Deckard lives. Valve have officially announced the long-leaked Steam Frame virtual reality headset, and as rumoured, it is indeed a hybrid VR kit: one that can play both high-fidelity games streamed from a PC, and simpler stuff that’s installed on the headset itself. A departure, then, from the Valve Index’s pure focus on cabled-up PC VR.
Yet neither is it a Meta Quest 3 with a Valve badge on it. Besides its smartphone-spec internals breaking new ground for the kind of hardware that Steam games can run on, the Frame is built with modularity in mind, potentially making it as upgradable and long-lived as an actual PC. As well as their other new gear, the refreshed Steam Machine and Steam Controller, I gave the Steam Frame a test run during a recent Valve visit, and mostly liked what I saw – though it’ll need to make sure its ambitions to do everything in the VR space are more firmly realised than they are right now.
There’s certainly a lot of design cleverness evident here, including some tech that Valve have invented themselves. The whole thing weighs 435g, 80g less than the Quest 3 and only around half of the Index, while the battery pack is mounted on the rear of the headset to balance the bulk. It’s totally wireless, which for steaming PC VR games normally means latency, but Valve’s newly developed ‘foveated streaming’ technique cuts down on data usage by tracking your eyes and only beaming full-resolution details to where you’re looking. The best thing I can say about this is that I couldn’t notice when it was working – in Half-Life: Alyx it was fast enough that there was no visible transition between high-rez and low-rez streaming, even when I intentionally darting my eyes back and forth, trying to catch it out. Between this and the general efficacy of the Frame’s USB streaming dongle, HL:A felt as crisp and looked as sharp as it would on a wired connection.
The lenses have also had a healthy resolution upgrade from the Index’s, their LCD screens coming in at 2160×2160 (up from 1440×1600, though the Index does have a slightly wider-on-paper 130-degree field of view than the Frame’s 110). Mind you, they might not stay at that spec forever. Both lenses are affixed to a clip-on module that can be popped out and, so say Valve, replaced in the future by something even higher-tech.
Now, there’s quite a lot of what-ifitude around the Steam Frame’s modularity, as none of the Valve staff I spoke to would commit to concrete plans for alternate modules. But the potential, at least, has been knowingly built-in, with the lenses, battery, and even the speakers (which, in another change from the Index, are now contained within the straps) all mentioned as upgrade possibilities.
“Our customers, as well as ourselves, have a bunch of viewpoints on how these things could be arranged,” hardware/software engineer Jeremy Selan told me. “So for example, [the Frame has] a single battery that’s been optimized to be lightweight, but there are certain constraints because of that weight. Some people are excited about hot-swappability. Some people want to put it in their pocket. This type of modular design certainly opens the path for us in the future, or for other partners in the future, to have other designs that plug in.
“It’s similar with the audio. This has great integrated audio, but we know and love the Index audio as well, with those off-ear speakers. That’s another thing that, you could imagine, could be explored in the future with this type of modular design.”
I’d hope that more specific details emerge at least before the Frame’s early 2026 release window, though even now, anyone who’s swapped out the graphics card in their desktop rig will know the appeal of piecemeal upgrading over full-system replacement. This move to make a VR headset more PC-like also makes sense when remembering that, for all intents and purposes, the Frame is a PC.
It runs SteamOS, like the Steam Machine and Steam Deck. It’s got an SSD – your choice of 256GB or 1TB – for installing games or, via Desktop Mode, almost any software you fancy. It’s got a microSD card slot for quickly transferring games from a Deck or Steam Machine, and the same SteamOS quality-of-life gubbins (quick suspend/resume, cloud save support) as you’d get on those devices. It’s only unusual among Valve’s growing hardware menagerie for two reasons: one, you wear it on your head, and two, it’s running of an ARM chip.
This is a bigger deal than it might sound, especially if you’re not familiar with the technical drudgery I’m about to subject you to. Currently, the state of play is that PC games, including the entire Steam/SteamOS library, are designed to run on processors built on the x86 architecture; your gaming PC or laptop, as well as the Steam Deck and Steam Machine, are all x86-based. The ARM architecture is distinct, being far more commonly fitted to phone and tablet chips – not to mention hybrid VR headsets like the Quest series, which can ‘run’ PC games if they’re being piped from an x86 system, but not straight off the onboard hardware.
