In an interview, Yazan Aldehayyat from Valve explained how they chose the technical specifications. The Steam Hardware Survey helped determine the most popular configurations: 6-core CPUs and RTX 3060-level GPUs.
At the same time, older GPUs and CPUs are still popular: 3.05% of players use GTX 1650, 1.9% — Intel Iris Xe, which is noticeably weaker than the 28 CU RDNA 3 GPU of the Steam Machine.
«We looked at the results of the Steam Hardware Survey. This gives us a good idea of the performance of home devices. The Steam Machine is 70% similar to or better than what people have,» the engineer noted. Valve guarantees that players will be able to run all their games without problems thanks to the selected specifications.