While AMD is increasingly switching to consoles, Nvidia and Intel attempt to draw partners in the gaming console industry as well. So far, it seemed as if the only manufacturer of graphics cards for Valve’s Steam Box would be Nvidia.

AMD GPUs represents a good compromise between quality and cost–AMD APU allows a very good gaming performance at a reasonable price compared to its Intel and Nvidia counterparts.

But after the formalization of the specifics of Steam Machine, Valve has revealed that the gaming console will also be based on AMD hardware. Not only will Intel and Nvidia provide components as speculated, Valve said it is also working closely with the other manufacturers (including AMD) in order to offer its customers a wider choice.

Doug Lombardi, Valve’s spokesman, responded to Forbes that AMD graphics hardware will be included in commercially available Steam Machines next year.

“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,” he said.

The Steam Machines will therefore not be an exclusive Nvidia, but in the next year we will see a large variety of configurations, designed to offer a wide selection of the best hardware solutions on the market. In addition to the system from Valve, we will witness the arrival of the solutions of other producers, which, however, share the first information on related projects only in the coming months.

AMD said about it to be very actively engaged with Valve on these products and campaigns, thus confirming its involvement in the project.

“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. This couldn’t be further from the truth – AMD is very actively engaged with Valve on these products and campaigns. But since we’d like you to hear this from Valve directly, please email Doug Lombardi, who is the Vice President of Marketing at Valve for their official statement on AMD’s involvement in the Steam Machine prototype program,” said AMD’s internal PR.

The use of AMD GPU under Linux, unfortunately, does not offer the same advantages as Nvidia GPU if we consider only the proprietary drivers, but the open source Radeon drivers are at a more advanced stage compared to its counterpart. So initially Valve could benefit from the status Code of open drivers for AMD GPUs and to push quite a bit of code to maximize the performance of the OpenGL libraries.

According to Jon Peddie Research, AMD is at number two position with a 21.9 percent share with market leader Intel a 62 percent market share in the CPU market. AMD’s accelerated processing units power the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 next-generation consoles.

Valve recently presented the hardware specifications of Steam Machines as well as the SteamOS, which are adapted to the living room and designed to compete with next-generation consoles from Microsoft and Sony. With the release of 300 prototypes, Valve has set the stage for a series of gaming-optimized, PC-like boxes to compete with Windows with Valve’s own Linux-based Steam OS.

It has also announced Steam Dev Days, a two-day conference for developers to showcase, share ideas and talk about latest developments, including SteamOS, Steam Machines, and Steam Controller.