If you’ve spent money on games from Steam, Valve’s aim with Steam Frame is to make that library more valuable.
50 percent of Steam users still run their games at 1080p, according to the latest Steam Hardware Survey. How many of those gamers have never seen a monitor refreshing faster than 60Hz? Or a modern VR display running its content at 120Hz?
Ignoring the subset of people, mainly gamers, who have a concept of the difference between 30Hz and 60Hz, how many people worldwide have never seen motion displayed on a screen faster than 60Hz?
In 2026, Valve will follow the Steam Deck by starting to sell its most portable standalone PC ever. You wear Steam Frame on your face with experimental display support up to 144Hz.
What Is Steam Frame?
Steam Frame and controllers, image provided by Valve.
Steam Frame is a VR headset, personal computer, and probably a whole lot of other things once its community verifies Valve’s claims that you can swap out the operating system or plug in other accessories into its high-speed nose port.
“We don’t block anyone from doing what they want to with their device,” Valve’s Lawrence Yang said.
David Heaney
Developers and Steam Frame buyers can use high frame rates in different ways, but at its core this headset features a stereoscopic portable display as its compute unit. There’s dedicated hardware to enable high quality streaming from nearby PCs also running Steam and, while in standalone mode, you can still get something like a 1440p picture on what feels like a 70-inch virtual display running at 90, 120 or potentially 144Hz.
UploadVR played Hades 2 at Valve HQ in a demo that conveyed the power of having a virtual display comfortably floating anywhere with smoothly animated content displaying in the Steam Frame at rates usually only associated with high end gaming monitors tethered to desks. Arms at your sides with a controller in each hand, Valve says Steam Frame works in the dark too.
“All of these games can support arbitrary resolutions and refresh rates,” Valve’s Jeremy Selan said during our briefing. “We’re thinking about it as very much a per-game setting. Some games just by the nature of the play want to be very high refresh and more modest res. When we were showing you Hades, it was at 1440p at 90 Hertz.”
Hades remains a strong memory from my time in Steam Frame at Valve headquarters because of that high frame rate, and it bears calling out amid all our coverage that having some “VR and non-VR” games running at an extremely high frame rate – even reclined on a couch or bed – will be an eye-opening experience for many people, including Steam Deck owners.
“While it is a wireless streaming first headset,” Yang told UploadVR. “We did want you to be able to play your Steam library when you’re not next to your PC or laptop, so we made Steam Frame a PC by itself. It has an ARM chip that’s running SteamOS.”
Could playing existing games at high frame rates in a lightweight standalone headset make it hard to go back to 60 or 30 fps screens entirely?
For long-time UploadVR readers as well as newbies learning about the market for the first time, it’s important we convey just how meaningful this feature alone might be in daily use as Valve works to optimize the system and rally developers into supporting new surfaces for their games on Steam.
During our time with Valve I dug into questions of openness, tracing the path from the Vive and wired PC VR-only Index to the standalone Steam Frame with wireless streaming.
“This is a Linux OS, this is SteamOS brought to ARM. If there are other operating systems, for instance, that support these chip sets, you’re welcome to do so,” Selan said. “You’d at that point be responsible for the tracking stack and everything else, but very much in the spirit of Steam Deck, this is your device, your computer, you own it, you can mod it and extend it in any way.”
Steam Input Alignment
Valve looks to align controller input in Steam Frame with traditional gamepad and Steam Deck, with backward compatibility to existing VR content on both Quest and PC. That’s why there are two index buttons instead of one on each controller, matching the shoulder and trigger buttons on traditional gamepads.
Valve’s Jeff Leinbaugh introduced the controllers by saying their design is “going along with all the goals of the headset and a lot of our hardware. We want this device to work with all of your VR games but also all of your non-VR games and just make your whole Steam catalog more valuable, deliver you a bunch of value no matter what you happen to be playing.”
What Is Steam Frame’s Price?
