Valve Officially Announces Steam Frame, A "Streaming-First" Standalone VR Headset

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 it can run almost any Linux, Windows, and Android application, including SteamVR games. Many titles won’t perform well on the mobile chipset, though, so 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.

Steam Frame Hands-On: UploadVR’s Impressions Of Valve’s New Headset

UploadVR’s Ian Hamilton and David Heaney went hands-on with Steam Frame at Valve HQ, trying both standalone use and PC VR.

UploadVRIan Hamilton

My colleague Ian Hamilton and I 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 match their interpupillary distance (IPD) for visual comfort.

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, and there’ll be a “Steam Frame Verified” tag for such titles, 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 clock speed. But based on what we know about the chips, expect Steam Frame to have around 50% improved single-threaded 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.

SLAM Tracking & Monochrome Passthrough

Steam Frame has four outwards-facing greyscale fisheye cameras for inside-out headset and controller tracking via computer vision. You don’t need SteamVR base stations, and the headset doesn’t support them anyway.

Two of the cameras are on the top corners, and the other two are on the front, near the bottom, widely spaced.

To make headset tracking work in the dark, Steam Frame also features infrared illuminators, bathing your environment in IR light that the cameras can see.

You can choose to see the real world around you via the two front cameras at any time, though the view is monochrome, and lower resolution than the passthrough on headsets with dedicated mixed reality cameras. But combined with the IR illuminators, the advantage is that it lets you see in the dark.

Front Expansion Port

While Steam Frame has only low-resolution monochrome passthrough by default, it has a user-accessible front expansion port
that in theory enables color cameras, depth sensors, face tracking sensors and more to be added.

Valve says the port offers a dual 2.5Gbps MIPI camera interface and also supports a one-lane Gen 4 PCIe data port for other peripherals.

“There is certainly enough flexibility in this port to do anything people are interested in doing”, Valve’s Jeremy Selan told UploadVR.

Included Controllers With Gamepad Parity

The included Steam Frame Controllers have a relatively similar ringless design to Meta’s Touch Plus controllers, and are also tracked by the headset via infrared LEDs under the plastic. However, while Touch Plus controllers have 8 IR LEDs each, 7 on the face and 1 on the handle, Steam Frame Controllers have 18 each, dispersed throughout the face, handle, and bottom, which should make them more resistant to occlusion.

The bigger difference between Touch Plus and Steam Frame Controllers is the inputs. Valve has put all four A/B/X/Y buttons on the right controller and a D-Pad on the left controller, while both have an index bumper in addition to the index trigger.

The idea here is that the Steam Frame Controllers have all the same inputs as a regular gamepad, meaning they can be used for both VR and flatscreen gaming. You can switch between VR and flatscreen seamlessly, and you’ll need less space in your bag when traveling.

Steam Frame Controllers feature capacitive finger sensing on all inputs and the handle, as well as advanced tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR) thumbsticks. TMR technology means they should have improved precision and responsiveness compared to traditional potentiometer thumbsticks, and should be significantly more resistant to drift – an issue that plagued the Valve Index Controllers.

Unlike the Index controllers, Steam Frame Controllers don’t have built-in hand grip straps. But Valve says it will sell them as an optional accessory for people who want them, a similar strategy to Meta.

As with Touch Plus controllers, the Steam Frame Controllers are powered by a single AA battery. They should last roughly 40 hours, though this is highly dependent on how much the haptic actuator gets activated.

Spec Sheet & Competitors Comparison

Here’s a full list of Steam Frame’s specs, directly compared to Meta Quest 3 and Samsung Galaxy XR for context:

Steam Machine

While Steam Frame supports any gaming PC that can run SteamVR titles, Valve is also releasing its own desktop PC running SteamOS, which, as well as being able to act as a living room console, could make getting into PC VR a more streamlined experience than ever.

Steam Machine is more than 6 times more powerful than Steam Deck, Valve tells UploadVR, with a discrete CPU and GPU, not a unified APU architecture.

Here are the full specs of Steam Machine:

• CPU: Semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T
  • up to 4.8 GHz
  • 30W TDP
• GPU: Semi-Custom AMD RDNA3 with 28 CUs
  • 110W TDP
  • 2.45GHz max sustained clock

• 8GB GDDR6 VRAM
• Ray tracing supported

The RAM and storage are user-upgradable, Valve confirmed, while the CPU and GPU are soldered on.

You’ll “eventually” be able to wake Steam Machine via a Steam Frame, without needing a physical display or other peripherals attached, though Valve couldn’t say whether this functionality will be available at launch. When this does arrive, it means you’ll be able to just grab your Steam Frame and jump straight into high-performance PC VR at any time in seconds.

Steam Frame Cheaper Than Index?

Valve isn’t yet giving a specific price for Steam Frame or Steam Machine, saying that it doesn’t yet know and referencing the volatility of the current macroeconomic environment.

The company did however tell UploadVR that it’s aiming to sell Steam Frame for less than the $1000 Index full-kit.

“As soon as we know pricing, we’ll be sharing”, Valve said.

Steam Frame is set to launch in “early 2026”, alongside the new Steam Machine and Steam Controller. It will be available in all the same countries where Steam Deck is sold today, and fully replaces Index in Valve’s lineup.

If you’re a developer, you can apply for early access to a Steam Frame kit today, though there are limited units available.

Steam Frame Hands-On: UploadVR’s Impressions Of Valve’s New Headset

UploadVR’s Ian Hamilton and David Heaney went hands-on with Steam Frame at Valve HQ, trying both standalone use and PC VR.

UploadVRIan Hamilton