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Steam Frame starts at $1059

Steam Frame starts at $1059

bsimpson

Comments (216)

  • sporp
    Half-Life Alyx is the greatest gaming experience I have ever had the pleasure to witness. I now occasionally VR golf. It's a steep price for a niche with not a lot of games.
  • accrual
    GamersNexus released a video comparing the Frame VR vs Meta Quest 3 today, worth a watch for the Frame review alone:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcerOYY_K1g
  • rwz
    I've never been interested in VR headsets and am not very educated about it.Can someone explain why you'd want to actually run things on it instead of having a much lighter screens-and-headphones-only unit that plugs it into a more powerful machine that renders things for it? What's the benefit of having to strap all this extra hot hardware and batteries to your face.Is it just about it being wireless? Surely there are wireless protocols that can stream high-bandwidth videostreams from your PC to VR goggles.Not trying to be snarky or facetious, but genuinely curious.
  • mawadev
    You can get a used or cheap headset for a similar experience. VR has a couple of games you get bored of pretty quickly :0been there
  • vallerie
    I do hope Valve's work on ARM64 for this, alongside improvements to performance in Honeykrisp, make for a dramatically better experience with Linux on Apple Silicon Macs.They're very lovely devices with big GPUs, and I would love to (one day when ram prices go back to normal!) repurpose my M3 Max as a under TV Steam Machine when I upgrade.
  • kikkia
    If use for solely VR Gaming, and you don't care a ton about the privacy aspect, it is a hard sell against a new or used Q3. However, for myself personally I love the idea of it as a device I can tinker with and have full control over. I would love to also replace my laptop with it while traveling. Especially with a small wireless keyboard it has a good chance to replace my laptop for tinkering/gaming on the go.With the price increases it is likely not a good value for an average person, but for myself and some other tinkerers I think it is very acceptable.
  • terribleperson
    The Steam Frame looks like a heck of a device. At the cost, though, I question why they didn't include a better pass-through camera. A device with onboard processing and a good pass-through camera would be very neat. If they were trying to make this an affordable device I'd understand, but it's over a thousand dollars.
  • guiomie
    Anyone knows how the passthrough compares to visionpro with the add-on?
  • BoppreH
    For these devices, I always enjoy Adam Savage's Tested videos. Here's the one they posted today for the Steam frame: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9JyWAVj94EIt's full of technical details and down-to-earth analysis, and includes interviews with the Valve engineers.
  • RomanKornev
    Foveated Streaming seems to be buried on the page, this feels like a true game changer, especially for PCVR. Coupled with eye tracking it unlocks about 2-3x more compute for rendering. Now sparkle DLSS-like upscaling and you can render 144hz native resolution PCVR games without buying a 5090. Truly exciting stuff.I still remember Michael Abrash's talk from 2016 where he talks about Foveated Rendering + Eye tracking as one of the key pillars of next-gen headsets https://youtu.be/o7OpS7pZ5ok?t=5438. Interestingly, his prediction was that it would be widespread as of about 5 years ago. Is next-gen finally here after 10 years?
  • LarsDu88
    At basically quest 3 levels of on device performance, this thing better have amazing software. This price is way too high.Our expectations have been warped by Meta's decade long subsidization of VR hardware
  • JoshTriplett
    > Reservations are currently not available for customers who have not made a purchase on Steam before Mon, April 27, 2026.As someone who made a purchase on steam (that I can't even play) after the release of the Steam Machine, but before the release of the Steam Frame, I am disappointed that they used the same date, such that that purchase still does not unlock the ability to order.
  • Stevvo
    Wish Valve would make enough of something so that everyone that wanted one could get one. I wanted to get an Index headset when they launched that. I would check the Steam store page every few months, for 5 years. Every time it said "Out of Stock". It's still out of stock in France today. They design great products, but are useless at getting them produced in quantity.
  • manlymuppet
    I don't game much nowadays; can I just use this to replace my monitor, and work within high fidelity VR?
  • ricardobeat
    At current hardware prices, this is worth buying to use as a server!
  • duxup
    Does anyone make VR games anymore?
  • othomp
    Hopefully it's possible to use eye tracking as a pointer in desktop mode. I'd like to connect only a keyboard and use binds to emulate clicks.
  • throwitawayfam
    With the software being open source I wonder if the quest 3 will get owned so that eventually we can run steam frame sw on it
  • schmorptron
    It's absolutely wild to me that they didn't include, and have devs ship profiles for some of their games, SuperDepth3D or some other depth map shader officially in some form in the Steam UI for this. If a big focus is playing your pancake library on a huge screen (due to there not being not many native VR games), having that huge screen be 3D would be a huge value add. And they're big enough to get some developers to ship profiles for their games officially guaranteeing some form of workingness(?).
  • haunter
    Great news: SteamOS running on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, ARM64Bad news: I'm poor. Just wish I had pocket money for niche products like this.
  • comandillos
    I think this is a good chance to try and port Alyx (ARM64 build) to visionOS and run it on my Vision Pro headset which has been running around unused for the last two years xD
  • chrysoprace
    Aussies are getting it at a premium, too.USD$1059 (256GB) should be AUD$1483, retailing for AUD$1609 - a AUD$126 premium.USD$1299 (1TB) should be AUD$1819, retailing for AUD$1969 - a AUD$150 premium!
