- Valve has been importing (literal) tons of “Game Consoles”
- Weights and details suggest they aren’t Steam Decks
- HDMI 2.1 VRR and 4K 120Hz could be delivered via firmware update
With the new Steam Controller now shipping, attention is turning to Valve’s hotly anticipated Steam Machine — and, fingers crossed, it appears to be nearing launch too. Valve has reportedly brought around 50 tons of “game consoles” into the US, at least according to import records seen by The Verge, .
Although it’s possible that these imports are Steam Decks, which used the same label for their shipments, the shipping records detail different weights and patterns this time around. And that’s led to speculation, or perhaps wishing, that the Steam Machine’s US launch is imminent.
But if it is, you can expect them to sell out quickly unless Valve has a lot more containers coming or here already: as Notebookcheck.net calculates, 50 tons of shipments works out at about 20,000 Steam Machines.
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That’s not the only Steam Machine news circulating this week. It also appears that Valve’s new console could come with HDMI 2.1, including full-quality 4K at 120Hz and variable refresh rate support, which was feared to be impossible.
If so, that makes it an even more serious rival to the Xbox Series X and the PS5 for playing on the best gaming TVs, because it makes the Steam Machine an even more impressive gaming platform for big 4K screens.
Will the Steam Machine have HDMI 2.1?
The Steam Machine is currently listed with a spec of HDMI 2.0 and 4K at 120Hz with a reduced color spectrum. That’s because true 48Gbps HDMI 2.1 with the AMD graphics and Linux OS wasn’t possible: as Valve explained late last year, the HDMI Forum had blocked open-source Linux drivers for HDMI 2.1.
Valve said that the hardware was certainly HDMI 2.1 compatible, but the software wasn’t, and it was helping AMD try to “unblock things there.” And according to reports on Phoronix, AMD has done just that.
AMD has released a series of Linux kernel patches that add support for HDMI Fixed Rate Link, aka FRL, a feature that’s exclusive to HDMI 2.1. That’s currently working on AMD GPUs on Linux systems. The next step is to develop a full implementation of HDMI 2.1 to potentially deliver 4K at 120Hz (or higher) with HDR, variable refresh rate and auto low latency mode.
There’s no timeline for that full implementation, so it’s unlikely that we’ll see HDMI 2.1 at launch, whenever that actually turns out to be. But HDMI 2.1 is clearly possible on the Steam Machine, and that suggests it’s a question not of whether Valve will support the standard, but of when that support will be delivered, so it can truly match what the consoles can do.
We’re still waiting for a launch date for the Steam Machine, but hopefully it’ll be announced very soon: the launch has been delayed because of memory and storage shortages, so the early 2026 launch has been pushed back. However, Valve was still hoping to launch in the first half of 2026, so we may see what’s in those shipping containers very soon.
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