TECH NEWS – Is it possible that Gabe Newell and his team are not only planning to release a new Steam Deck in the future, but that Valve is also planning to release something more serious after the Steam Machine?

The owner of Handledeck.com has found out that Valve is working on drivers. We also know what it has to do with: the AMD Radeon RX 9070, aka RDNA 4 architecture. It’s supposed to be released in March, but we covered that in more detail in today’s news. This information was then picked up by a reliable Spanish leaker, eXtas1s, who said this (translated) about Valve’s plans in the video:

“It turns out that Valve is openly working on drivers for the AMD 9070 graphics cards. These cards are currently only designed for desktop machines. These AMD 9070s are the first to have RDNA 4 technology and FSR 4. It’s expected that many years down the road, it could make its way to portable devices. Valve is already working on it; they are putting a lot of effort into the drivers for these RX 9070 GPUs with RDNA 4. Why is Valve so interested in working on this? This particular type 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 for this 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 is considering AMD’s RX 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 will actually be called. It’s also possible that they could use this card to create some sort of external GPU for the Steam Deck 2, or it could just be for third parties to build their own stuff,” eXtas1s said.

It’s been almost ten years since Valve failed with the Steam Machine. It tried to bring a PC-like experience to the living room. It was their first hardware product, but after seeing the success of the Steam Deck, Gabe Newell’s company certainly learned a lot from it. Using SteamOS is logical: save on the Windows license, develop internally (and Linux-based), and thus create interoperability between Fremont and the (successor?) Steam Deck.

But it’s not official yet!

Source: WCCFTech