We Should All Just Take A Moment To Appreciate Valve Announcing New...

Being a tech journalist, hell, even just being a PC gamer in 2025, means that you have to accept that every time you hear from a hardware company about some new product they're releasing, or feature they're adding, it will almost exclusively be something to do with AI. Whether directly, indirectly, tangentially, or just plain pointlessly.

So, thank you Valve, for offering up three new pieces of Steam hardware this week that made not one mention of the initialism de jour: AI.

The closest we got was when its engineers noted the Steam Machine was being targeted for 4K60 gaming, but only via the use of upscaling. Even then, it's an AMD-based system, and FSR has only just got itself updated to machine learning algorithms with the FSR 4 update. That, however, is still effectively tied to the Radeon RX 9000-series of graphics cards, and most definitely not available to the Navi 33 GPU at the heart of the Steam Machine's discrete GPU.

Steam Frame: Valve's new wireless VR headsetSteam Machine: Compact living room gaming boxSteam Controller: A controller to replace your mouse

It's not even like it's just been this year, either. Ever since ChatGPT grabbed people's collective basal ganglia at the tail end of 2022, the swell of AI-ness being added to everything possible (and often irrelevant) in tech has exponentially increased. Every event, every launch, every show has been tailored around just what level of AI-ification the company in question has been able to jam (or pretend it has) into whatever it is they're showing off.

CES and Computex ever since have been 'brought to you…' or 'powered by…' AI. And every booth without end has had to plaster those two letters all over them. Graphics cards and CPUs are now being sold to us on the benefits they can bring to all the AI things we do every day (can you name one outside of upscaling and frame gen?), and Windows has decided that it's now an agentic operating system.

I'm not saying I don't ever use AI; I love me some DLSS and Frame Generation, Photoshop has become more effective than ever for my job, and Gemini's been making me HTML table code on the regular. I just don't want to have it jammed down my throat at every turn.

So it's immensely refreshing that the Steam Controller has no AI button to call up some little cutesy G-Man within SteamOS to ask 'Would you like help with that?' The Steam Machine, with its 16 GB RAM and 8 GB VRAM quotient, isn't going to be housing the latest local LLMs out of the box, and th

Source: PC Gamer