  • joshcsimmons
    This is a huge step backwards for VR. The headset is heavy, hot, and worst of all, expensive. This is the opposite of progress for this field.
  • ganelonhb
    That’s a better price than I thought it would be, but still quite high. I will consider buying it someday, but today it’s a luxury I can’t afford…
  • zokier
    Isn't it bit odd that there is no basic wired connectivity option? Or am I just old-fashioned? As far as I can tell you only options are 6GHz streaming or stand-alone mode
  • ranguna
    If only it were OLED
  • lightedman
    Underpowered where it really counts. The GPU is barely better than that in a Quest 3 (Adreno 750 in Steam Frame vs Adreno 740 in Quest 3,) and while the CPU is almost 250% better overall than what is in the Quest 3, CPU power hasn't really been the limiting factor in most VR games I've played, it has been the GPU, both in PCVR and in standalone devices.
  • peq42
    I'm so happy that they DONT SELL TO 75% OF THE WORLD(No options in Asia, Latin America or Africa. 3 ENTIRE CONTINENTS)
  • cpach
    Who are they targeting with this product?What’s the appeal? Can someone enlighten me? :)
  • bigyabai
    Also exciting, Valve has finally started shipping native ARM/FEX builds of Proton 11: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/vr/valves-latest-proton-11-bet...Will be super interesting to benchmark various ARM chips and see where they land performance-wise!
  • MomsAVoxell
    I want this for one reason and one reason only: DCS.Anyone know how well it works/doesn't work yet?I've waited for years to get a VR heads for DCS (its a flight simulator folks) .. and now, maybe, this is it.
  • earthpyy
    I'm wondering how long the battery is in one charge.
  • Cockbrand
    Not being very savvy about VR glasses, am I assuming correctly that this device can't do AR, as the cameras are only used for tracking?
  • spijdar
    I think the only way this is really compelling is if it's able to effectively function as a virtual Linux desktop with a reasonably clear floating monitor in front of you.I'm not sure that's appealing to me for a couple reasons that mostly boil down to "I don't really want a computer strapped to my face for hours at a time", but I'm the right kind of weirdo who sees the appeal in being able to eliminate the 32 inch monitor from my desk. I'd love to have all this desk space back to put "not computers" in. Or even just leave it empty.Outside that, so much of this feels very ... I dunno. Answer in pursuit of question. Sure, I can play my Steam library "anywhere" (* caveats apply), but how often do I really want to do that, and especially how often do I want to take the very expensive gadget around to do that?I've got a Lenovo x86 handheld purchased for around $500, which I'd already be a bit reluctant to drag out on the train or wherever public. For an even more expensive headset with optics and other difficult-to-clean parts, much more so.VR games themselves are very "meh" to me. Some are insanely cool, but they just aren't enough to rationalize buying a headset. I've got a CV1 that's collected dust for years because it's just not worth it.It looks like this does support a pretty robust sort of virtual desktop environment, though. That could make this almost compelling, I think. But that's a steep price for "it's almost interesting"...
  • stego-tech
    I think the price is very reasonable for what’s on offer (especially given the current memory crisis), and given that Valve doesn’t subsidize the cost of anything, it really shows how much Meta values your privacy and biometric data for advertising purposes (~$600 in subsidies).One thing I keep seeing reviewers skip over is VR Chat, which is weird since it’s a core VR experience that continues seeing average player count increases YoY compared to the boom-bust cycle of most VR games/experiences. It’s also an experience the headset seems uniquely targeted for - wandering the home or apartment streaming over 6GHz Wi-Fi, hanging out with friends or going to raves, no umbilical needed or dodgy Quest support limiting the experience.For VRC alone, $1300 is a very respectable price for the experience on offer, especially compared to the $1k “entry point” of the Index. Common man VR this ain’t, this is targeting the VR serious as well as those who value privacy higher than what Meta offers in subsidies. The 2D support is a clever way of justifying the higher price though, and giving folks a more private way of enjoying their libraries in non-gaming spaces.
  • cisrockandroll
    Maybe Im just poor
  • baalimago
    I mean.. I could consider renting a pair over a weekend or something. But buying? No way
  • medlazik
    10 years later and VR headsets are still too heavy, hot and sweaty. Short of having brain implants or magical contact lenses, nothing will ever change that.Can't be used more than 30min without major discomfort for most people. Any talks about it replacing monitors are lies.
  • iugtmkbdfil834
    Fuckfuckfuck. Not now, I will need to now offset this with a present for wife. Not to mention, it will mess with how fast other projects move. Fuck.
  • rvz
    No better than the rest of the VR headsets that came before it and almost no-one wants them. These headsets will end up collecting dust with the Apple Vision Pro and the Meta Quest Pro.We gave VR headsets enough time and this is just going to be a repeat failure of the previous ones.Glasses such as the XReal on the other hand have a far better future than these VR headsets.
  • idontwantthis
    That’s a remarkably cheap storage upgrade too. First time I’ve ever thought the upgrade would be worth the money.
  • xlayn
    [flagged]
  • sergiotapia
    Brutal pricing. It would have been brutal at $600.Having said that, there really is no other game quite like Half Life Alyx. It's so good, immersive and one of a kind. Perhaps worth the price of admission. It's so good that it kind of ruined VR gaming for me because all other games kind of felt like tech demos from that point on.Yikes, what a terrible price. 55 minutes playing on-device Half Life Alyx. 1hr 30min streaming from a PC with dongle. 3 hours charge time. It's just pretty lame tbh. Damn :(