Horizon

The best new tech heading your way

1 STEAM MACHINE

£TBC, steampowered.com

We’ve been here before, but it turns out that ‘before’ was a quite different time to ‘today’. The first generation of Steam Machines died on the vine not long after their 2013–2015 planting. They were hamstrung by iffy Linux gaming support, compact third–party PC hardware which just couldn’t keep up, and a console generation which was then on the cutting edge. None of those things are true for the 2026 iteration: having booted Linux into maturity with the likes of the Steam Deck, now is the perfect time for Valve to fuzz the border between PC and console once and for all.

Compact it may be, but Valve’s decision to control its own hardware this time – and to partner with AMD for a semi–custom CPU/ GPU combo – means there’s a pile of power packed into the cube. But most importantly, it means a standardised platform: this is, for all intents and purposes, a console, just one that happens to run everything in your Steam library. It’s a definitive mark for developers to aim for, which is something the PC as a platform has struggled to find for as long as it’s been around.

Could it flop? Again? Sure! As we go to press Valve is being very coy about exact pricing, though it suggests that this will cost the equivalent of a similar non–cube PC rather than being blessed with any kind of loss–leader console hardware discount. That’ll upset some of its potential market, but we bet it’ll sell out anyway.

TECH SPECS

OK, it’s not a world–beater, but few PCs are. The Steam Machine has it where it counts. It totes a six–core AMD Zen 4 processor, an 8GB RDNA 3 GPU and 16GB of DDR5. That’s a package which should be able to handle the 4K/60fps it’s aiming for, at least with a little FSR smoothing.