AMD is no stranger to home consoles - its chips power PlayStations and Xboxes - while Valve has long wanted to find its place in this sector.
Valve's appetite for PC-derived machines designed for quasi-exclusive videogame use is no great news. The company founded by Gabe Newell first made its name creating video games after all, and its first success, Half-Life, remains an absolute benchmark on the PC to this day. Later, the firm launched Steam, which is nothing less than the undisputed leader of PC gaming platforms. Finally, hardware also interested the American firm, which first launched Steam Machines, without much success, before distributing its own game controller, again a failure.
Two years ago, however, a breakthrough came with the release of the Steam Deck, a portable video game console that proved a great success, breaking what seemed to be a curse for Valve. The Steam Deck is built around an AMD chip, and this is a crucial point. Indeed, a recent rumor has brought the two companies, Valve and AMD, closer together once again. Valve is said to be working on the drivers for AMD's new graphics cards. The Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT are scheduled for release in early March.
The information was revealed by MundoD - Rafael Cruz on his Youtube channel and he explains that " Valve is putting a lot of effort into the drivers for these RX 9070 GPUs with RDNA 4 ", the name of the architecture implemented on the next Radeons. Playing the candid card, he then asks " why Valve is so interested in collaborating on RDNA 4 ". In his video, Rafael Cruz doesn't let the suspense last too long before declaring that " most of the graphics used on Steam come from NVIDIA " and that if Valve is so interested in RDNA 4, it's because the firm has a hardware project in the back of its mind.
Rafael Cruz adds, however, that one could also simply imagine Valve working on RDNA 4 in order to offer an external graphics solution to its Steam Deck, or even to the future Steam Deck 2. Nevertheless, the hypothesis of a home console developed jointly by AMD and Valve is an attractive one. AMD is no stranger to home consoles, supplying the chips found at the heart of Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox. As for Valve, it's been almost ten years since Steam Machines missed the mark: the company may be keen to make up for this affront, especially as it now knows the console market much better, thanks to its experience with the Steam Deck. In the meantime, while we're waiting to find out more, and while Valve has accustomed us to singular products, we're beginning to dream of such a machine.
