Steam Frame is finally here. It’s Valve’s second-ever VR headset, and a radically different product than its first. Did Valve pull off the vision? And, if so, who is Steam Frame for? Read on in our full review to find out.
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Steam Frame Review Summary
Steam Frame is a unique headset that combines strong standalone capabilities with an easy-to-use PC streaming experience. In standalone or streaming modes, you can install and play pretty much any flat or VR game from Steam. However, in standalone mode, demanding or poorly optimized games will be largely unplayable. Valve’s ‘Frame-certified’ program helps to identify which games are known to work well on the headset. Anything else will be a shot in the dark, but Valve won’t stop you from experimenting to see if you can manually dial in the right combination of game and headset settings to reach an acceptable level of performance.
On the whole, Steam Frame is very capable and expandable. But this comes at the expense of ease-of-use. This is a headset for power-users and those willing to tinker with settings to find the optimal experience. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who is new to VR or prioritizes ease-of-use over raw capabilities.
Quest 3 is the natural point of comparison for Steam Frame. While Frame technically does more and holds up well when comparing visual performance, Quest 3 covers most of Frame’s core features (including streaming VR and flatscreen content from Steam). So the key buying decision comes down to whether you think Frame’s extra capabilities justify a $460 premium ($1,060 total) over Quest 3’s $600 price point, in consideration of a less user-friendly experience.
Spec for spec, Steam Frame is very much a ‘Quest 3-class headset’. They’re roughly the same size, have similar visual performance, and a similar field-of-view. Quest 3 has an edge on overall clarity, but Frame’s pancake lenses come fairly close, and will still be a big upgrade for anyone coming from a Fresnel-generation headset, and are better than most other pancake optics on the market.
Frame has a noticeable advantage over Quest 3 when it comes to weight. It’s 16% lighter (435g vs. 515g), but even more importantly, the weight is distributed much better thanks to Frame’s rear-mounted battery pack.
Frustratingly, this advantage is foiled by a lack of top strap. Valve could have (and should have) put one right in the box, but instead opted to sell it as part of a $60 Ergonomic Accessories Kit (which also includes ‘knuckles-style’ controller straps and a larger light blocker for the nose cavity).
Without the top strap, Frame is a bit more comfortable than Quest 3. With the top strap, Frame is a lot more comfortable than Quest 3.
When it comes to audio, Frame’s built-in speakers sound quite good overall, but could do with a little more punch in the bass department. Anyone coming from Valve’s Index headset will be missing the legendary quality of its off-ear speakers—but that’s the case when comparing Index to any headset with in-strap speakers.
On paper, Frame is more powerful than Quest 3, and has slightly higher resolution. So you’d assume the extra power and pixels would add up to better image quality overall, but between optics and game optimization, Frame’s visuals are generally just on-par with what you’d find on Quest 3 (streaming or otherwise).
This is Valve’s first headset with inside-out tracking, and the company has delivered solid tracking performance. I’ve had zero complaints with the latency and accuracy of head-tracking and controller-tracking on Frame. The cameras on the upper left and right do a good job of addressing common controller-tracking dead zones behind or above a user’s head.
Valve has positioned Frame’s standalone capability as more of an ‘extra’ but I was surprised how well it works overall. ‘Frame-certified’ games give you confidence that a game will work well, but nothing is stopping you from installing almost any game on Steam (VR or otherwise) in standalone mode and running it directly on the headset without a host PC. Not every game is going to run well, but anything that’s well optimized (especially many 2D top-down and side-scrolling games) has a shot of working well enough to enjoy, even if it isn’t yet Frame-certified.
Frame’s controllers are very similar to what you’d expect from any modern VR controller. But Valve made a few key changes (like adding a D-pad, bumper triggers, and moving all the face buttons to the right controller) which allows the Frame controllers to exactly emulate a traditional gamepad. This means you can play VR content or flatscreen content from Steam, whereas most VR controllers (including those on Quest 3) don’t have all the inputs necessary for the average flatscreen game, which means you’d need to pair a traditional gamepad to Quest to play flatscreen games.
Standalone flatscreen gaming is neat, but it feels like a bonus more than a major feature. If you already have a decent gaming PC or console and a decent TV (as most of Frame’s target audience likely does), playing flatscreen games in a headset doesn’t offer much benefit. Yes, you can get a large virtual screen, but the headset is underpowered for the kind of visually intense and cinematic games that would benefit most from a huge screen.
If you aren’t up to drawing from the (presently) very limited Frame-certified library, or doing your own experiments, PC streaming is the easiest way to get the best experience (for flatscreen or VR games).
