The Steam Machine is finally here, with pre-orders now live, so long as you can get lucky in the reservation system lottery that is. And, honestly, we’re kinda underwhelmed with the thing, beautiful wee companion cube though it is. Though that’s more the fault of the AI apocalypse hoovering up all the memory and making the price of the Steam Machine utterly prohibitive for the entry level PC gamers it was originally aimed at. But Valve is still committed to improving the system, and has announced ahead of launch it is working directly with AMD to bring FSR 4 support in for the Steam Machine and its RDNA 3-powered GPU.

“We’ve been working with AMD on FSR 4 support for Steam Machine,” we’re told by Valve, “and can confirm that it will be coming soon.”

Unfortunately that’s all it’s saying in regards to an actual release date, but then AMD itself has been rather cagey about when it’s going to be getting FSR 4 support opened up beyond the original RDNA 4 target GPUs. Back in May AMD said it would be bringing FSR 4’s machine learning-based upscaling to RX 7000-series graphics cards in July, but notably said during Computex that no decision had been made about whether it would be opened up to the RDNA 3.5 GPUs housed in its Ryzen AI Max APUs or the chips powering the latest AMD-powered gaming handhelds.

Which seems to suggest that July launch date is very much just for the RX 7000-series graphics cards alone and not a blanket level of support for the RDNA 3 architecture and above. That would also explain why Valve would have to be working directly with AMD to ensure its semi-custom 28 CU RDNA 3 GPU is going to get support for the improved upscaler in FSR 4.

“We can’t say more about timing,” Valve notes, “but are excited for you to test it on your Steam Machine press units once it’s available. It should offer a significant improvement in upscaling graphical quality.”

While the improvement in upscaling quality will definitely be a benefit for the Steam Machine, it’s a double-edged sword of a feature. The Steam Machine’s relatively weak GPU component needs upscaling and frame generation to be able to cope with modern games at decent graphics presets and at the sort of resolutions you’ll want to see on a modern TV in your living room. So, chances are almost every game you play on the Steam Machine will want to be using upscaling.

That means it’s a win that you’ll get the best image quality AMD can muster for that upscaling experience. However, the machine-learning model of the improved FSR 4 upscaler is more performance intensive, especially for hardware that it was not initially designed for, namely RDNA 4 GPUs. And when performance is at a premium with the Steam Machine, that little bit extra hardware overhead for FSR 4 could mean that it’s not an automatic on for some users, and could just be another balancing act owners are going to have to juggle with their new PC console.

The other thing to note is that FSR 4 support is not natively enabled in a whole lot of games right now. The list of supporting titles for FSR Redstone (inc FSR 4, AKA FSR Upscaling) looks extensive on first glance, but only around 20-odd have it natively built in; all the other games on the list need to have it enabled via the Adrenalin Driver software. How those games can get FSR 4 enabled in SteamOS is going to be interesting to see, if it happens at all.