The Fried Motherboard is a crucial item when it comes to upgrading your workstations in ARC Raiders, but finding them can be a challenging task. This item is specifically required to upgrade the Utility Station. You can also use the Fried Motherboard in different blueprints and crafting mechanisms. This guide will provide you with all the necessary information that will help you find these rare items on your raids. Table of contentsBest Fried Motherboard locations in ARC RaidersHow to use the Fried Motherboard in ARC RaidersBest Fried Motherboard locations in ARC Raiders The Fried Motherboard spawns randomly in areas of Technological nature. You can find such areas across all four maps, but I have found the highest success from Dam Battlegrounds. The Dam Battlegrounds map has several locations that are tagged as Technological areas. My favorite spot, and where I have had the most success, is the Research and Administration building. Located in the central part of the map, this colossal building has plenty of containers to breach and loot. You can search every floor to increase the chances of finding a Fried Motherboard. Screenshot and remix by Destructoid The location is pretty popular for finding keys as well. Keys in ARC Raiders allow you to access locked areas and offer valuable loot, items, and blueprints. The keys spawn randomly across the map, but I have found a bulk of them from the Research and Administration building. As a secondary choice, I have had some success from the Space Travel building in Buried City. Located in the northern part of the map, the building has helped me with a few Fried Motherboards. Finally, you can always gain them randomly (with low chances of success). How to use the Fried Motherboard in ARC Raiders Here are all the known ways of using a Fried Motherboard in ARC Raiders. 3x Fried Motherboard + 5x Advanced Electrical Components + 4x Leaper Pulse Unit (Upgrade Utility Station 2 to Utility Station 3)Recycle a Fried Motherboard to get 5x Plastic Parts and 2x Electrical Components1 Fried Motherboard can be salvaged to 5x Wires The post How to get Fried Motherboard in ARC Raiders appeared first on Destructoid. View the full article
It's not exactly a surprising outcome, but it is now official: RuneScape players have voted overwhelmingly to remove the game's 'Treasure Hunter' microtransaction system, and so it'll be cut out completely on January 19, 2026... Read more.View the full article
Valve has announced three new Steam Hardware products with the new Steam Controller, Steam Machine and Steam Frame. [Hidden Content] These products have long been rumoured but have now been officially unveiled. “We’ve been super happy with the success of Steam Deck,” said Gabe Newell, President of Valve, “and PC gamers have continued asking for even more ways to play all the great titles in their Steam libraries. Our work over the years on other hardware and even more importantly on SteamOS has enabled Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame to do just that.” The Steam Controller is a new version of the controller that launched back in 2015. The new controller features a design similar to that of an Xbox controller. It features the typical face buttons, D-Pad, Steam Button, Grip buttons, Quick Access Menu, along with symmetrical magnetic thumbsticks utilizing TMR technology. [Hidden Content] Steam Controller (2026) Below the thumbsticks, you’ll find dual trackpads. There’s also HD rumble and grip-enabled gyro that Valve calls Grip Sense. The Steam Controller Puck that connects the controller to your PC is both a wireless transmitter and a charging station for the controller, using pogo pins. You can also connect the controller using Bluetooth or wired via USB. [Hidden Content] Steam Controller (2026) Valve says the new Steam Controller works with any PC, Mac or Linux PC that runs Steam or the Steam Link app, as well as the Steam Deck, new Steam Machine and Steam Frame. The controller has infrared LEDs that make it easily trackable by the Steam Frame’s cameras. Next is the Steam Machine, which is essentially like the Steam Deck but in a console form factor. Valve says the Steam Machine has six times the horsepower of the Steam Deck. The device itself runs SteamOS 3 and is 152mm tall, 162.4 mm deep and 156 mm wide and weighs 2.6 kg. [Hidden Content] Steam Machine (2026) Powering the machine is a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 processor with a semi-custom AMD RNDA3 GPU with 16GB of RAM and 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM. Valve says the console offers 4K gaming at 60fps with FSR. [Hidden Content] Steam Machine (2026) For storage, the Steam