News News Official
Nvidia is giving Valve's Steam Machine an unusual upgrade: the option not to use its own GPU
The Steam Machine was built around the idea that a small SteamOS PC could sit under a television and run a PC library itself. Nvidia is now adding another route. GeForce NOW will officially support Valve's box later in 2026, which means a game can be running on remote RTX hardware while the Steam Machine acts as the client in the living room.
By Kader 
Nvidia announced the change during its Gamescom 2026 GeForce presentation on August 25. Steam Machine support is scheduled for later this year, building on the GeForce NOW implementation already available for Steam Deck.
Valve's new Steam Controller is included in the plan. Nvidia says the controller will work with the GeForce NOW app on Steam Deck and Steam Machine first, with Windows and macOS support following later.
The Radeon hardware stays exactly where it was
This announcement lands beside a collection of new DLSS 4.5 controls for GeForce NOW, so the wording can sound more like a hardware upgrade than it actually is.
Valve's machine still has its semi-custom six-core Zen 4 processor and 28-CU RDNA 3 GPU with 8GB of graphics memory. When GeForce NOW is used, the demanding rendering work happens on Nvidia's servers and a video stream is delivered to the Steam Machine.
The DLSS Super Resolution, Dynamic Frame Generation and Ray Reconstruction settings Nvidia is preparing belong to that cloud session. They do not add local DLSS support to Valve's AMD GPU.
That separation could suit this particular PC rather well
Valve's base system launched at $1,049, with a 512GB SSD and a hardware target that favors a compact, console-like living-room experience over brute-force desktop performance.
A demanding game can still run locally when that makes sense. A GeForce NOW-supported title can instead use remote hardware if the owner wants higher settings than the box comfortably delivers.
Nvidia currently advertises RTX 5080-class cloud performance on its Ultimate membership and a catalog of more than 4,500 supported PC games across connected stores and subscriptions. That does not mean every Steam purchase automatically appears in GeForce NOW.
Cloud performance comes with different bottlenecks
The local GPU stops being the main performance limit, but the internet connection becomes part of the rendering pipeline. Latency, network stability, membership tier and whether a specific game is supported all matter.
Nvidia has not yet published Steam Machine-specific streaming limits. Its broader GeForce NOW service can reach extremely high resolutions and frame rates on selected devices and plans, but there is currently no confirmed promise that the Steam Machine client will expose every one of those modes.
That is a detail worth waiting for because Valve's box is explicitly aimed at televisions. Resolution, HDR behavior, controller latency and the maximum supported refresh rate will matter more there than another logo in a device list.
One box, several ways into the same library
SteamOS already makes the Steam Machine less rigid than a conventional console. GeForce NOW extends that flexibility without replacing local play.
For some games, the cleanest option will remain installing them on the SSD. For others, an existing GeForce NOW subscription may make more sense than asking the local RDNA 3 GPU to do everything.
Nvidia has only committed to “later this year” for Steam Machine support so far.