Valve’s Steam Machine has been criticized in some quarters for its lack of graphical grunt. But if you’re thinking of pairing one with an ultrawide display, you likely won’t be disappointed.

Valve recommends that the Steam Machine is run at Full HD resolution (1,920 x 1,080) for the best graphical performance, although the machine is capable of 4K output.

It’s that 4K performance that seems to have irritated many of the Steam Machine reviewers, with benchmarks showing slipping frame rates in the more challenging titles.

For example, The Verge’s benchmarks show that running Cyberpunk 2077 at high graphics settings at a 4K resolution delivers an average of only 24 frames per second, which is the kind of frame rate that makes action games impossible. Dropping to medium settings returned an average of 52 frames per second, which is moving into the realms of playable. At Full HD with ultra graphics settings, the performance is a much more acceptable 69 frames per second.

Steam Machine Ultrawide Performance

So what about a halfway house between Full HD and 4K: an ultrawide monitor with a resolution of 3,440 x 1440? To put that in perspective, that’s roughly 2.4 times the number of pixels of a Full HD screen and roughly half as many pixels as a 4K display (3,840 x 2,160).

When I ran the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmarks at high graphics settings at that ultrawide resolution, it recorded a very respectable average of 91 frames per second, which is more than fast enough for cruising around Night City without any noticeable stuttering.

One of the great strengths of the Steam Machine compared to an Xbox or PlayStation is that it plays full PC titles with a keyboard and mouse, rather than console-optimized versions of games that don’t always have the same depth or mod support as the PC originals. Games such as Civilization VII , for example.

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In the Civilization VII benchmarks on the ultrawide display, the game was averaging around 50 frames per second on high graphics settings. That’s not flawlessly smooth, but it’s more than playable for a game where you’re not constantly panning around scenery, as you would be in Cyberpunk. And there’s potential to improve those frame rates by dropping graphics quality slightly.

In the recently released pirate strategy game Corsair Cove , which has very intricate graphics, the performance dipped to around 30 frames per second on high graphics settings, but settled at a more acceptable 40-45 frames per second when dropping the graphics quality to medium. Moving around the map could be a little jerky, even at these medium settings, but again it was more than playable.

In older titles such as Euro Truck Simulator 2 graphics performance was predictably spotless. At high graphics settings we were burning down the freeways at around 70 frames per second, and that was with anisotropic filtering pushed to the max. Drop that and the frame rates were pushing the 100 frames per second max of the screen.

Ultrawide monitors are relatively rare. The 3,440 x 1,440 resolution of my screen is used by only 3.14% of gamers in the latest Steam hardware survey , which shows the resolution of the primary display used by Steam gamers. Other ultrawide resolutions are even rarer, with 2,560 x 1,080 in use by 0.69% gamers, and the superwide 5,120 x 1,440 on less than 0.5% of machines.

However, 4K isn’t as common on the desktop as you might think, either, with only 4.95% of gamers using 3,840 x 2,160. Full HD is king, with just over half of gamers using that resolution.

Of course, Valve is aiming more for the TV gamer with the Steam Machine, where 4K displays are now commonplace, but if you’re planning on using the Steam Machine as a desktop PC and are looking for a display to pair it with, ultrawide might be the way to go.