Machine will be available with either a 512GB SSD or a 2TB SSD. Both will have a microSD card slot. For ports, there’s a DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0, 4 USB-A ports, 1 USB-C, and Gigabit Ethernet. Other specs include Wi-FI 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, an LED strip with 17 individual addressable RGB LEDs and an integrated 2.4 GHz Steam Controller wireless adapter. Lastly, there’s the Steam Frame, which is a standalone VR headset that runs SteamOS. Powering the headset is the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip with 16GB of RAM. With the Steam Frame, you’ll be able to play all the VR games in your Steam Library as well as non-VR games. Valve is working on a verification program that will let users see which games in their library (VR and non-VR) will work standalone. The headset features custom pancake lenses with 2160 x 2160 LCD panels (one per eye) and supports refresh rates from 72-144Hz. There are also dual stereo speakers on each side, monochrome cameras for inside-out controller and headset tracking. Valve says the headset should work even in dark environments. [Hidden Content] Steam Frame You’ll also find eye-tracking cameras in the headset and IPD adjustment. Other specs include a 21.6 Wh battery, Wi-FI 7, Bluetooth 5.3, dual mic array, USB-C port and 256GB or 1TB storage options with a microSD card slot for expanded storage. The Steam Frame controllers have full 6-DOF tracking and IMU support, face buttons, Steam, View and Menu buttons, D-pad, triggers, bumpers, and grip buttons, along with haptic motors. Battery life is up to 40 hours from an AA battery in each controller. [Hidden Content] Steam Frame Controllers Valve says that the new Steam Controller, Steam Machine and Steam Frame will be available in the same regions where the Steam Deck is available, including Canada, the US, the ***, Europe and Australia. Along with Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan (via Komodo). Valve is hoping to start shipping the new hardware in early 2026, with specific launch timing and pricing shared in the new year. You can wishlist the products now. Source: Valve View the full article
Going into the third week since the monumental release of ARC Raiders, the latest set of trials haseven more worthwhile rewards to farm for. While you do have to achieve raider level 15 to access these challenges, they're more than worth completing to claim additional cosmetic rewards when the season ends. View the full article
EA and Battlefield Studios give players a new roadmap for the next two big updates for Battlefield 6, starting on November 18 with the California Resistance patch. Although it hasn't always been smooth, Battlefield 6 continues at a rapid pace as EA, DICE, and the other involved development studios chart out a plan of action for the rest of 2025. View the full article
The Nintendo 64 clone was first teased in 2023 with a due date of late 2024. Once formally introduced, Analogue said the system would ship in time for the holidays… then in Q1 of the following year. Unfortunately, the console maker was unable to meet these deadlines and ended up... Read Entire Article View the full article
We cover Atelier Ryza, Ryza 2, Ryza 3, and the Ryza DX games across PS5, PS4, Switch, Switch 2, Steam Deck, and PC to help you find which version you should buy going over visuals, performance, load times, and more. View the full article
Valve confirmed that it's not currently working on a new first-party VR game. Today saw Valve officially announce Steam Frame, a “streaming-first” standalone VR headset that's launching in “early 2026”. While the company is aiming to make your existing Steam library more valuable, this naturally raised the question: following 2020's Half-Life: Alyx, is Valve developing new VR games for the headset? Speaking to UploadVR during our recent visit, Valve told us that it's “not talking about content today.” However, Road To VR says that "a member of the Steam Frame team" denied that it has any VR content in development, offering what the publication described as a "simple and definitive no". While Alyx wasn't a launch title for the Valve Index headset, the groundbreaking title arrived less than a year after launch. Before that, Valve had previously confirmed it was developing a flagship VR game, whereas Steam Frame will seemingly rely on existing and third-party titles. As for Steam Frame itself, the newly announced headset uses a lightweight modular design and runs a VR version of Valve's SteamOS, which it previously used with Steam Deck. This also uses an updated version of the Proton compatibility layer that goes beyond SteamVR games, letting it also run almost any Linux, Windows, and Android application. If you're interested to find out more about how it runs games, you can check out our hands-on impressions and the hardware specifications for more. View the full article
