Gabe, where's the 4K? For Steam Machine verification, games must run at least 30 FPS at 1080p
Valve’s rule is blunt: to get Steam Machine Verified, a title has to hit 30 FPS at native 1080p. That’s the practical snag for the company’s 4K-with-FSR claim — if the game only manages 30 FPS at 1080p, upscaling that framebuffer to 4K won’t magically deliver 30 FPS at 4K. You lose headroom.
There is a fallback: the ultra-performance upscaler that jumps 720p up to 4K. But that’s a stretch (literally) — FSR up through v4 tends to show obvious softness and artifacts when pushed that hard, and many players will find it tiring to look at. Want 60 FPS? You’d be relying on frame generation (FG) on top of a very low base framerate, which introduces its own interpolation errors. The same caution applies to DLSS and XeSS when they try to generate frames from a 30 FPS source — too little base data, too many visual glitches.
On a different note: every one of the 25,000+ games already marked Verified for Steam Deck is automatically treated as Verified for Steam Machine as well. That’s how Valve can ship the console with a massive library ready on day one.