Frame comes with a wireless dongle that makes a direct connection between your PC and the headset. This simplified setup makes it very easy to get a consistent, high quality PC streaming experience. It’s entirely possible to get an equivalent PC streaming experience on Quest 3, but you need to have an ideal network setup. Frame’s dedicated dongle takes away the guesswork.
Wireless PC VR streaming to Frame works very well with the dedicated dongle, to the point that I think the average user wouldn’t be able to tell (by latency or fidelity) if they were looking at an an image streamed to the headset or an image coming over a dedicated tether.
Though PC streaming connection and quality is largely solved thanks to Frame’s dedicated dongle, there’s still some wonkiness in the actual usage. When streaming from your PC, sometimes games don’t launch or don’t close, and sometimes the buttons on the interface don’t respond. I’m betting Valve will smooth out these issues after launch, especially considering that PC streaming on Quest 3 via Valve’s own Steam Link app works very consistently.
Battery life on Frame is a bit of a weak point. My testing has clocked between 1–1.5 hours with mixed used, compared to an average of around 2 hours on Quest 3.
Frame essentially combines the interfaces of Steam Deck and SteamVR; the result technically works, but does not feel cohesive. There are too many menu surfaces, overlapping settings, and inconsistent input rules. This mashup of legacy systems has some pretty significant impact on the overall user-experience. Frame really needs a new interface built from the ground up. On the upside, nearly every proper Steam and SteamVR feature is accessible somewhere in the current interface.
Interface isn’t the only place where Frame feels a bit out of date. Other modern conveniences like controllers that turn on automatically, controllerless hand-tracking for casual use, and a monotone low-resolution passthrough view hamper the headset’s ease-of-use.
For a cool $150, you can improve Frame’s passthrough view significantly thanks to the third-party Arcturus Vision Camera add-on. But, like an overhead strap, this feels like something that should have been built right into the headset.
Compared to other headsets, Frame is clearly more tweakable, modable, and expandable. The entire facepad assembly can be removed without a screwdriver, there’s an accessory add-on port under the nose bridge (which is already being put to good use with the passthrough camera add-on), and there’s a MicroSD slot for expanding storage.
Frame also gives users access to a full Linux desktop. The immediate benefit for most users is that you get access to a full-featured Chrome browser, which is really handy inside a headset. But having a full-blown desktop environment opens up some interesting possibilities to those willing to dig into it.
Steam Frame covers a lot of ground with both standalone and PC streaming capability, a modular design, and access to a full-fledged Linux desktop directly in the headset. Anyone wanting to get the most of the headset, however, is going to need to be willing to go through a less streamlined user-experience.
Frame is a power-user’s playground. It feels like a product made by and for the engineers, developers, and deeply invested Steam users at Valve. For the average gamer, though, it ends up looking like a more expensive Quest 3 with about as many cons as pros.
Steam Frame Detailed Review
Steam Frame is a very intriguing headset. Valve positions it as both a fully-capable standalone VR headset and a perfect PC VR companion. But wait, there’s more! Steam Frame can also play flatscreen Steam games in both standalone and streaming modes. Oh, and did I mention there’s a full-blown Linux desktop?
On one hand, Steam Frame is a very capable machine. On the other hand, that’s largely come in the form of a headset that emphasizes capabilities over ease-of-use. To put it simply: Steam Frame is best fit for PC power-users. Although it’s a surprisingly capable standalone headset, it would be difficult to recommend it as the best choice to someone who is new to VR or who prioritizes a high-quality, easy-to-use VR experience—even if it was competitively priced versus Quest 3.
It probably shouldn’t surprise any of us that Valve—the king of PC gaming—made a VR headset that mostly has the same pros and cons of a PC vs. a console.
Generally speaking, PCs are more capable, more powerful, less affordable, and somewhat less user-friendly than a gaming console.
Consoles on the other hand are less capable, less powerful, more affordable, and somewhat more user-friendly than a PC.
In broad strokes, that rings almost perfectly true when you put Steam Frame side-by-side with its nearest competitor, Quest 3.
But there’s one big exception to the rule: while the extra power (and extra price) of a PC usually means better visual fidelity than a console, there’s not a meaningful visual advantage for Steam Frame ($1,060) over Quest 3 ($600), despite Steam Frame costing about twice as much.
Visuals & Audio
Visually speaking, Steam Frame is very much a Quest 3-class headset. While the resolution of both headsets is practically identical (4.7MP vs. 4.6MP), Quest 3 eeks out slightly greater clarity overall, thanks to slightly better optics (larger sweet spot), better brightness, and slightly better rendering optimization when it comes to the user-interface.