Microsoft’s head of gaming, Phil Spencer, has welcomed Valve’s announcement of its console-like PC, the Steam Machine. Announced on Wednesday alongside a new VR headset and controller, Steam Machine is a six-inch console-like cube with “over six times the horsepower of Steam Deck”, which is designed to allow PC games to be played on the TV. It’s a device that sounds similar to Microsoft’s own reported plans for the next Xbox, which is allegedly set to be a hybrid system capable of playing games across multiple stores, including Steam. Read More... View the full article
After much anticipation and endless leaks, Valve has finally come forward with what it's been cooking all this time: a trio (shocker!) of new devices, including Steam Machine (form-factor PC), Steam Frame (a new VR set), and the infamous Steam Controller, now improved and actually (seemingly) quite good. The Steam Store pages have not yet been updated at the time opf writing, but Valve's own sites are already up and running for each of the devices, which also do not feature any prices as of this article. Image via Valve Image via Valve Image via Valve The Steam Machine is a successor to Valve's previous device of the same name, and is now a portable, powerful, small, and quiet mini-PC that can be used on the go and placed literally anywhere. It runs on the SteamOS and is, as Valve argues, six times more powerful than the Steam Deck. Much like the latter, the Steam Machine will have its own set of "Steam Machine Verified" games on the company's storefront, ensuring you get the most out of it in anything you fire up. Meanwhile, the Steam Frame is a new pair of VR goggles that aims to revolutionize the technology by turning the set into an actual PC that can be used, as is the Valve philosophy lately it seems, on the go. It is a lightweight VR system that Valve outfitted with the SteamOS and, like the above, is going to verify individual titles as "Steam Frame Verified." It's integrated with Steam and can be used in both VR and non-VR scenarios, and I can't wait to see how the latter plays out, as it might very well be a necessary first step toward total VR integration in everyday use. Lastly, Valve is offering a new, improved, and reformed Steam Controller that is much like the previous one but with a more traditional design. It's similar in most aspects to the DualSense controller by Sony, but has two trackpads that can act as mice for particular PC-specific scenarios. Everything about the controller can be edited and attuned to yourself via Steam Input, and since it's integrated with Steam itself, running it on any device with Steam installed is going to be a breeze. It also supports both Bluetooth and USB connections, but can also be paired with your PC via Steam's own "Steam Controller Pluck," if that's your prerogative. Valve typically follows up these hardware announcements with some big video game news, whether they're just small-time projects to promote the devices themselves or actual, full-blown games like Half-Life: Alyx, after Valve Index was shown to the world. Many leakers and hopium addicts like myself believe Half-Life X could be the game announced this time around, but that could be just hope and cope. At any rate, it's good to see Valve actually doing things and pushing the boundaries in the industry, which is sort of its thing. The post Valve finally learns what the number 3 is with a triplet of new gaming devices appeared first on Destructoid. View the full article
The UEFA ********** Challenge 3 SBC is now live in FC 26, and it's a pretty tough challenge to complete in Ultimate Team. The latest fodder challenge allows you to use lower-rated items in hopes of getting a higher-rated card from the rewards. The requirements appear to be quite stiff for the challenge, but this guide will help you complete the SBC without any hassle. Table of contentsFC 26 UEFA ********** Challenge 3 SBC tasksFC 26 UEFA ********** Challenge 3 SBC solutionsFC 26 UEFA ********** Challenge 3 SBC tasks The UEFA ********** Challenge 3 SBC has only one task, and here are its requirements. UEFA ********** Challenge 3 SBC Min. 4 Players from the same LeagueMax. 3 Players from the same NationMin. 3 Players: RareMin. 