Steam Frame preview: a long-awaited standalone VR headset that runs Steam games on ARM

Codename Deckard, Valve's long-rumoured standalone VR headset, is here. Despite being the subject of rumours for years, this is in many ways the most unconventional part of Valve's November hardware announcements, which also include the Steam Machine and Steam Controller, as it's an entirely new category for Valve. It also marks the debut of two key technologies, Foveated Streaming and SteamOS on ARM, allowing the headset to be a capable option both for streaming games rendered remotely and playing games directly on the Frame's Snapdragon chipset.
You might not know that the Frame is Valve's third crack at a VR headset, following on from the Vive, which Valve co-developed with HTC and released in 2016, and Valve's in-house Index headset, which released in 2019. While the first two were room-scale VR headsets that used external tracking, the Frame is a standalone headset that uses inside-out tracking instead.
Like the popular Meta Quest series, that means the Frame is essentially an entire computer that you strap to your head, built around a similar Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 ARM64 4nm mobile chipset with 16GB of unified LPDDR5 memory and either 256GB or 1TB of UFS storage, expandable via MicroSD. Critically, this is the first time that SteamOS has run outside of the usual PC x86 architectures, which requires some special sauce that we'll discuss soon.
The Steam Frame weighs a relatively light 435 grams all-in, with a 190g computing "Core" plus displays, dual mics and pancake lenses up front, dual speakers integrated into the sides and the 21.6Wh battery on the back. By default, there's no central strap above your head, as Valve believes that not every VR user wants to use one, but you can buy an accessory pack if you want one.
Four monochrome cameras on the exterior of the headset track the position of the included Frame Controllers through six degrees of freedom, though you're free to use the Steam Controller or indeed other PC gamepads if you prefer.
Unlike most VR controllers though, there's actually less reason to do so. That's because the Frame Controllers include the full whack of console-style controls, so you're able to play any game with gamepad support from the Steam library this way, not just VR titles. The Frame Controllers also get the TMR thumbsticks found on the Steam Controller, capacitive finger sensing, haptic feedback and 40 hours of battery life from a single AA battery. Optional straps are also provided.
Each of the headset's two LCD displays measures 2160x2160, while refresh rates range from 72 to 120Hz (with a 144Hz experimental mode), just like the Index. Field of view is a relatively narrow 110 degrees, but this is the measurement both vertically and horizontally.
While VR titles are an obvious first port of call, the Frame also lets you play standard "flat" games in a virtual area, which sounds brilliant for when you're ill in bed, taking a flight or simply outvoted when it comes to the use of the living room TV. The usual sleep/resume and cloud save features apply, as this is essentially full-fat SteamOS.
While the Steam Machine is intended for AAA console-level gaming, the Frame is understandably more constrained, given its smartphone-grade hardware, battery life requirements, and the fact that it needs to translate games from the traditional x86 PC architecture to its mobile ARM chip. This is done with Proton and the FEX open source project, and it's already capable of promising results.
Valve engineers mentioned running the recently released Hades 2 at 1440p and 90Hz, a result that sees Hades 2 as being "Frame Verified" - a certification program similar to Steam Deck Verified that lets users know which games can run acceptably on Frame hardware. Hades 2 isn't the most demanding game by any means, but it'll be interesting to see how other titles fare.
While you can download games directly on the Frame, you can also install games to a MicroSD card on the Steam Machine, Steam Deck or PC, then tuck that memory card into the Frame to instantly access the same titles. Valve even intends Android developers to be able to easily run their .APK files on the Frame, so the number of available titles could be quite substantial if the most popular mobile VR titles are also accessible.
As well as running games directly, Frame is also intended to stream VR and non-VR games from more powerful hardware, whether it's a Steam Deck, Steam Machine or a gaming PC, all via the relatively uncongested 6GHz spectrum of Wi-Fi 7.
Valve has also done some heavy lifting here, creating something called Foveated Streaming. You may be familiar with a VR technology called foveated rendering, which uses eye tracking to render more detail where you're currently looking and less where you're not, which boosts apparent clarity massively. The downside is that it requires developers to write in support for it, which is fine if you're Sony and working closely with game makers to produce PSVR2 titles, but isn't great if you're trying to support a massive PC games library as Valve is with the Frame.
That's why, instead of changing how games are rendered in the first place, Foveated Streaming instead uses the Frame's two internal cameras to change how each frame is sent to the headset. The vast majority of the available bandwidth is used on the pixels that you're looking at, and the remainder fills in the gaps elsewhere. Doing this fast enough to make it imperceptible is a huge engineering challenge, but our colleagues at IGN say that it actually works as advertised.
The upshot is that 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. Valve has even gone to the trouble of using separate antennas for accessing the 5GHz and 6GHz spectrums to stream VR and access Wi-Fi, ensuring that one doesn't disrupt the other. I'd imagine that you'll still need a good base level of wireless performance though, and you do get a Wi-Fi 6E adapter in the box to help ensure that your source PC's networking hardware is up to the task. Regardless, the Frame ought to be a bit more consistent when it comes to delivering a high-quality stream.
Standalone VR headsets do feel like the future, as someone that owned a Valve Index for years but ended up using a Meta Quest much more frequently, so it'll be fascinating to see how the Frame compares in terms of both streaming games and running them directly.
I've even heard that the Frame will be able to serve as a pint-sized gaming PC if you hook its Core up to a display via USB-C, so the possibilities here are exciting to consider. A Steam Frame could conceivably be your only PC if you tend to prefer less demanding PC games, and you can take it almost anywhere.
For much more on what Valve is detailing today, check out our coverage below.