Everyone knows that outside in tracking is just better for VR gaming. It's
faster, more accurate, and it's more reliable. Well, here's the thing. Valve
isn't everyone. And the new Steam Frame took my expectations of a lousy, flaky
experience in a standalone VR headset with camerabased positional tracking and
blew them away. They also blew away my
expectations for their new Steam Machine and Steam Controller, but that's a
separate video. We'll have that linked down below. In two words or less, this thing is impossibly good and maybe more
importantly, impossibly versatile. They
managed to make it lighter, more comfortable, and higher fidelity than
the OG Index for PC VR gaming. They managed to bolt an ARMbased computer to
it that runs mobile VR games and applications. You can even just
sideloadad an Android APK. And the whole
thing runs freaking Steam OS with a new
element to their Proton compatibility layer called FEX that allows you to play
desktop VR games. I'm talking x86
Windows VR games on your ARM Linux VR
headset. I would mic drop this, but I think I'd [music] get in trouble. The
last part I wouldn't believe if I didn't experience it for myself. But they did
all of this with latency that is indistinguishable from the best VR
[music] experiences that I've had. But is it indistinguishable from the best
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the video description. Frame is a fundamental shift for Valve. Rather than
being an accessory for your gaming PC, it's meant to be a standalone device
that can also be enjoyed alongside your PC using wireless streaming for VR,
which sounds horrible, but somehow it's
not. Let's take a closer look at the hardware, then we can talk about how
they did it. The headset that I'm holding is actually made up of multiple
components. The core module contains the actual computer and weighs under 190 g.
Then next is an audio module that can be detached with three clips under the foam
gasket. Then there's the head strap and a battery pack that is cleverly
positioned at the back to help counterbalance the device, improving
comfort and also to make it a little bit easier to cable manage if you wanted to
have an external battery pack. The optics are simply [music] put flipping
incredible. Like other leading headsets, they're using pancake lenses. But unlike
some other headsets that use pancake lenses, there was very little in the way
of internal reflections visible in the demo applications that I use today. It
is possible that with brighter light sources, it could show up a bit more,
but that's going to be something that I'll have to save for the full review.
What I can tell you is that under each lens is a 2160x 2160 LCD display that's
capable of anywhere from 72 hertz presumably for power saving up to 120 Hz
with a 144 hertz experimental mode just
like we had on the Valve Index. As for why Valve decided to use LCD rather than
OLED, it basically came down to the light losses due to the pancake lenses.
Oh, since I'm pointing at them, on the inside of each lens, maybe you could
even see them if you went crosseyed enough, is an eye tracker that's [music]
obviously going to be great for, you know, social VR experiences, but perhaps
more importantly enables Valve to do what they call fiated streaming, which
I'm going to have to explain later because it gets a little in the weeds.
First, let's take a look at the controllers. Valve [gasps]
fully acknowledges that these are very similar to other designs in the market,
but they wanted something that was both great for VR and also great for your
nonVR applications if you just want to use your headset as a giant virtual
display. And they still managed to add some Valve touches to them, putting
capacitive sensing on all input surfaces
and on the grips, so you can still do five finger tracking just like the
Knuckles controllers from the Valve Index. They have two-stage actuating
triggers, two-stage actuating grips, which unlocks a ton of control
customization. They use the same magnetic thumb stick as the new Steam
controller for better reliability, and a very small dead zone. And they each have
their own independent gyros that can be rebound for aiming or whatever you want.
