I think you may have an unrealistic idea of how much power low or mid-range gaming PC’s use. Only at the very top-end of PC’s with extreme overclocked components pushed to the limit would you come near 1000w (a $3000 Nvidia GTX 5090 graphics card can use 575w, as an example).

The Steam Machine uses effectively a laptop CPU (35W TDP) that’ll likely use 40 to 50w max, and the GPU is also a beefed up laptop GPU with a 110W TDP (it’ll probably peak at 140 to 150w, I’m guessing).

Overall it’ll probably idle at 10 or 15w, and likely use around 70w under average gaming, or 150 to 200w when pushed hard.

The Steamdeck is certainly still more power efficient (it peaks at 25w when pushed hard), and if you find that it’s powerful enough for the games you play, there’s not much reason to consider getting anything else. But the Steam Machine will be pretty power efficient for a desktop. It kinda has to be, since it only has a single fan for cooling.

I doubt it would be feasible to replace the power supply with something that takes 12v DC

All PC’s run off a power supply that inverts 120/220v AC to 3.3V 5V, and 12V DC for the internal components to run off of. Your Steamdeck charger is no different from the power supply inside a desktop PC, it’s just smaller and put in an external shell.

Unless by 12v DC, you mean you’re charging your Steamdeck with solar panels or from batteries directly, in which case, you could use an Inverter to power the Steam Machine.

Cyberpunk for sure will play well, as it was one of the games that testers were able to play on one during a preview event. I believe it’s the most demanding game as well, so the rest of your list should work fine as well.

They played it at 4K on ultra settings (with FSR on), and had playable framerates. At 1440p or 1080, you wouldn’t even need FSR.

I’m happily playing with Intel HD 630 integrated graphics myself, though my taste in games doesn’t usually require a beefy GPU.

I think we’ll still get unoptimized crap, but it may sway some studios to consider that lower-end market. We’ll never truly know how much of a difference it makes, but it will undeniably be another data point they’ll have to consider in terms of potential profit.

The new Indiana Jones game straight up couldn’t be played past the first level with 8gb of vram (and their forced ray-tracing made it require a beefier GPU to get playable framerates), and I’m always curious if that noticeably lowered sales compared to their projections by locking gamers with lower-end hardware.

Unfortunately, I’m not very optimistic because of the Unreal Engine monoculture

That is a setback, and I’m not sure how much can truly be done for a studio that opts for UE, other than limiting their game to an artstyle that requires a lower polycount, and perhaps reducing the amount of assets in areas like they used to do for older consoles, but I too doubt that’ll happen.

I’m actually kinda glad it has only 8gb for an odd reason; I hope it encourages devs to optimize their games more so they aren’t locked out of the steam machine market.

Straight to jail. Right away.