Valve recently released Windows drivers for the new Steam Machine living room console, and benchmark results from ETA Prime show they're pretty good. The YouTuber installed Windows 11 on the Steam Machine, noting the process was fairly painless with all hardware working flawlessly. Notably, the GPU appears in Windows Task Manager and AMD's Radeon Adrenaline driver as an AMD Radeon RX 7600.

The test unit has 64 GB of memory, which may cause slight performance differences as Windows accumulates programs. In productivity benchmarks, SteamOS and Windows mostly trade blows, but Windows edges out SteamOS by a sizeable 22% margin in Geekbench 6 multi-thread, while single-core is on par. Cinebench 2024 shows 99 points single-core and 554 multi-core, trailing Apple's M1 Max and AMD Ryzen 5800X.

Gaming performance is more even, with Windows gaining small advantages at 4K and 1080p. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Windows leads by 1.7% at 1080p and 4.3% at 4K, though SteamOS is 2.4% faster at 1440p. Cyberpunk 2077 favors SteamOS by 8.8% at 1080p and 4.7% at 1440p, while both are unplayable at 4K. Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered shows a 7.1% Windows win at 4K.

Running Windows on the Steam Machine is perfectly feasible, aligning with Valve's marketing that it's just a PC. However, SteamOS offers other benefits beyond gaming performance.