“It’s a premium headset, but we’re really aiming to be cheaper than Index,” Selan said. “While I said we’re gonna be premium, we’re still trying to be very cost considerate.”
We’re due for months of debate over the definition of “cheaper than Index” not due to any fault of Valve, but because that’s not a comparison many people know how to make conceptually.
Valve Index was $999 for a room-scale VR kit plus a user-provided Windows PC to drive it. Steam Frame is a standalone headset from Valve. Many people, in their heads, will be comparing the price of a component to a computer.
Trade-Offs: Wi-Fi & Display
Steam Frame’s creators acknowledge trade-offs in its design, like the lack of HDR or a true-black display technology like the Steam Deck OLED. My colleague David Heaney asked about the potential of a higher end headset one day exchanging the LCD in its design for OLED or HDR.
“I think about HDR every day,” Selan said.
Where Apple brings to Vision Pro its iPad app and Apple TV content libraries as the cornerstone of its leap into VR — while building new Apple Immersive Video content along the way — Valve representatives declined to talk about content made for Steam Frame by their developers.
Valve is “optimistic” about bringing Half-Life: Alyx to standalone at some point. Until then, that’s what the streaming focus is about. The story now from Valve is about putting its hardware in end-to-end wireless control of Steam games in more places while improving frame rates, latency and resolution wherever possible along the way.
What makes good Apple Immersive Video so powerful is the amount of photons hitting camera sensors and then reconstructed for your view on a virtual display at a high resolution and frame rate. Almost nobody notices when an iPad app that typically runs at 30 fps on a physical tablet also runs at 30 fps on a virtual display, but you’ll jump when something comes at you in 180-degree video delivered in Apple Immersive Video at Apple Vision Pro’s frame rates and quality levels. You’ll have to stay tuned for our review of the M5 Vision Pro, released in 2025, to see if that specification bump from the M2 of 2024 has a meaningful effect on frame rates across the broader Apple software ecosystem. Still, you should keep some of this in mind as Valve seeks to make an impact with new hardware centered on Steam games in 2026.
“We ask ourselves at Valve, what can we do well?” Selan said. “We keep coming back to the Steam games that you already own.”
Developer Feedback & Community
Valve is looking to its developer and user communities to do the lifting here in centering Steam in the market for VR games running on ARM. Developer applications for Steam Frame kits are open today.
The market for VR content on ARM is currently dominated by Quest, but many top apps have ports of their Android-based software packages on other storefronts, like those from Pico or HTC. As of last month, this is a market also being formally chased by Android XR for the Google Play Store.
“The same way Steam OS has been fully expanded and extended by the community. Our hope is to do that same thing for VR. So this would be considered an open PC,” Selan said. “This would be like the biggest open VR headset device, and like everyone can richly work together to make that better and better.”
The Best Headset Demo Ever?
Valve didn’t show experiences like The Lab with mini games like Longbow from 2016, or even Beat Saber from 2018, that might’ve indicated tracking regressions compared with the Valve Index or HTC Vive laser base stations surrounding a play area. We didn’t even see SteamVR Home, just a compositing system for content in SteamOS on ARM.
Apple planted its flag in VR hardware as the future of personal computing with its first public demo of Vision Pro in the middle of 2023, with software showing full control over photos, videos, FaceTime and more. Plenty of software Apple is known for, like Final Cut Pro and GarageBand, still isn’t present in its headset from 2025.
Valve plants a flag for all of Steam in VR with its first public demo of Steam Frame near the end of 2025. There’s a long path of optimization ahead to make Steam games of all kinds run well with Valve’s new headset and input.
Pulling up a Linux desktop in VR for the first time in a headset as lightweight as Steam Frame conveys something about this medium and its steadfast believers that I felt in awe to see with my own eyes. You can use whatever terminology you want to describe this medium, but progress never stops.
We’ll be watching Valve’s optimization developments closely across all platforms.