9 Players: GoldPlayer quality: Min. SilverMin. Squad Total Chemistry Points: 31 The chemistry requirements of this challenge are the hardest aspect. Meeting 31 chemistry while adhering to the other tasks can feel quite stiff. However, I have added a potential solution for you to try and complete the SBC. FC 26 UEFA ********** Challenge 3 SBC solutions When it comes to fodder challenges, you'll ideally want to use lower-rated items that are already available in your Ultimate Team inventory. If you're stuck, feel free to use the following solution. Adams ST 77Nusa LM 76Maldini CAM 74Ngonge CAM 72Isaksen RM 76Matic CDM 77Biraghi LB 78Nelsson CB 75Koch CB 82Knauff RM 77Meret GK 82 Completing the challenge gets you an untradeable Prime Gold Players Pack in Ultimate Team. The pack features 12 gold player items, with six of them guaranteed to be Rare. You're also guaranteed to get one card rated 82 or higher, and it will have more chances of being a **********/walkout. Don't forget to complete the SBC before it expires from Ultimate Team. The post FC 26 UEFA ********** Challenge 3 SBC tasks and solutions appeared first on Destructoid. View the full article
If you've spent money on games from Steam, Valve's aim with Steam Frame is to make that library more valuable. 50 percent of Steam users still run their games at 1080p, according to the latest Steam Hardware Survey. How many of those gamers have never seen a monitor refreshing faster than 60Hz? Or a modern VR display running its content at 120Hz? Ignoring the subset of people, mainly gamers, who have a concept of the difference between 30Hz and 60Hz, how many people worldwide have never seen motion displayed on a screen faster than 60Hz? In 2026, Valve will follow the Steam Deck by starting to sell its most portable standalone PC ever. You wear Steam Frame on your face with experimental display support up to 144Hz. What Is Steam Frame? Steam Frame is a VR headset, personal computer, and probably a whole lot of other things once its community verifies Valve's claims that you can swap out the operating system or plug in other accessories into its high-speed nose port. "We don't block anyone from doing what they want to with their device," Valve's Lawrence Yang said. Developers and Steam Frame buyers can use high frame rates in different ways, but at its core this headset features a stereoscopic portable display as its compute unit. There's dedicated hardware to enable high quality streaming from nearby PCs also running Steam and, while in standalone mode, you can still get something like a 1440p picture on what feels like a 70-inch virtual display running at 90, 120 or potentially 144Hz. UploadVR played Hades 2 at Valve HQ in a demo that conveyed the power of having a virtual display comfortably floating anywhere with smoothly animated content displaying in the Steam Frame at rates usually only associated with high end gaming monitors tethered to desks. Arms at your sides with a controller in each hand, Valve says Steam Frame works in the dark too. "All of these games can support arbitrary resolutions and refresh rates," Valve's Jeremy Selan said during our briefing. "We're thinking about it as very much a per-game setting. Some games just by the nature of the play want to be very high refresh and more modest res. When we were showing you Hades, it was at 1440p at 90 Hertz." Hades remains a strong memory from my time in Steam Frame at Valve headquarters because of that high frame rate, and it bears calling out amid all our coverage that having some “VR and non-VR” games running at an extremely high frame rate – even reclined on a couch or bed – will be an eye-opening experience for many people, including Steam Deck owners. "While it is a wireless streaming first headset," Yang told UploadVR. "We did want you to be able to play your Steam library when you're not next to your PC or laptop, so we made Steam Frame a PC by itself. It has an ARM chip that's running SteamOS." Could playing existing games at high frame rates in a lightweight standalone headset make it hard to go back to 60 or 30 fps screens entirely? For long-time UploadVR readers as well as newbies learning about the market for the first time, it’s important we convey just how meaningful this feature alone might be in daily use as Valve works to optimize the system and rally developers into supporting new surfaces for their games on Steam. During our time with Valve I dug into questions of openness, tracing the path from the Vive and wired PC VR-only Index to the standalone Steam Frame with wireless streaming. “This is a Linux OS, this is SteamOS brought to ARM. If there are other operating systems, for instance, that support these chip sets, you're welcome to do so,” Selan said. “You'd at that point be responsible for the tracking stack and everything else, but very much in the spirit of Steam Deck, this