I can't tell if they were being suggestive there given the popularity of
certain VR applications, but I can't say for sure that they weren't. Both
controllers have an integrated IMU to track positional data and 18 infrared
LEDs that can be tracked by the four high field of view cameras that are
integrated into the frames core module. These were strategically positioned so
that even if you were, say, for example, drawing an arrow from a quiver, it
should be able to maintain tracking. Now, I didn't get a chance to try that,
nor did I get to fire up BeatSaber, my favorite application for evaluating
controller tracking under extreme conditions. But from just shaking them
around in the menu, they seem to track extremely well. Valve is claiming about
40 hours of battery life off of a single double A. And this battery compartment
is a perfect transition into the customizability that's on display with
this headset. They're going to have an optional accessory kit that includes
knuckle straps for the controller as well as a second head strap with a top
velcro piece if you like a bit of additional support. I personally liked
it better, but I also didn't feel like it was necessary like it is on the much
heavier Apple Vision Pro. There's a lot more to customize on the frame itself,
too. It includes a spacer gasket for folks with long eyelashes and to improve
compatibility with glasses, but Valve fully acknowledges that not everyone
will want to use that because it does take away a little bit from their claimed about 110° field of view. So,
they are working on prescription lenses for the headset itself. We even saw a
box of them, but there's no specific timeline on that. IPD adjustments are
handled with a little knob on the top that spins a cog on the core module. And
this is really cool. Right between the goggles at the bottom here is an
expansion port that allows up to two 2 1/2 GB MIP cameras or a single camera
with a PCIe Gen 4x1 slot allowing all
kinds of possibilities for additional accessories like if you wanted color
cameras for instance. the built-in ones are only monochromatic or if you wanted,
I don't know, a smell sensor. The sky's is the limit. Since we're on the subject
of the cameras, Valve says that they will work for inside out tracking even
in pitch darkness thanks to IR [music] emitters that are built into the headset
itself. And you can expect tracking performance on the order of about 200 to
250 updates per second, which is about
on par with the Valve Index. Not something that I expected. Now that I've
had a chance to gather my thoughts and eat some crappy airport food, let's talk
about how Valve is delivering a PCVR-like experience wirelessly when big
names like Apple and Meta have tried and never really succeeded. It starts with
the least interesting looking part, this 6 GHz Wi-Fi dongle. Valve built the
headset with two radios and two antennas for Wi-Fi along with a third dedicated
antenna for your controllers or your Bluetooth peripherals. One of those
Wi-Fi antennas handles 5 GHz for your game downloads, your multiplayer data,
your voice chat, etc. The other one connects to a very high-end home router
or more likely Valve's dongle using the
so far mostly unused 6 GHz band. This is
a perfect use case for 6 GHz since it
lacks the wall penetration that you might want for home Wi-Fi, but it excels
at avoiding 2.4 and 5 GHz channel congestion while pushing huge amounts of
bandwidth. With that said, while the
theoretical maximum is right up there with wired connections, in the real
world, it falls well short of that. So, what's the secret? Boiated streaming.
Seeing this in action blew my flipping mind. Basically, the idea behind it is
similar to fiated rendering, where the headset tracks your eyes and tells your
GPU, "Hey, only render the area of focus
at full fidelity and save your resources on the rest of the scene." It's a
technique that's been used to great effect on the handful of PSVR2 titles
that exist, but has been largely untapped on the PC side, largely because
it depends on game developers to implement it. And also, most headsets
don't have built-in eye tracking, so why would they bother? Foviated streaming.
Then, again, same idea. Focus your
resources wherever the eyes are looking,
except in this case, it's not the GPU saving on rendering resources. It's the
video encoding stream saving on bit rate. So you get crystal clear high bit
rate encoding exactly where your eyes are looking and then a little bit blurry
everywhere else. At least in theory. In
practice, it reacted so fast that no matter how quickly I tried to move my
eyes, I wasn't able to catch it. But I also don't feel too bad about that.
Valve put on an incredible demo for me in Halflife Alex where they highlighted
the maximum fidelity window as I was looking around. And even though they say
it's only about 10% of the total video stream, it ends up being a pretty large
window. Wild. As for the encoding latency, well, thanks to some clever
parallelization of the encoding, you can expect anywhere from 1 to 2 milliseconds
of extra latency on a modern GPU and four to five for a slightly older but
still VR capable one. Not enough to notice or to contribute to significant
motion sickness. And it keeps getting better. I managed to get almost 50 ft
away from the dongle without a noticeable difference in the experience.
