Now that you’ve hopefully absorbed everything Valve has announced for the Steam Machine, which begins shipping through a reservation system relatively soon, it’s time to look beyond. Valve has officially confirmed FSR 4, AMD’s most advanced image upscaling technology, is coming to the Steam Machine.

Upscaling, if you’re unfamiliar, is an effective way to increase the performance of games on hardware that supports it. Most games today ship with some form of upscaling, with the most common being Nvidia’s DLSS. Like DLSS, FSR also takes the image, rendered at a lower resolution, and upscales it to a higher resolution, saving precious hardware juice.

While we don’t yet know when Steam Machines will be able to take advantage of AMD’s latest tech, this is nevertheless very exciting news for a few reasons. FSR 4 is close in quality to Nvidia’s DLSS 4, and since the latter isn’t supported on AMD hardware, the Steam Machine would’ve been stuck with the earlier – inferior – versions of FSR. However, news that Valve’s latest hardware will natively support FSR 4 means wider game compatibility.

Though far more powerful than a Steam Deck, the Steam Machine has relatively modest specs and power is very much at a premium. Good upscaling tech will mean better performance in the most demanding games, and potentially future-proof the hardware.

“We expect customers will have a much higher quality graphical experience when using FSR 4.1 for upscaling,” Valve told Eurogamer. “AMD is adding support for more devices, including Steam Machines.”

To date, FSR 4 has only been available to the most modern generation of AMD GPUs, RDNA 4. Recently, however, AMD announced it’s bringing the tech to older GPU architectures like RDNA 3, and even RDNA 2. The Steam Machine’s GPU is based on RDNA 3, so it all lines up.

A few things remain a mystery for now. FSR 4 utilises a more demanding algorithm to achieve its results, which could impact the performance on Steam Machines. This may be avoided to some degree, depending on how the tech is implemented. Information is thin on the ground at the moment, so we’ll have to wait until Valve shares more.

And while Valve hasn’t confirmed a date for FSR 4 support on Steam Machine, it could perhaps be as soon as the next few weeks. AMD has set a July target for the tech’s arrival on its RDNA 3 GPUs, so it follows that Steam Machines won’t be too far behind.

If you’re wondering what we’ve made of our time with Steam Machine, you can check out Chris’ full Steam Machine review. And if that’s pushed you closer to picking one up, we’ve put together a detailed guide on how to actually pre-order the hardware, given the process is anything but straightforward. That’s not all! If you’ve got tech questions about Steam Machine, we got answers, as well as some chatter with Valve about why it hasn’t subsidised the hardware, and how it was originally going to cost “significantly” less.