is your device, your computer, you own it, you can mod it and extend it in any way.” Steam Input Alignment Valve looks to align controller input in Steam Frame with traditional gamepad and Steam Deck, with backward compatibility to existing VR content on both Quest and PC. That’s why there are two index buttons instead of one on each controller, matching the shoulder and trigger buttons on traditional gamepads. Valve’s Jeff Leinbaugh introduced the controllers by saying their design is “going along with all the goals of the headset and a lot of our hardware. We want this device to work with all of your VR games but also all of your non-VR games and just make your whole Steam catalog more valuable, deliver you a bunch of value no matter what you happen to be playing.” What Is Steam Frame's Price? "It's a premium headset, but we're really aiming to be cheaper than Index," Selan said. "While I said we're gonna be premium, we're still trying to be very cost considerate." We're due for months of debate over the definition of "cheaper than Index" not due to any fault of Valve, but because that's not a comparison many people know how to make conceptually. Valve Index was $999 for a room-scale VR kit plus a user-provided Windows PC to drive it. Steam Frame is a standalone headset from Valve. Many people, in their heads, will be comparing the price of a component to a computer. Trade-Offs: Wi-Fi & Display Steam Frame's creators acknowledge trade-offs in its design, like the lack of HDR or a true-****** display technology like the Steam Deck OLED. My colleague David Heaney asked about the potential of a higher end headset one day exchanging the LCD in its design for OLED or HDR. "I think about HDR every day," Selan said. Where Apple brings to Vision Pro its iPad app and Apple TV content libraries as the cornerstone of its leap into VR — while building new Apple Immersive Video content along the way — Valve representatives declined to talk about content made for Steam Frame by their developers. Valve is “optimistic” about bringing Half-Life: Alyx to standalone at some point. Until then, that's what the streaming focus is about. The story now from Valve is about putting its hardware in end-to-end wireless control of Steam games in more places while improving frame rates, latency and resolution wherever possible along the way. What makes good Apple Immersive Video so powerful is the amount of photons hitting camera sensors and then reconstructed for your view on a virtual display at a high resolution and frame rate. Almost nobody notices when an iPad app that typically runs at 30 fps on a physical tablet also runs at 30 fps on a virtual display, but you’ll jump when something comes at you in 180-degree video delivered in Apple Immersive Video at Apple Vision Pro’s frame rates and quality levels. You’ll have to stay tuned for our review of the M5 Vision Pro, released in 2025, to see if that specification bump from the M2 of 2024 has a meaningful effect on frame rates across the broader Apple software ecosystem. Still, you should keep some of this in mind as Valve seeks to make an impact with new hardware centered on Steam games in 2026. "We ask ourselves at Valve, what can we do well?" Selan said. "We keep coming back to the Steam games that you already own." Developer Feedback & Community Valve is looking to its developer and user communities to do the lifting here in centering Steam in the market for VR games running on ARM. Developer applications for Steam Frame kits are open today. The market for VR content on ARM is currently dominated by Quest, but many top apps have ports of their Android-based software packages on other storefronts, like those from Pico or HTC. As of last month, this is a market also being formally chased by Android XR for the Google Play Store. "The same way Steam OS has been fully expanded and extended by the community. Our hope is to do that same thing for VR. So this would be considered an open PC," Selan said. "This would be like the biggest open VR headset device, and like everyone can richly work together to make that better and better." The Best Headset Demo Ever? Valve didn't show experiences like The Lab with mini games like Longbow from 2016, or even Beat Saber from 2018, that might've indicated tracking regressions compared with the Valve Index or HTC Vive laser base stations surrounding a play area. We didn't even see SteamVR Home, just a compositing system for content in SteamOS on ARM. Apple planted its flag in VR hardware as the future of personal computing with its first public demo of Vision Pro in the middle of 2023, with software showing full control over photos, videos, FaceTime and more. Plenty of software Apple is known for, like Final Cut Pro and GarageBand, still isn't present in its headset from 2025. Valve plants a flag for all of Steam in VR with its first public demo of Steam Frame near the end of 2025. There's a long path of optimization ahead to make Steam gameView the full article
