Valve – which runs the Steam game store and made the legendary Half-Life series – already makes a VR headset for hardcore gamers who care to tether themselves to a beefy PC for an immersive experience. Its new headset, the Steam Frame, is designed to make VR gaming a lot more accessible to folks who want to easily jump into their favorite titles, with some clever tech hidden inside.
The Steam Frame straps onto your noggin without wires to thrust you into the action in VR and non-VR titles. It can either stream games from your PC using a dedicated 6-GHz wireless adaptor, or use its own onboard computing power for running a limited selection. We’ll get to the details on this in a bit.
The bigger deal is a new technology Valve has pioneered, called foveated streaming. Essentially, it tracks your eyes inside the headset, and uses that data to ensure that in-game visuals are sharp and detailed only where you’re looking – rather than taxing the system to needlessly deliver high-resolution graphics outside your field of view.
Steam Hardware Announcement
Some headsets, including the PSVR2 and the Apple Vision Pro, already use a similar technology called foveated rendering that directs your GPU to render graphics only where you’re looking, and that’s solid. But it requires game developers to implement this in their titles. Valve’s feature sees the GPU render the entire frame sharply, but adjusts the video encoding stream from your PC to deliver a crisp image where you’re looking. This saves on bandwidth and gives you the best possible experience.
“We can send a very, very high-fidelity representation of the source data for where you’re looking, and then spend far fewer bits on the surrounding area,” Valve engineer Jeremy Selan explained to PC Gamer. “So, you could imagine that if that foveated area, say, represents 10% of the full field of view, it would actually be a 10x multiplication factor in bandwidth, in latency, in robustness.”
Folks who got to try this in person noted that the feature worked well enough with the eye tracking that they couldn’t spot the low-resolution areas in their VR field of view. That’s really impressive, especially when you consider that this isn’t a giant team like Meta or Apple would have working on bleeding-edge tech, but a subset of a roughly-400-member company pulling this off.
Valve Corporation
It is worth noting, though, that your PC will be strained just as much as it would be when rendering full frames for your VR gaming, as foveated streaming doesn’t narrow the area that the GPU has to spit out in high-resolution. But on the flipside, this also doesn’t require games to have foveated rendering built in; you should simply be able to experience fast high-fidelity streaming across every title in your Steam library. Plus, Valve says other headsets with eye tracking tech running Steam Link can also use its foveated streaming tech.
If your Frame isn’t paired to your PC, you can use the onboard Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip with 16 GB of RAM to play a number of supported games using the headset’s Linux-based system. It supports microSD cards to expand storage. It will also run Android games. That greatly expands your options for getting in some game time.
The Steam Frame comes with thin pancake lenses fitted with high-res 2,160 x 2,160 px LCD panels for a 110-degree field of view, which support fast refresh rates ranging from 72-144 Hz. Dual stereo speakers on each side of your head deliver audio without the need for headphones; they’re oriented in opposite directions to cancel out vibrations.
Valve Corporation
The headset uses four high-resolution monochrome cameras for head and controller tracking, even in the dark. And speaking of controllers, the Frame comes with a pair that feature a split gamepad layout and work with both VR and non-VR games.
All that works out to a pretty compelling reason to consider giving VR gaming a shot, and a whole lot of flexibility in terms of what you can play. Valve hasn’t yet announced pricing, but if it can get the Steam Frame to market anywhere around the US$500 price point (like the Meta Quest 3) when it arrives next year, it could make sense to a lot of folks who are already invested in PC game libraries to add this hardware to their kit.
Product page: Steam Frame
