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Not fairly 4 years on from the industry-bending success of the Steam Deck, Valve is again with its most formidable assortment of gaming {hardware} but. Today, the pioneering PC gaming firm is taking the wraps off the Arm-powered wi-fi Steam Frame gaming headset, a brand new Steam Controller that takes its design cues from the Steam Deck, and one thing I by no means would have guessed, given its previous failures: a brand new compact, cube-shaped Steam Machine gaming desktop, rocking some extra semi-custom AMD silicon.
Valve invited us to its headquarters for some early hands-on time with all this new {hardware}, and I got here away largely impressed. These are massive swings for an organization that has a tiny number of employees in comparison with rivals like Epic Games or Microsoft.
But the company’s secret weapon might be one of its simplest features, which applies to both the Steam Frame headset and the Steam Machine: the ability to pull the microSD card from your Steam Deck and insert it into either of the company’s new SteamOS machines and get instant access to your library and saved games. We’ll have to see how well that trick works once we get review hardware, but it sounds like a great way to get gamers to further buy into your hardware ecosystem and your game store.
Steam Frame: Arm meets SteamOS in a feature-packed gaming headset meant for more than VR
The Steam Frame headset, formerly known in leaks as its codename, Deckard, is the real wildcard in Valve’s new lineup, as well as the most complex. Aside from, perhaps, Valve’s own Half-Life Alyx, compelling, high-production AAA VR games haven’t materialized, despite a decade of hardware pushes from Valve, HTC, and most notably Meta.
Valve’s solution? The Steam Frame (and its controllers) are designed to play VR titles, as well as traditional PC and mobile games in a resizable in-headset window that actually felt like a big-screen experience during my hands-on time with the headset. Valve engineers told me the company thinks of the Steam Frame less as a VR headset and more as “a new way to play your entire Steam library.” The Frame can do this both by streaming titles wirelessly from your PC, or running them internally on its built-in Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip.
This is all a major change from Valve’s previous headset, the Valve Index. That headset, launched in 2019, was purely for VR gaming, used base stations for monitoring, and required attaching to a pc to play.
With the Steam Frame, streaming from a PC is one choice, however the firm makes use of the Fex (formally stylized as FEX) software program emulation layer that brings SteamOS to the Arm instruction set, which actually has implications past this system. But I’m very curious how a lot operating Windows titles through Proton and Fex goes to have an effect on battery life and efficiency.
Steam Frame Specs
|
Processor |
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 |
|
RAM |
16GB LPDDR5X |
|
Storage |
256GB, 1TB UFS (plus microSD slot) |
|
Optics |
Pancake lenses |
|
Resolution |
2160 x 2160 LCD per eye |
|
Refresh fee |
72, 120, 144 Hz (experimental) |
|
FOV |
Up to 110 levels |
|
Tracking |
4x exterior monochrome cameras (monochrome passthrough) |
| Row 8 – Cell 0 |
2x inside cameras (eye monitoring) |
| Row 9 – Cell 0 |
External IR illumination for darkish environments |
|
Wireless adapter |
USB Type-A Wi-Fi 6E with dual-band low-latency direct PC connection |
|
Battery |
21.6 Wh, USB Type-C charging |
|
Weight |
185 grams (core headset alone) |
| Row 13 – Cell 0 |
440g (with facial cushions, audio, and rear battery) |
|
Steam Frame Controllers |
6-DOF monitoring with IMU |
| Row 15 – Cell 0 |
Capacitive finger sensing |
| Row 16 – Cell 0 |
TMR thumbsticks |
| Row 17 – Cell 0 |
Haptic suggestions |
| Row 18 – Cell 0 |
Traditional sport pad controls |
| Row 19 – Cell 0 |
Powered by AA batteries (rated 40 hours) |
Controllers and comfort
Valve had to design its Steam Frame controllers to handle traditional games alongside those that involve head and controller tracking. In short, in addition to the thumbsticks and triggers, there’s a D-pad to the left controller and ABXY buttons on the right, as well as a second set of finger triggers. This is a major difference from Valve’s previous VR controllers for its Index headset, which each included an A button, B button, thumb stick, gyroscope, and advanced finger tracking.
In short demos, this seemed to work fine, but I am not sure I’d want to play something like a platformer or other gamepad-focused title for long periods with a separated D-pad and button setup. That said, lots of Switch players have been doing that for years.
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Comfort of a headset is going to vary between individuals, and I didn’t spend hours using the Steam Frame, so I’m not ready to fully pass judgment yet. But the headset was fairly easy to put on and adjust the IPD (via a knob between the lenses), it never felt heavy in my demos, and I didn’t experience nearly as much lens fogging as I have with previous VR headsets. But the latter might have more to do with the climate control in Valve’s offices than the headset itself. Like so many other aspects of the Steam Frame, the fit feels good at first blush, but I’d need to spend a lot more time with it on my head to tell just how good it is.
At the very least, the Steam Frame’s 440 gram weight (including the battery, padding, and straps) is less than the 515-gram Meta Quest 3.
A “streaming-first” headset
Valve’s engineers emphasized that the company sees the Steam Frame as a “wireless streaming-first device.” So while the headset (specifically, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip it runs on, which was a flagship smartphone processor back in 2024) technically supports Wi-Fi 7, for gaming that’s streamed from your desktop or laptop, the company includes a dedicated Wi-Fi 6E dongle with the headset. That dongle uses the 6GHz band for game streaming, while the 5GHz band handles Wi-Fi communication duties, like downloads and multiplayer communication, and chat.
