Valve has quietly toned down one of the Steam Machine’s boldest promises. The company changed the Steam Machine product page so it no longer says ”4K at 60 FPS with FSR”; the new wording is ”up to 4K with FSR 4.1.” That is a small edit with a very loud subtext: the box may still be aiming at the living room, but it is no longer pretending to be a guaranteed 4K/60 machine.
The timing is awkward for Valve, though probably deliberate. The wording change landed on 25 June, the same day the company stopped taking preorders for Steam Machine. For a product already getting side-eye over performance and price, that is the sort of phrasing cleanup you do before complaints turn into receipts.
Steam Machine no longer promises 60 fps in 4K
The old copy was simple and easy to market. The new version is more cautious, and for good reason: benchmark coverage has shown Steam Machine can struggle to hold 60 fps even at 1080p in some games with max or ultra settings. In other words, 4K was already doing a lot of heavy lifting in the marketing department.
Valve is not alone in retreating from absolute performance claims. Hardware makers have become increasingly careful about how they describe upscaling features, especially as FSR, DLSS, and similar tools blur the line between native output and reconstructed frames. The difference here is that Valve had been unusually direct, and then quietly got less direct.
FSR 4.1 replaces the old marketing line
There is also a detail buried in the change: the page now refers to FSR 4.1 instead of the older, vaguer phrasing. That may sound like a technical footnote, but it also gives Valve more room to argue that the machine’s output depends on software tricks, not raw brute force. Upscaling can help a lot; it can also become a polite way of saying ”don’t ask too many questions about native resolution.”
- Old claim: ”4K at 60 FPS with FSR”
- New claim: ”up to 4K with FSR 4.1”
- Change date: 25 June
- Preorders: no longer being accepted
The bigger question is how far Valve wants to push this hardware before the gap between page copy and real-world results becomes impossible to ignore. With French retailer LDLC already floating a rival called PC Stim at the same price, the Steam Machine is entering a crowded argument: if you cannot honestly promise 4K/60, what exactly is the premium paying for?