According to a new rumor, Valve might be making a new Steam console. The info was relayed by renowned Spanish leaker extas1s, although it originates from the owner of HandleDeck.com, who found out that Valve is working on drivers for the upcoming RDNA4-based AMD Radeon RX 9070 graphics cards due next month. Here’s the translated excerpt from the YouTube video:
It turns out that Valve is openly working on drivers for the AMD 9070 graphics cards. These cards are currently designed just for desktop devices. These AMD 9070s are the first to feature RDNA 4 technology and FSR 4. So yeah, that’s the scoop! This RDNA 4 architecture is currently designed only for desktops. It’s expected that, many years down the line, it might make its way to portable devices, but right now, it’s strictly desktop. Valve is already working on it; in fact, from what my friend has heard, Valve is putting a lot of effort into the drivers for these RX 9070 GPUs with RDNA 4. And the question he raises in his tweet, which we all might be wondering, is why Valve is so interested in collaborating on this.
This specific kind of graphics card and this particular AMD architecture, especially knowing that most of the graphics used on Steam are from NVIDIA, raises an interesting point. One of the main reasons this might be happening—and here’s the juicy part, especially after the recent Xbox news—is that Valve, the company behind Steam, is internally working on desktop consoles that will be branded with the SteamOS license. It looks like Valve might be considering AMD’s 9070 graphics card as the main core for their desktop console. The codename for Valve’s Steam console is currently Fremont, but we don’t know what it’s actually going to be called. It’s also possible that they could use this graphics card to create some sort of external GPU for the Steam Deck 2, or it might just be for third parties to build their own stuff.
As the leaker mentioned in the last sentence, there are other possible reasons for Valve to be crafting drivers for the upcoming RDNA 4 GPU. However, the possibility of a new Steam console is enticing indeed. It’s been nearly ten years since Valve’s failed attempt with the Steam Machine, which was meant to deliver a PC-like experience to the living room. That was their first hardware product, and they’ve clearly learned a lot from it, as shown by subsequent and much more successful hardware releases like the Valve Index and the Steam Deck.
At the same time, if Valve was really going to use the Radeon 9070 for this hardware, the console would be very expensive, which makes us doubt this part of the rumor. Regardless of these specifics, would you like to see another attempt at a Steam console from Valve? Let us know below.