Valve just officially announced a new Steam Machine, and the new AMD-based mini PC builds upon the Steam Deck's success with console features.View the full article
The day has arrived, Valve have announced a major hardware expansion with multiple devices including the new Steam Frame, Steam Controller and Steam Machine. Read the full article here: [Hidden Content] View the full article
Valve is mostly known for the software triumph of Steam, but the company has just made its commitment to hardware clear. While some of Valve's past hardware efforts were relatively unsuccessful, the Valve Index VR headset and Steam Deck handheld both proved to be hits. Now, Valve is expanding into three discrete hardware View the full article
Despite having a degree in War Studies, I've never quite got on with military-based FPS games. Call of Duty, Battlefield, even Counter-Strike - I prefer a good ol' injection of fantasy in my shooters. But '83's blend of realism and fun has certainly caught my eye, especially in the wake of Battlefield 6's success. Blue Dot Games' debut thrusts you into an allohistorical 1983 where the Cold War escalated into a global conflict. Treading the line between accuracy and multiplayer chaos, its Steam Next Fest demo was met with a somewhat lukewarm response, so perhaps it's no surprise that its launch date has been pushed back. Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: 40v40 FPS '83 doesn't want to "take on" Battlefield 6, and that's a good thing Battlefield 6 has a Cold War rival in '83, a huge and realistic mil sim FPS After years of silence, one mega realistic milsim shooter is finally coming back View the full article
Six years ago, Valve made its second big virtual reality push, launching the Valve Index headset alongside VR blockbuster Half-Life Alyx. Since then, the company seems to have lost interest in virtual reality gaming, letting competitors like Meta release regular standalone hardware updates as the PC-tethered Index continued to age. Now, after years of rumors, Valve is finally ready to officially rejoin the VR hardware race. The Steam Frame, set to launch in early 2026, will run both VR and traditional Steam games locally through SteamOS or stream them wirelessly from a local PC. Powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor with 16 GB of RAM, the Steam Frame sports a 2160 x 2160 resolution display per eye at an “up to 110 degrees” field-of-view and up to 144 Hz. That’s all roughly in line with 2023’s Meta Quest 3, which runs on the slightly less performant Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor. Valve’s new headset will be available in models sporting 256GB and 1TB or internal storage, both with the option for expansion via a microSD card slot. Pricing details have not yet been revealed publicly. Read full article Comments View the full article
Nearly four years after the Steam Deck changed the world of portable gaming, Valve is getting ready to release SteamOS-powered hardware designed for the living room TV, or even as a desktop PC gaming replacement. The simply named Steam Machine and Steam Controller, both planned to ship in early 2026, are “optimized for gaming on Steam and designed for players to get even more out of their Steam Library,” Valve said in a press release. A Steam Machine spec sheet shared by Valve lists a “semi-custom” six-core AMD Zen 4 CPU clocked at up to 4.8 Ghz alongside an AMD RDNA3 GPU with 28 compute units. The motherboard will include 16GB of DDR5 RAM and an additional 8GB of dedicated DDR6 VRAM for the GPU. The new hardware will come in two configurations with 512GB or 2TB of unspecified “SSD storage,” though Valve isn’t sharing pricing for either just yet. If you squint, you can make out a few ports on this unmarked ****** square. Credit: Valve A strip of LEDs adds a touch of color to the front face of the Steam Machine. I'm a fan of the big fan. Credit: Valve Those chips and numbers suggest the Steam Machine will have roughly the same horsepower as a mid-range desktop gaming PC from a few years back. But Valve says its “Machine”—which it ranks as “over 6x more powerful than the Steam Deck”—is powerful enough to support ray-tracing and/or 4K, 60 fps gaming using FSR upscaling. Read full article Comments View the full article
