Valve announced Steam Frame, the successor to its Steam Index VR headset, in a surprise bevy of reveals alongside the company’s new Steam Machine. Steam Frame is a cord-free VR headset that lets you play (some) games natively on the hardware and stream your entire Steam library, including non-VR games, over a stable wi-fi connection. A small group of publications went hands-on with Steam Frame prior to the announcement, and the consensus is that it’s shaping up to be better than Valve’s previous VR attempts and most other headsets available now as well.
Most of what Valve is doing with Steam Frame isn’t particularly new. Sony uses foveated rendering for the PlayStation VR 2, and Steam Frame’s lenses and audio solutions are, Digital Foundry’s Sam Machkovech says, practically the same as what you find in Meta’s Quest 3. The consensus is that the minor, quality-of-life changes are the most noteworthy. For example, the battery pack is in the strap, rather than on the headset’s front, which IGN’s Michael Higham says keeps it from feeling like you “have a brick strapped to [your] head.” Speakers are also located within the horizontal strap to help keep the set’s weight evenly distributed, and PC Gamer’s Jacob Ridley says the overall effect is one that’s surprisingly comfortable — though if you plan on laying down with the Steam Frame, the battery pack at the back of your head might become a nuisance during longer sessions.
Steam Frame’s foveated rendering and foveated streaming were two of the most common points that came up in early impressions coverage. Foveated rendering uses eye-tracking to decide what gets rendered and with how much fidelity. So, for instance, if you’re looking off to the left, the set renders whatever’s on the right at a lower resolution. Foveated streaming is something new that Valve came up with to help reduce the demands on streaming from your PC to the Steam Frame. Like foveated rendering, foveated streaming governs how much bandwidth in-game objects get based on where you’re looking.
It works much more effectively than any of the previewers expected, too. “As a fun party trick, Valve turned on its ‘debug’ mode to let us see how accurately its eye-tracking system followed our gaze,” Digital Foundry said. “Valve engineers describe their eye-tracking solution as ‘fast enough to beat you to where your gaze is going.” And it was.
Valve uses a wi-fi dongle to keep Steam Frame streaming cord-free. That isn’t a new experience either, but combined with foveated streaming it should be a much better experience than you usually get streaming games from your PC to a headset.
“Streaming games to the headset should look better than it does on rival headsets, without requiring a high-bandwidth connection that could trip up on lower-end router hardware or in Wi-Fi dead zones,” Eurogamer’s Will Judd said, with the caveat that no one knows just how well the streaming will work across the board, given the curated selection of games that previewers were able to demo.
The small sample of controlled previews that accompanied Valve’s announcement all remarked on how stable and clear games were when streamed from a nearby PC, though there were a couple of exceptions. UploadVR’s David Heaney noted frame skip issues at an interval during one demo game, and while Valve explained it away as a Windows issue, IGN’s Michael Higham also commented on image stuttering similar to screen tearing in standalone PC gaming. Granted, Steam Frame isn’t set to launch until 2026, so Valve has time to tinker with hardware problems between now and release.
Digital Foundry’s coverage raises a lingering question: whether Valve sees the Steam Frame as a standalone headset or one tethered to your PC. Steam Frame uses a layer of code processing called Fex that runs native versions of games, including Ghost Town and Moss, two of the games available for demo. The layer takes up a chunk of the CPU to work, though Valve says it won’t necessarily result in framerate drops. However, Digital Foundry noted that Half-Life: Alyx was only available to demo via streaming, and Valve reps wouldn’t clarify whether they have plans for an enhanced version of the game running natively on Steam Frame. In other words, more demanding games might be streaming-only.
“[Steam Frame’s] biggest possible rival might not be Meta Quest 3, but rather Steam Deck,” Digital Foundry said. “Valve has dangled the mixed proposition of a magic wand that translates x86 code to run natively on Steam Frame… and a clear suggestion that Frame is designed first and foremost around streaming games from a nearby PC. So, which is it?”
IGN’s Michael Higham says streaming-only for most games might not be such a problem, though. He tested Hades 2 in 4K with the Steam Frame’s virtual screen expanded to its full size and described it like “playing on a 100-inch TV [you] didn’t have to buy or fit into a living room.” Like pretty much everything else with Steam Frame, that’s not a unique feature for headset gaming, but combined with powerful wi-fi tech that lets you get the most out of your existing PC setup and low-latency streaming, it’s much more convenient. PC Gamer’s Jacob Ridley expressed a similar sentiment. “There’s minimal hassle to set it up, to play VR or non-VR games, and blending the best bits of standalone and PCVR into one very convenient VR headset.”
