say nothing of the boundless frontiers of emulation. The argument that this machine isn't fast enough for modern gamers simply doesn't hold up.

As we noted in the intro, Valve hasn't set a price point for this product yet. People have ventured guesses from as low as $399 to as high as $999, or even more. If we were building from parts at today's prices, we'd be looking at around $600 for this machine—before adding RAM. That's the wrench in the works; today's RAM prices have us sympathizing with companies like Valve that have to price a retail device like Steam Machine with the memory market in such a wild state of flux. Valve's BOM is surely well below what we'd pay at retail for the parts, but if it has to pay a 400% markup on memory, it may well be impossible to price the Steam Machine low enough to make sense.