Closed vs. Open
The latest generation of VR headsets sees us logging into Samsung, Google, Steam, Apple or Meta accounts to access large quantities of digital content. That doesn’t feel truly “open”, even if along the way we’re getting some unlocked bootloaders and the promise of OS-swapping.
Earlier this year, I did the absurd thing of purchasing a 2 terabyte microSD card which I stuck into my Steam Deck. I’ve installed everything I could possibly want onto it, including 100s of gigabytes of content I don’t expect to work properly in Deck mode ever. Now, instead of waiting hours downloading a 100 gigabyte game from Valve’s network to a freshly reformatted PC, I can simply transfer it locally right from the Deck.
I had that card with me at Valve HQ because I had another hope in putting my Steam library on that card. They warned “no screwdrivers” ahead of our demos and said not to take anything apart. So, while deeply curious, I didn’t take the step of sticking my card into the headsets there and trying to log myself into Steam Frame.
That said, I look forward to the day I can pop that card out of my Deck and into a Steam Frame and see what experiences work smoothly as I click play on absolutely everything. Valve told us they’re planning to distribute review units sometime early in 2026.
Near the end of my time at Valve HQ in 2025, six years after I first visited their offices in 2019, I asked them to frame for me the difference between a computer that’s “closed” and one that’s “open.”
Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais responded.
“If folks on an experience that’s more curated and more closed off are having a good experience, that’s fine. But in general, we see that people that are trying to experience a variety of games in different ways, there’s a bunch of stuff that they might wanna do that we haven’t thought of. And what we always observe is that there’s a ton of value that is usually distributed laterally in the community, where users between themselves will share stuff that will make the experience better. And that is only possible in an open platform. Like we don’t want all the value in a platform like that to be flowing up and down through us, and for us to be determining what’s a good experience or not on behalf of all those users that might have different opinions and different aspirations.”
“So it’s really important for us to keep that open because it creates those kinds of effects that eventually leads to a better experience. Also, anyone that’s using this stuff can also go and contribute patches and develop on it. And so we’re excited to be able to have stuff get even better because people now want to contribute to it.”
“In fact, a lot of the developers that are working on open source have started because they were users and they just want to improve a specific aspect and they go deep into it.”
“The lines between user and developer has always been very blurry for us. We’ve come from a world where some of our most popular game properties actually started out as mods. And modding on PC was always like a strong thing that we were always trying to support. Because so many good concepts and new game genres, you know, free to play, mobile, all that stuff came through mods, initially. If you look at the history of video games, different genres, different ways to experience games, different peripherals, a lot of it came from PC because PC was an open platform where different companies could innovate in different ways, but also users could mod. People that created closed off platforms based on some of those concepts, they’re gonna take some of those concepts and kind of freeze them in time. And then PC’s gonna keep moving forward because it’s open and we have all this value. And we are just applying PC to VR. So it’s nothing new for us. We’ve always applied PC to VR. It’s just some folks have opted to like branch it off in different directions, but I think we’re just doing the same thing as we’ve always been doing.”
From Valve Index To Steam Frame
In 2019, when I first tried the Index, a Valve representative told me “this is going to ruin you” before I tried Beat Saber running at 144Hz.
Beat Saber was later acquired by Facebook that same year and, sure, at some point in Steam Frame I’d like to see how Meta’s cornerstone title performs in terms of tracking and frame rate.
In retrospect, Beat Saber at 144Hz did ruin me in the sense that, when I invited Index into my home, I don’t think I really experienced those frame rates in any substantial way running an NVIDIA RTX 2080 for most of the lifetime of the headset.
In Steam Frame, Valve manages end-to-end controller inputs and frame delivery not just in the standalone mode, but when streaming from PCs like Steam Machine too. Even a few minutes playing your favorite game with a few milliseconds less lag in input, or higher frame rates visually, will feel like invisible magic while meaningfully adding value to your day. Ultimately, that’s exactly why Valve is making Steam Frame.