Despite launching three years ago, Quest 3’s optics are better (the GOAT), but Steam Frame’s lenses aren’t far behind. For anyone coming from a Fresnel-era headset, this will be a nice upgrade with a better sweetspot and significantly reduced god-rays and glare.
On my face, Frame has a slightly smaller field-of-view (103° diagonally vs. Quest 3’s 107°). It’s close enough that I think most people won’t notice the difference.
I’m happy to report that Frame’s screen-door-effect (or lack thereof) is also pretty much on par with Quest 3. In our preview of Frame last year, Road to VR‘s Ben Lang said he was surprised to notice the screen-door-effect (a visual artifact that has largely been eliminated on modern headsets). It would see that Valve managed to get that tuned up in time for launch.
Frame stands shoulder to shoulder against Quest 3 on most other display factors like practically no ghosting and very low mura.
Frame’s in-headset speakers are passable but I wouldn’t mind a bit more bass. Unfortunately they’re a far cry from the legendary headphones on the company’s first headset, Valve Index.
So I talked about Quest 3 having an edge on visuals generally. But when it comes to standalone VR games, Steam Frame could theoretically close this visual gap by leveraging its extra horsepower and eye-tracking optimizations.
But in practice, this is only the case when a developer has taken extra care to optimize their title for Steam Frame. At the time of writing, not many have. Yes, there may be about 75 VR titles now on Valve’s ‘Great on Frame‘ page, but that doesn’t mean those titles have been deeply optimized for the headset. This could change over time, but it doesn’t feel like Valve has given many developers enough incentive to rebuild their VR apps in time for Frame’s launch.
Frame’s eye-tracking is good enough to mostly be invisible. It’s used for some automatic game rendering optimizations and automatic optimization of PC streaming. I’m surprised to find that there doesn’t appear to be any kind of calibration procedure for eye-tracking on Frame, yet it still works well every time I put on the headset.
Tracking & Controllers
When it comes to tracking, the release of Steam Frame is truly the end of an era for Valve. The company’s own SteamVR Tracking system (AKA Lighthouse) was the most widely used external tracking system for VR headsets; it was so good that it put ‘room-scale’ VR on the map years before it could have happened otherwise, and has been the bar that every other VR tracking system has been measured against.
Valve’s high bar for tracking has carried over to Frame too. Tracking of both the head and controllers has felt consistently strong, and I haven’t noticed any obvious dead zones. In fact the two upper side cameras on Frame seem positioned to cover a significant area behind and above your head, two spots that can be problematic for certain motions like throwing a football or grenade (where the wind up usually means your hand is well out of view and nearly behind your head).
Frame’s controllers are quite a bit more compact than the Index ‘knuckle’ controllers. They have most of the same buttons, sticks and triggers you’d expect from a VR controller, but with a few key additions.
On the left hand there is a D-pad instead of face buttons. On the right hand is four face buttons (instead of just two, on most VR controllers). Both controllers also get a ‘bumper’ button above each index trigger finger.
These changes mean Frame controllers have an essentially identical layout to a traditional gamepad, which makes them compatible with every controller-supporting game on Steam.
Controller layouts for most VR games expect that there will be two face buttons on the left controller and two on the right. If you play one of these games with Frame’s controllers, the D-pad essentially emulates the face buttons that would be on the left controller by making ‘down’ on the D-pad equivalent to the lower button, and ‘right’ on the D-pad equivalent to the higher button. Tactily, it feels a little odd at first, but I found I got used to it quickly.
PC Streaming
That brings us to the other major side of Steam Frame: its PC VR streaming capability. Visually speaking, it’s here where Steam Frame’s visuals are mostly on par with a Quest 3 that’s also streaming SteamVR content from a PC.
Yes, Quest 3 still has an optics advantage, but Frame’s streaming eye-tracking optimizations help close the gap, making streaming with both headsets feel pretty much equal visually. But Quest 3 still holds an edge when it comes to brightness.
Valve thoughtfully includes a wireless dongle in the box with every Frame headset. The dongle plugs into your PC via USB-A, and makes a direct connection from your PC to Frame, ensuring a very solid connection when streaming Steam content to your PC.
PC streaming to VR headsets has been great overall for years now, but sub-par Wi-Fi can make it a nightmare. Frame’s streaming dongle makes it easy to get a great PC streaming experience with little effort. In fact, Valve says the headset continuously checks the connection to the dongle and to to your home WiFi, and intelligently uses the best connection on a per-packet basis, which the company calls Multi-Link Streaming.