Valve has announced three new products – a new VR headset called the Steam Frame, a new controller called the Steam Controller and a console-like unit called the Steam Machine. The Steam Frame is a “streaming first” virtual reality headset which can be played wirelessly, similar to the Meta Quest headsets. It also comes with two handheld controllers which also look similar to those for the Quest. The Steam Frame “is a PC” according to Valve and runs SteamOS on a Snapdragon 8 Series Processor with 16GB of RAM. This means that although it’s mainly designed for streaming games from the PC, it will be able to handle some games standalone. Read More... View the full article
UploadVR's Ian Hamilton and David Heaney went hands-on with Steam Frame at Valve HQ. If you missed it, 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. You can find a full rundown of the design, features, and specifications of Steam Frame in our news article here. This article describes our impressions of using the headset at Valve HQ, where we were invited to a hardware briefing that included hands-on time with the new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and the Steam Frame headset. Ian's time with Steam Frame was mostly spent in standalone titles on SteamOS, while David's time was entirely in Half-Life: Alyx streamed from a nearby gaming PC using the wireless adapter included in the Steam Frame box. Here's what they thought of their time with Steam Frame. Ian's Impressions: Standalone Use In quick succession I played Ghost Town, Walkabout, Moss 2, and Gorn 2 in the lightweight standalone SteamOS headset, and I also briefly tried some Half-Life: Alyx streaming from a nearby Windows PC. Ghost Town is one of the best VR games of the year and Valve says I played the PC VR version – the version made for x86 processors – completely in standalone through a compatibility layer. Walkabout Mini Golf's build was more fully featured than the one shown during the demo day at Samsung a couple weeks earlier, allowing me to putt with one controller in full VR joined by an iPhone player logged into the same room code via the Pocket Edition of the game. I enjoyed waving at Quill in Moss 2 and, in Gorn 2, I punched barbarians with my fists using the analog sticks to move myself out of the way of their attempts to hit me. Playing mostly seated, they all worked smoothly with Steam Frame running as a standalone personal computer – no streaming from a PC. Portal 2 ran on a large virtual display, as if on a giant Steam Deck, with what seemed like a very high frame rate. That was a really nice, responsive experience. So was stretching out my farm in Stardew Valley to keep an eye on most of the farm at once. Both of these flat games are pretty powerful to see running well directly on such a lightweight device alongside any number of standalone VR games. I opened the Linux desktop, went to Chrome and voice searched for the No Time For Caution scene from Interstellar on YouTube. I kicked off my shoes at Valve HQ (apologizing for doing so) and stretched out horizontally on a couch. I propped up a pillow behind my head and left the controllers on my stomach with the screen stretched across the sky. Matt Damon said "there is a moment" and I watched him blast into the gray of space with my controller drifting off with him. Regressions in controller tracking compared with Valve Index and its SteamVR 2.0 base stations may grate against developers and players who’ve come to expect rock-solid tracking from Steam-based laser systems outside the play area. I tried nothing like Longbow, for example, from Valve's original Lab experience, nor something with lots of physics objects like Boneworks, nor anything with fast motion like Beat Saber. With the controller in my hand, my index finger had some difficulty reaching both the index shoulder and trigger buttons while also keeping my middle finger on the grip button. Grip straps should be sold optionally at launch and there are capacitive sensors along the base of the controller intended to see when the 4th and 5th fingers release. I saw it in action in Half-Life: Alyx, with Alyx’s pinky and ring finger occasionally moving as I released my grip from that part of the controller. It didn’t seem super responsive, but it also wasn't strapped to my hand and the grips of the Index controllers were never particularly responsive either. The input from the 4th and 5th digits hasn’t proved necessary to game developers for half a decade, so I'm not too worried about it being well supported here. Still, we will closely watch what developers say about their feedback on the Steam Frame controllers. IPD adjustment is done via a wheel on the top of the headset and, after I got it set right, I largely forgot