Now, granted, this is still line of sight, but it's a lot further than I can
get with a tether. Now, I did bring up the possibility of more than one of
these devices causing interference with each other. And Valve said that while
they have operated multiple headsets concurrently in the same space, they
haven't explored more demanding use cases like packed VR cafes. Moving on to
audio, the built-in solution is both incredibly impressive and also a little
disappointing. I'm impressed by the audio quality. They apparently had to
use opposing drivers to cancel out the vibrations to make sure that the inside
out tracking wouldn't get messed up, and they sound fantastic. As for the mic, I
didn't get a chance to test it, but Valve assured me that the mic should
carry on the Index's incredible reputation for stellar microphone
performance. I'm disappointed because I literally had the engineer who worked on
the Index and this new headset in the room with me. And when I asked her for a
gaming headset with all this same audio black magic, she just shrugged. So sorry
y'all, I tried. In all seriousness, the
speakers don't fire directly into your ears, so there is a bit more sound bleed
than with the Index, but it doesn't seem like a gamebreaker depending on what
you're watching and who's around. The last couple of experiences I want to
talk about are a huge deal whether you plan to use them or not. The first is
FEX, an open- source project that Valve has been contributing, and this is a
quote, quite heavily to. It's a
translation layer that allowed me to experience a completely standard Windows
x86 game, Hades 2 in this case, running
directly on the hardware on the frame. I'm talking x86 code designed to run on
Windows, running on a Snapdragon 8650
running Linux. Holy freaking mind blown.
They're planning a compatibility list. I'll uh grade on deck for the future.
But wait a second. Running on Linux. Yeah, Valve's been busy porting Steam OS
to ARM. How did they drop so much news
on one day? The Frame does everything that you know and love about Steam OS,
like fast suspend and resume and performance overlays, except on your VR
headset directly. And as I mentioned briefly in the intro, if you blinked,
you might have missed it, with this new ARM processor comes the ability to
supposedly run Android APKs by directly
sideloading them onto the Steam frame. And given how many VR experiences are
designed to run on mobile devices, this is a colossal win. And with Valve's
commitment to putting micro SD card slots on all their devices, it can't be
too hard to install. Now, there are still some areas where the frame doesn't
seem to be industryleading. The light seal isn't perfect, especially if you
compare to the Beyond 2 with its custom 3D printed gasket. The pass through
cameras, they're just monochrome, so don't expect to be wearing your frame
out and about like people did with the Apple Vision Pro for the first week or
so. From my very brief, and admittedly not side-by-side experience, it's also
not the highest clarity nor highest dynamic range display I've ever seen.
And it's not as light or compact as say the big screen Beyond 2. But it's the
overall package that should have the entire rest of the industry stopping and
going, "How did Valve, who as of 2021
supposedly had less than 350 employees,
manage to outmaneuver monsters like Meta, who spent 17.7 billion on Reality
Labs just last fiscal year. I would ask
Gay Ben how it happened, but I'm pretty sure he's busy on his yacht. All I know
is that I want one. Whether it's for wireless PC gaming, native gaming on the
road with minimal bulk in my bag, or even just relaxing on the couch watching
movies on the big screen. Like, what kind of sucker needs a big TV when this
thing exists? So, with the frame clearly taking the
place of the Index in Valve's lineup, what happens to all the users of the
Index and maybe more importantly, the third party ecosystem that exists around
its base stations and Knuckles controllers? The short answer is the
index is EOL, but the long answer is Valve would love to see other players in
the VR space approach them about continuing to support or even continuing
to manufacture these devices. Whether
that'll happen, I don't know, but at least Valve is open to the conversation,
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the video description. If you guys enjoyed this video, go check out part
two on the Steam machine as well as the new 2026 edition of the Valve Steam
Controller. Mind-blowing stuff today. I
can't believe they blindsided me with this. They're like, "Come down. We'll tell you nothing. You have 4 hours to do
everything.