In my testing with the dongle I found that it works best if you’re playing in the same room as the PC you’re streaming from. This makes sense as the dongle will have a literal line-of-sight connection to your headset for the best possible performance. But Frame will lose contact with the dongle pretty quickly if you play further away from your PC. In this case your headset will choose to fall back to Wi-Fi, if it’s has a higher quality link.
This won’t mean much to anyone that already has a well optimized setup for PC streaming. But for everyone else, this is a simple way to get a great PC streaming experience that looks virtually indistinguishable from what you’d see through a tethered headset.
Ergonomics & Battery Life
Moving onto ergonomics: there’s some good news and some bad news.
The good news is that, despite being in the same size-class as Quest 3, Steam Frame is noticeably lighter, especially where it matters most (the front of the headset). This is no doubt aided by the fact that the battery is in the rear of the headset, but you can see Valve went to great care to minimize every gram of material it used.
The bad news is that Frame ships without a top strap. Soft strap designs (like Quest 3) always benefit from a top strap, full stop. Rigid strap designs (like PSVR 2) can get away without one. But I’ve literally never found a comfortable headset that has a soft strap with no top strap.
I honestly can’t believe companies are still making this mistake. Even Apple envisioned Vision Pro (as heavy as it is) without a top strap, until it finally made the much needed move of changing to a top strap design in the Vision Pro refresh.
The painful part is that Valve clearly understands the benefit of a top strap. That’s why they’re selling an Ergonomic Accessories Kit which includes one. But that’s $60 you have to shell out for a strip of cloth that might cost $5 to have included in the box in the first place. If you just heard a noise, it was me facepalming on Valve’s behalf.
So yeah, if you’re going to buy Steam Frame, get the Ergonomic Accessories Kit for the top strap and you’ll be happier with the comfort.
The kit also comes with ‘knuckles-style’ straps for the controllers which I’d say is a nice option if you prefer them over a wrist strap, but not a necessity. There’s also an expanded light blocker in the kit which I found to be an improvement over the default one, but not in a way that it feels like it should have been included with Frame in the first place.
Battery life on Frame is less than I’d hoped, considering the rear strap doubles as a pretty hefty battery pack. I’ve been averaging between 1 and 1.5 hours of battery life on Frame with mixed use, while mostly sticking to default settings and switching between the higher power ‘Performance’ preset or the lower power ‘Playtime’ preset. For comparison, I generally get closer to 2 hours on Quest 3.
Gameplay & User-experience
There’s a lot of wonkiness right now when it comes to PC streaming in particular (while pure standalone usage has been surprisingly smooth and stable). Sometimes games don’t start or don’t stop when you ask them to. Sometimes they hang indefinitely when loading. Sometimes some of the buttons in the interface seem to simply not do anything. I was surprised to find that PC streaming on Frame was actually less reliable in terms of an end-to-end session than streaming the same content from the same PC using Valve’s own Steam Link app on Quest 3.
But I’m not actually that worried about this. I expect Valve will iron out the inconsistencies as time goes on; there’s no reason to think Frame won’t eventually work just as seamlessly as Steam Link on Quest 3. It’s the other stuff—the deeper stuff—that I’m more worried about.
In a very literal way, Frame combines the interface of Steam Deck with SteamVR. The result is usable, but not particularly cohesive. There’s too many competing menu systems, too many competing settings pages (sometimes with the same setting in two different places), restrictions on what you can control with D-pad input vs. laser pointer input, and… well, the list goes on. At the very least, the interface covers pretty much every proper Steam feature (remote play, game capture, friends list, storage management, Steam Input, etc).
Valve is trying to do a lot with Frame, and I don’t envy the challenge of trying to layer the flatscreen interface of Deck onto the spatial interface of SteamVR. Unfortunately Frame’s user-experience feels like a patchwork of legacy systems doing their best to work together, but it has become clear that a ground-up rebuild that actually marries these two systems is what’s needed.
There’s other details missing that impact Frame’s ease-of-use too. It’s little things, like the controllers not automatically powering on when the headset turns on; and big things, like no controllerless hand-tracking for casual use, and a pretty poor passthrough camera view.
Even if you have no interest in mixed reality, a headset’s passthrough view is a convenience feature that improves its ease-of-use by making it easier to see the world around you when you want to. So having a high quality passthrough view is desirable. Unfortunately, Frame’s passthrough view is greyscale and not very high resolution. It reminds me of going back to Quest 2’s grainy passthrough view (though Frame is not quite that bad).
Fortunately, this is something that can be fixed. Unfortunately, doing so costs another $150.
I’m talking about the Arcturus Vision Camera add-on, an official third-party accessory for Frame. It’s a tiny module that so seamlessly integrates with Frame (both aesthetically and functionally), that you’d swear it was made by Valve.