To improve streaming further, Valve is also offering up some new (but familiar) streaming tech. Foveated rendering — essentially saving compute resources by using eye tracking to render only the center of what you are looking at in the greatest detail — has been a staple of VR for nearly a decade now. But with the Steam Frame, Valve is taking that concept and applying it to game streaming, calling it Foveated Streaming, and pointing out that this isn’t something developers need to get involved with.
“The game just renders the full field of view, like it normally would,” said Valve’s Jeremy Selan. “The games don’t have to do anything to take advantage of the technology.”
In my brief time playing Half-Life: Alyx on the Steam Frame at Valve’s headquarters, performance was flawless, and the controllers were intuitive. But, of course, we need to spend more time with the headset in settings that aren’t Valve’s HQ to pass judgment on how well the Steam Frame is at streaming titles from a PC.
Fex brings Steam games to Arm
But that’s not the only way the Steam Frame can game. The company also showed off the x86 version of Hades 2 running standalone (as in not streaming from a PC) on the Steam Frame. And the game ran just fine and looked good at what Valve reps told me was 1400p in a window inside the headset, which I could actually resize to something that filled a large part of my field of view.
“The magic trick is that the game doesn’t know it’s running on an Arm chip,” designer Lawrence Yang told me. The game may be designed for a Windows PC, but “it’s actually running on Linux, running on Arm.”
That happens thanks to Fex, which is an emulation layer, so that will almost certainly mean increased power consumption / shorter battery life. Valve isn’t saying anything about battery life yet (except for the 40-hour per AA controller claim), as they continue to work on the software for now. But like the Steam Deck, this means your gaming time on the Steam Frame is going to vary dramatically, depending on whether you’re streaming from a PC or playing something directly on the device.
And the headset definitely felt like it was working harder when running games on the Arm chip rather than streaming. The only time I actively noticed the Steam Frame’s fan whirring was when playing the second game that Valve had me test on the headset itself, the VR title Ghost Town. It was very noticeable, however that was seemingly at the least partly as a result of the a part of the sport I used to be enjoying, exploring a small ship at sea, was fairly quiet.
You can see the fan, heatpipe, and different internals on this clear model that Valve had made solely to indicate off the interior structure. There is certainly a number of {hardware} inside a reasonably small headset.
This stage of fan noise wouldn’t be problematic for me when enjoying an motion title or one thing with regular music, however it did barely spoil the immersion on this one sport. Hopefully, that’s extra the exception than the norm.
Adding your individual headphones or earbuds would possibly assist with fan noise, however the audio system within the Steam Frame are a part of the pinnacle strap mechanism. This was good for listening to Valve’s engineers whereas I ran by demos, and sound typically felt advantageous when gaming, it’s not the sort of isolating audio that you simply would possibly need to be actually immersed in your sport world.
Valve’s software program developer, Jeremy Selan, tried to assuage a few of my fears about what Fex would possibly do to battery life, saying the system makes use of Vulkan, that many video games now are natively Vulkan, and that as quickly as the sport engine makes API calls, they begin operating in on “natively compiled Arm processing code.”
Similarly, on the CPU facet, Selan says it’s largely issues just like the consumer interactions themselves (what occurs while you pull a set off or hit a soar button) that undergo the Fex layer. He says there’s a few 10-20% efficiency hit with the emulation, however that it solely applies to particular points of the code.
“When we set out, we didn’t know quite how far this would get,” mentioned Selan. “But on games like Hades 2, where we are seeing 1440p at 90 Hz, while running the full VR stack. We’re really very happy with it.”
Streaming or Local gaming?
As for which video games you will need to (or should) run streaming from a PC to the Steam Frame, versus enjoying domestically, Valve says all video games (VR and non-VR) may be streamed to the headset from a PC. And much like the Hades 2 demo, non-VR video games will run in a resizable window.
For video games put in and operating on the headset itself, Valve tells me there will probably be a “Verified” sport program much like what already exists for the Steam Deck, the place the corporate goes to check titles within the Steam catalog and supply steerage. The firm’s purpose is for the Steam Frame expertise to be as frictionless as attainable, so that individuals can deal with enjoying their Steam titles. But clearly there must be some distinction between video games that you will have to be close to your gaming PC to play, and video games you’ve got put in natively and may play when you’re at house or touring along with your headset.
More software tweaks to come
Selan also says the Valve team is working on a way to pre-cache the CPU shaders, in a similar way that the company already pre-caches GPU shaders ahead of time on the Steam Deck. This should further reduce the overhead of the Fex emulation layer, but it’s not shipping yet.
That all sounds good, but Hades 2, which happily runs on the Nintendo Switch, obviously isn’t the most demanding title. Again, I’m quite curious to see how the promised “new way to play your entire Steam library” holds up when we get review units – as well as what battery life is like. Obviously, I don’t expect the Steam Frame with a smartphone chip to run games like a dedicated gaming rig, but Borderlands 4 is a recent addition to my Steam library, and it can bring my RTX 4090 to its knees.
“From the partner’s perspective, we’re trying to minimize the effort to get their software on this device,” said Selan, wrapping up my Steam Frame session.”And from a customer’s perspective, they shouldn’t have to think about anything. They’re just going to hit play.
”We’ll learn more about how smooth the streaming and native experience is, as well as battery life and how much the Steam Frame costs, as we get closer to launch, which Valve representatives said should be early next year.
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