[STEAM] Valve Officially Announces Steam Frame, A "Streaming-First" Standalone VR Headset

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Valve just officially announced Steam Frame, a "streaming-first" standalone VR headset launching in "early 2026".

Steam Frame has a lightweight modular design and runs a VR version of Valve's SteamOS, the Linux-based operating system used in Steam Deck, with an evolved version of the Proton compatibility layer that can run almost any Linux, Windows, and Android application, including SteamVR games. Many titles won't perform well on the mobile chipset, though, and Steam Frame has a wireless dongle in the box to leverage the power of your gaming PC – hence Valve's "streaming-first" positioning.

The headset does not require or support base stations. It tracks itself and its included controllers using four onboard greyscale tracking cameras, two of which can be used for monochrome passthrough, and it also has eye tracking for foveated streaming.

Steam Frame will replace Valve Index on the market, which the company confirmed to UploadVR is no longer in production, and joins Valve's "family" of hardware products, which will also soon include a Steam Machine consolized PC and a new Steam Controller.

Myself and my colleague Ian Hamilton went hands-on with Steam Frame at Valve HQ, and you can

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. This article, on the other hand, provides a full rundown of the design, specifications, and features of Steam Frame, based on the information provided to us by Valve.

Lightweight Modular Design

Steam Frame will come with a replaceable battery strap, with built-in dual driver speakers and a 21.6 Wh rear battery.

The strap itself is fabric and the rear battery unit has soft padding, meaning it can "collapse" against the lenses for portability and naturally deform when your head is resting on a chair, sofa, or bed.

There's an optional front-to-back top strap, but it's not attached by default.

The core frontbox of Steam Frame weighs just 185 grams, Valve says, while the entire system with the default included facial interface, speakers, strap, and rear battery weighs 440 grams.

That makes Steam Frame the lightest fully-featured standalone VR headset to date.

Steam Frame is a modular system, and Valve will make the CAD and electrical specifications available to third parties to build custom facial interfaces and headstraps. Someone could, for example, build a rigid strap with an open interface, or a fully soft strap with a tethered battery. Expect a range of accessories.

2K LCDs & Pancake Lenses

Steam Frame features dual 2160×2160 LCD panels, meaning it has twice as many pixels as the Valve Index and roughly the same as Meta Quest 3.

The panels have a configurable refresh rate between 72Hz and 120Hz, with an "experimental" 144Hz mode, just like the Index.

Valve says the multi-element pancake lenses in front of the panels offer "very good sharpness across the full field of view", which the company describes as "slightly less than Index", and "conservatively" 110 degrees horizontal and vertical.

Lens separation is manually adjusted via a wheel on the top of the headset, letting wearers adjust for their interpupillary distance (IPD).

Wireless PC Adapter With Foveated Streaming

Steam Frame does not support DisplayPort or HDMI in. It is not a tethered headset. Instead, Valve is going all-in on compressed wireless streaming, aiming to perfect it with a combination of clever hardware and software.

The headset has two separate wireless radios. One is used as a client, connecting to your home Wi-Fi network on the 5GHz band for the general internet connection of SteamOS. The other is for a 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E hotspot, created by the headset, that SteamVR on your PC automatically connects to via the USB adapter included in the box. It's a dedicated point-to-point connection between Steam Frame and your PC.

This gives Valve precise firmware-level control over the entire network stack for wireless PC VR, and eliminates the problems you might experience using other standalone headsets for this, such as being bottlenecked by a router that's either too far away, blocked by too many walls, congested by other traffic, or just supplied by your ISP because it was cheap, not because it's any good.

Of course, some enthusiasts already have a high-quality Wi-Fi setup for PC VR, with a high-end router or access point in the room where they play. Valve tells us that such people can continue to use their setup instead of the adapter if they really want, but suspects they won't choose to.

The other feature Valve has implemented to make the wireless PC VR experience as good as it can possibly be is foveated encoding. Steam Frame has built-in eye tracking, and when you're using PC VR it's always used to encode the video stream in higher resolution where you're currently looking.

While this feature has existed as part of Steam Link VR for Quest Pro since the app launched in December 2023, Valve says on Steam Frame the foveated streaming has lower latency and greater precision, thanks to the company controlling the entire rendering stack on the headset side.

Linux, Windows & Android Apps Standalone

Steam Frame can run Linux, Windows, and Android applications through a combination of compatibility layers and emulation.

As with other SteamOS devices such as Steam Deck, Steam Frame can run Linux titles natively as well as Windows applications via

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, the compatibility layer Valve has been working on for almost a decade now in collaboration with CodeWeavers.

But while Steam Deck is an x86 device, the same CPU architecture as a gaming PC, Steam Frame uses the mobile-focused ARM architecture. That supports a huge advantage: Steam Frame can natively run Android APKs, including those you download in the web browser, as long as they don't require

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Play Services. But it also means that Steam Frame can't natively run x86 applications, which the majority of Steam games are.

To solve this, Valve has been investing in

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, an open-source tool for emulating x86 applications on ARM Linux devices that it has integrated into Proton on Steam Frame. The company tells UploadVR that the performance impact here is "shockingly small" – on the order of a few percent.

The ability to run x86 Windows applications means that Steam Frame can, in theory, run almost any VR title on Steam.

However, the key word here is "run". Steam Frame features a roughly 10-watt chipset originally designed for use in smartphones, and has only a fraction of the power of the gaming PC hardware that most SteamVR titles were designed for. Thus, while you can run visually simplistic and well-optimized titles at relatively low graphics settings, for high-fidelity VR gaming, such as playing Half-Life: Alyx you'll want to leverage your PC.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 + 16GB RAM

Steam Frame is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, paired with 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM.

Two models will be sold, one with 256GB UFS storage and the other with 1TB, and there's also a microSD card slot for expanded storage. In fact, you can even transfer the microSD card from your Steam Deck or Steam Machine, and your games will automatically be available to play.

So just how powerful is Steam Frame's chip? Well, the

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used in pretty much every other non-Apple headset features the Adreno 740 GPU from the 8 Gen 2 smartphone chip, and the 8 Gen 3 is the successor from the year after with the newer Adreno 750.

On paper, Steam Frame's Adreno 750 GPU is 25% more powerful than the Adreno 740 in Meta Quest 3, and this difference increases to over 30% when you factor in the fact that Quest 3 slightly underclocks its GPU, while Valve confirmed that Steam Frame does not. Further, the effective performance difference will be even greater in titles that leverage eye-tracked foveated rendering.

The CPU, on the other hand, is much more difficult to compare, as the XR2 Gen 2 uses a non-standard core configuration and 2D benchmarks run on headsets don't induce the maximum clockspeed. But based on what we know about the chips, expect Steam Frame to have around 50% improved singlethreaded performance compared to Quest 3 and around 100% greater multithreaded.

Essentially, from a standalone performance perspective Steam Frame is notably more powerful than other non-Apple standalone headsets, though still significantly less powerful than a gaming PC.

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