the headset's weight as it disappeared split between the rear and front in a remarkable feat of engineering. There’s no battery up front but no adjustment knob at the back — you pull on the soft straps at the side to adjust fitting — with the dual-cell thin battery on the back held behind a cushy foam. In hand, the compute unit feels a bit like I imagine a mainline Apple Vision might, with the rear component of Valve's headset able to collapse inside of the front for more compact travel than any other headset I'd want to use. On head, Steam Frame is a relief compared to all headsets with a battery hanging on the front of your face. The absence of the battery there is easily the most impactful feature of its design. Even though Google and Samsung hang the battery in a pack in Galaxy XR like Vision Pro, I found Steam Frame’s cushy back-mounted battery design to be an enormous relief particularly after spending four days in Android XR’s first headset. Of course, that’s only after a few minutes watching a movie reclined on a couch while missing OLED displays every second, but Steam Frame feels like glasses or perhaps even a sleep mask because of how well spread out its weight feels across the head. A Steam Frame Wireless Adapter comes in the box with each headset intended to manage the link to a nearby PC, including to the planned Steam Machine. We’ll be looking for the Steam Frame-verified label on VR games for Steam in the year ahead, and looking to test what it means to truly pump Steam throughout the home with dedicated Valve-managed wireless connections. There’s a lot of space for developers to play here in SteamOS, jumping off a Steam Machine or Deck and into a Frame. Valve has a lot to accomplish here during a turbulent time in global relations and specifics like cost and availability aren’t finalized. Valve representatives think they can get Half-Life: Alyx running performant in standalone, but they’re not promising it yet and it’s clear there’s still a lot for them to do. David's Impressions: Wireless PC VR My two Steam Frame demo sessions involved streaming Half-Life: Alyx from a nearby gaming PC that had the headset's included wireless adapter connected to a USB port. A hands-on demo can never definitively reveal whether a headset is comfortable to wear for hours, but even in the relatively short time I used Steam Frame it felt significantly lighter and less burdensome than any other fully-featured standalone headset. The visor itself weighs just 185 grams, a remarkable achievement, and the entire unit including the rear battery just 440 grams, meaning the weight is incredibly well distributed across your head. Further, the material Valve is using for the facial interface and rear padding is an evolved version of the ultra-snug fabric used in the Index, which even six years and dozens of aftermarket accessories for other headsets later, I still find feels the softest on my face. While I'm cautious about making sweeping conclusions until I have the headset in my home, my initial impression is that Steam Frame is the most comfortable VR headset yet, for my face at least. When it comes to making Steam Frame an ideal headset for connecting to SteamVR on your PC, Valve is using a combination of both hardware and software cleverness to refine the compressed wireless streaming experience. Steam Frame 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-View the full article
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 read our impressions here. 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 Proton, 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 Google 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 FEX, 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 XR2 Gen 2 series 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. View the full article
The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) has issued a legal claim against Grand Theft Auto 6 developer Rockstar Games, after it dismissed a group of staff in what the group claims was an act of union-busting. Earlier this month, Rockstar dismissed over 30 staff across its offices in the *** and Canada for what it called “gross misconduct” related to the alleged leaking of company secrets in a public forum. At the time, the IWGB issued a strongly worded statement calling Rockstar’s actions “a brazen act of ******** union busting” and accusing the company of “a calculated attack on workers organising for a collective voice and to improve their difficult working conditions”. A spokesperson for Rockstar parent Take-Two denied the claims. Read More... View the full article
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