Valve Confirms Official AMD-Powered Steam Machines For 2014

In a statement to Forbes, a Valve representative has confirmed that AMD graphics hardware will be included in commercially available Steam Machines next year. The more interesting story, however, is why Valve needed to confirm this in the first place.Valve recently detailed the hardware specifications for its initial prototype run of 300 Steam Machines, which included CPUs by Intel and a variety of graphics cards by Nvidia . A sprinkling of tech sites and a large number of gaming enthusiasts interpreted this announcement as Valve dictating that their vision for Steam Machines —buy All Terrain Crane QAY-50 from China compact living room PCs powered by the company's Linux-based SteamOS — should not include AMD hardware.This mentality was later exacerbated when boutique PC vendor OriginPC publicly announced via Engadget that they were completely dropping AMD graphics cards from their offerings. Amusing conspiracy theories ensued.

Nvidia has several engineers actually embedded at Valve, assisting the company full-time in porting games over to SteamOS and improving driver support. Given that fact, the choice to include Nvidia hardware in Valve's prototype systems is anything but shocking.At any rate a quick email to Doug Lombardi, who handles PR for Valve, yielded this response:"Last week, we posted some technical specs of our first wave of Steam Machine prototypes. Although the graphics hardware that we've selected for the first wave of prototypes is a variety of Nvidia cards, that is not an indication that Steam Machines are Nvidia-only. In 2014, there will be Steam Machines commercially available with graphics hardware made by AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. Valve has worked closely together with all three of these companies on optimizing their hardware for SteamOS, and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future."

Valve's statement may well generate some news stories, and perhaps sighs of relief from AMD fans. Picking apart that response, one could reasonably assume that future Steam Machines may also include Iris/Iris Pro graphics from Intel's Haswell lineup of CPUs. It's the necessity of the response, though, that's puzzling.Doug Lombardi's email was preceded by a peculiar one from AMD's internal PR,buy All Terrain Crane QAY-130 from China seemingly to multiple members of the press, which stated:"You've asked questions around Valve's recent announcement of SteamOS and Steam Machines – and were wondering if AMD was 'left out' from their prototype program.