The Frame’s ARM-based Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, which also happens to power the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra smartphone, would therefore appear to be a poor match for SteamOS. Except just as Valve’s Proton compatibility layer instantly makes Windows games work on Linux, SteamOS is now also integrating FEX: an x86-to-ARM emulator. This, too, I saw in action for myself, playing Hades 2 and Hollow Knight: Silksong in a 2D theatre mode with zero signs that it was running on strange new internals.
The implications for this compatibility breakthrough stretch far beyond the Steam Frame’s straps. Besides for the potential for thousands of Steam games to seamlessly run on all kinds of ARM devices, it goes the other way too: if FEX makes it feasible to use ARM processors in PC gaming machines, then with just a little more OS help, ARM-native Android games could be installed right alongside our familiar, made-for-Windows libraries. And that’s not just a hypothetical: Valve confirmed to me that they’re actively inviting the makers of Android VR games to publish on Steam, where they could be bought and installed onto Steam Frames in a few VR clicks.
Still, the more immediate function of all this compatibility goodness is that the Frame can be used to play essentially every game you own on Steam (and a few more besides), either streamed from a more powerful PC or running internally. The new controllers reflect this approach too: unlike the Index’s ‘Knuckles’ controllers, which focused hyper-specifically on VR games alone, these include a D-pad and full set of XYAB face buttons. The finger tracking isn’t as sophisticated, losing the Knuckles’ wraparound sensor arrays in favour of solely capacitive sensors in the handles, but by more closely mimicking a conventional gamepad layout, the Frame’s controllers are more easily usable in a much wider range of games.
In fact, Valve themselves say they see the Frame not so much as a pure VR kit, but as another way to play (almost) any PC game, regardless of whether it’s VR or not. The idea is that you can sit on your sofa, or lay on your bed, or – if you’ve sufficiently little shame – recline in a plane seat with the Frame on your face, playing non-VR games with a much bigger view than you’d get from a Steam Deck or monitor. Valve are even planning to run a Deck-style compatibility programme where they’ll test Steam games for their Frame suitability, marking their store pages with either a seal of approval or an ‘Unsupported’ warning.
This has become a consistent theme across the company’s post-Index hardware output. The Steam Deck was originally pitched as something that can play your existing Steam games, but on a handheld. The new Steam Machine is intended as something that can play your existing Steam games, but in a living room. And now the Frame is promising to play your existing Steam games, but half an inch from your irises. That’s fair, although so many machines sharing the same mission statement could prove risky. When the Deck, in particular, can already take your non-VR games anywhere from an armchair to 35,000ft, the Frame seems to be banking an awful lot that enough people would prefer a big-screen view. Even if it is only virtual.
To me, it still seems more appealing as a simplified and responsive PC VR kit; foveated streaming is genuinely impressive tech, and the lack of cables or base stations gives the Frame a likeable pick-up-and-play quality. Mercifully, it’s also going to be cheaper than the £919 Index; as with the new Steam Machine and Steam Controller, exact pricing won’t be announced for some time, but Selan confirmed to me that the Frame’s positioning will be “Premium, but less than [the] Index.”
The catch there, however, is that the Index could keep its place as the go-to headset for primo VR at home. The Frame’s finger sensing, for one thing, makes a decent effort, but doesn’t match the Knuckles controllers for accuracy, repeatedly getting my ring and middle fingers mixed up in Half-Life: Alyx. The Frame also misses an opportunity to be wearable over big glasses, which forced me to switch to prescription lens inserts. This doesn’t sound so bad, but as with specifics on the Frame’s upgrade modules, Valve declined to say whether these inserts would actually go on sale. Beyond, that is, a mild assurance that it’s something they’re “looking at.”
I dearly hope these details are ironed out soon; the Frame has oodles of potential, both as a PC VR workhorse and as a more casual tool for playing old Steam games in a new way. And if it can be kept relevant through smaller, cheaper module replacements instead of the usual obsolescence, all the better. But while the new Steam Machine and Steam Controller are both reasonably convincing prospects right now, months from release, much of that Frame potential is based on things that might happen, might exist, might go on sale. And it’s specifics, not promises, that make for worthy hardware.