It gives you a significantly higher resolution, full-color passthrough view that directly replaces Frame’s system-level passthrough view. If you’re planning to buy Frame, the Arcturus Vision Camera is a no-brainer.
Power-user’s Playground
Now I want to talk about the parts of Steam Frame that are really for the power users—the stuff that Quest 3 just can’t do.
Firstly, Frame can download and run almost any flatscreen game on the Steam store, in standalone mode. While Quest 3 can easily stream flatscreen Steam games from a PC, Frame can download and play those same games locally.
As impressive as it is that Valve made this possible, Frame isn’t magic; it’s still bound by a mobile processing and thermal envelope, which are far less than the average gaming PC. The end result is that only very well optimized PC games run well on Frame.
For the most part, if a game runs well on Steam Deck, it’s probably optimized enough that it can work reasonably well on Frame too. And it’s what you’d expect: modern 2D games like Hades II and Balatro work well, and so do older 3D games like Portal 2 and Deep Rock Galactic. But don’t expect to be playing Helldivers 2, Battlefield 6, or Marathon, unless you love watching slideshows or counting pixels.
While it’s neat that it’s possible to run these games on Frame, I can’t help but feel like it’s a small bonus rather than a major value-add. It’s hard for me to imagine the kind of person who is likely to spend $1,060 on a VR headset who doesn’t also have a game console or PC… both of which would be the easier to use and more comfortable way of playing the same games (plus many more that Frame simply doesn’t have the power to run).
But there’s a few reasons I can imagine that would make it uniquely worth playing a flatscreen game in a VR headset.
First would be if there was some kind of automatic 3D conversion so you could use Frame like a 3D monitor to get an extra layer of immersion from your favorite games. Or jumping into a virtual space where friends can easily join to game side-by-side with you, or even play a couch co-op game together on the same virtual screen.
But Frame doesn’t have either of those features. So instead, it feels like a Steam Deck with a bigger screen… but with the downsides of needing to wear it on your face, and having less compute than you’d actually want for playing a visually stunning game on a huge screen.
Valve has gone out of its way to make Frame tweakable, moddable, and expandable.
I’m impressed with how easily you can remove the entire facepad, strap, and battery assembly. Three little switches and it pops right off. While not entirely useful today, you can easily imagine why this is a good design for repairability, hobbyist tinkerers, and third-party accessory makers.
The same holds true for the built-in MicroSD card slot, which you can use to expand the headset’s storage; and the for expansion port hiding under the nose bridge, which is already making it possible for Frame to bolt-on a better passthrough view.
Another feature that makes Frame unique compared to Quest 3 is that Frame gives you access to a full-fledged PC desktop, powered by KDE Linux. One tap from the SteamVR dashboard opens a virtual screen to the Linux desktop. And this is yours to do whatever you want with.
You can install applications, browse the web, play local media, edit photos, etc. Granted, the Linux desktop is essentially unmodified for VR; you control the mouse with a laser pointer from your controller and you enter text with SteamVR’s virtual keyboard. So while you can do a lot on a Linux desktop, there’s only a few things you’d actually want to do, unless you connect a keyboard and mouse.
Valve did add one thoughtful integration between the Linux desktop and SteamVR however. Any application installed in Linux can be quick-launched as a SteamVR dashboard app (ie: shown on a virtual display). The most obvious value this adds is easy access to a full-bore Chrome web browser, which means you can use the entire modern web right inside you headset. There’s seemingly no WebXR support yet, but I hope we’ll see it in the future.
Now, is having this Linux desktop a big advantage over a Quest 3? Well… Quest already has a pretty solid built-in browser, and that’s probably 90% of the value that most people will get from having the Linux desktop built into Steam Frame. For the other 10%, there might be some really cool stuff that an open Linux desktop will allow them to do—especially the likes of developers and modders who want to tweak, experiment and fiddle.
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And I think that sums up my overall feeling of Steam Frame. It’s a power-user’s playground. Want to run try running un-certified Steam games on it, and see if you can tweak the settings into a playable state? Want to add new capabilities by creating Linux utilities that run as SteamVR dashboard apps? Want to remove the default headstrap and make your own variation? Valve isn’t going to stop you from doing any of that.
In that sense, Steam Frame really does feel like a product made by and for the people at Valve who built it. The engineers, developers, and deeply-invested Steam ecosystem users at Valve are exactly the kind of techy power-users that are going to benefit from Frame’s handful of unique capabilities. For the average gamer, however, Frame ends up looking like a more expensive version of Quest 3 that offers as many pros as it does cons, despite launching three years later.
Disclosure: Valve provided Road to VR with a Steam Frame headset.
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