im confused, its specs are amazing and on paper is more powerful than the meta quest 3, but its mainly being advertised as a streaming headset that goes from your vr spec pc (that is becoming more and more expensive these days for people).
so can it play games natively on the headset or not? i want to get it for my birthday as i see it as a worthy sucessor to my quest 2 that is amazing, but its controllers are drifiting to an unrepairable degree.
imagine no mans sky on it :0
It can play Android games directly on the headset so you would be able to play Meta Quest versions directly, presumably fine, but it probably won’t handle running something like Alyx in standalone.
IDK how you’re expected to get legitimate Android versions tho. The only way I have ever found the installers themselves is through piracy.
They are trying to make Alyx work standalone: https://www.digitalfoundry.net/news/2025/11/valve-looking-into-a-steam-frame-half-life-alyx-standalone-experience
But that will probably be an exception due to the amount of resources Valve will invest into getting it to work well, you’re right that few other games on that level would run standalone.
I didn’t know that! You can play .apk files directly on the headset? Haha, il buy the game from steam ofc but if I can’t do that then maybe I will go that route :3
From what I was able to gather: yes, it has the capability to play VR on it without a dedicated machine. However, it will not be as good as if you had a dedicated PC, obviously.
yeah i expected that. i expect just like the steam deck, companies will optimize their game to be “Steam Frame Verified” or something like that.
Very likely! Honestly, if the price is able to be as good as the Deck and not the Index, I can see a lot of people adopting VR.
teh quest 2 sold 20 mill units (most of the 20 12 year olds yes) but still! maybe the frame can sell 25 mil
The Quest also has the caveat of being tied to Meta, and people like me will never buy one because of that.
And that caveat also comes with a discount, I heard Quest sells for less than it costs to produce.
I never wanted to get Quest even if the price was good, I hope I will be able to get the Frame soon 🥲
It’s not truly a discount either, it’s a subsidy. That cost is recouped by the aggregation and sale of your data, which is far more valuable to Meta than a single product sale.
yeah and that pisses me off. well not the people not buying the hardware but the developers. i would LOVE to play Hotdogs And handgrenades but untill i get the frame i cant as the devs of that game has clearly said “we will not be porting our game to any meta owned platform”.
It shouldn’t piss you off. You should be cheering for that behavior, and it would be wonderful if every dev was that brave.
The reason the Quest is relatively affordable is because you are the product. Meta is harvesting your data for free, and the cost is partially subsidized by the sale of your data. Continuing to support the Metas, the Googles, the Xitters, etc. does not ultimately benefit anyone but the wealthy.
I get that it can be frustrating to lose out on some fun, but I think not buying their products is a worthy sacrifice to make for the good of us all.
i dont care about all that data stuff. i just want the game to be on quest. for the quest 2 they had the excuse of “ohhh its not powerfull enough” but they could 100% do it with the quest 3 im sure
They’ve already confirmed exactly that, but if you have a Steam Deck you know those “verifications” are completely useless.
As someone with a deck, who has complained about games that were verified when they probably shouldn’t have been, I wouldn’t say useless, it’s certainly flawed, and irritating that it’s not better, but it’s not useless
Agree to disagree, I suppose. That was my experience. And looking at Proton DB the experience of many others as well.
I made a purchasing choice yesterday based on the verification status. Triggering me to look closer and see what issues there were.
Well if it makes you feel better, I don’t even look at it anymore because pretty much everything just works. To the extent that in the off chance it doesn’t work I will just refund it.
Thanks, I feel a lot better now
That’s okay, we’ll just have to have a crowdsourced FrameDB (or maybe it will be added onto ProtonDB).
Exactly. That website is going to have their hands full with all the new Valve hardware haha.
thats actually a great point 😆 . the difference with vr is that the games have to have a good frame rate, as unlike on the deck, you will get sick because of the fps.
Yes. The Steam Frame will come with the following technologies:
- SteamOS, just like the Steam Deck, so you can play Windows and Linux games on-device with Linux (both pancake on a virtual screen and lower requirement VR games will be supported)
- FEX to run x86_64 games on-device (small performance hit, but access to the vast majority of the Proton-compatible Steam library in return)
- native ARM games are confirmed to be side-loadable (VR or not)
- a wireless streaming dongle to natively stream PCVR, with foveated streaming to increase quality and reduce bandwidth requirements.
I’m super hyped and will most probably (pre)order it day one to replace my shitty CV1. I’m also hoping for a Steam Deck effect by pushing developers to optimize and use foveated rendering as it drastically reduces hardware requirements for high quality graphics.
small performance hit
How big the performance hit is depends on the game. If the game logic itself is CPU-heavy, the performance hit will be big. If the game spends most of the CPU time in system-supplied libraries or isn’t CPU-heavy to begin with, it’s gonna be small.
The good news is that many VR titles aren’t CPU-heavy.
Even for CPU-heavy titles it depends on the exact instructions. Sometimes multiple instructions in one architecture can be replaced by a single one in another. But that’s rare, on average performance will be negatively affected.
And Android titles through Lepton.
From what I’ve seen about foveated rendering, I don’t think developers need to do anything. It should just be “on” for any streamed content
The frame’s foveated streaming is a separate thing from foveated rendering. Foveated streaming does nothing to reduce the rendering load on the hardware running the game, it just reduces the network bandwidth required.
Yes, developers needs to implement fovated rendering but not fovated streaming.
The bugs are going to be hilarious when the game incorrectly understands what you’re looking at, or breaks from looking at something too intensely
I mean… Those kind of bugs exist now with some headsets and they’re not really funny. Mostly nauseating.
Yeah, didn’t think about that :( but I imagine the descriptions are still going to be fun, like ‘things don’t behave when I stop looking at them’
you have an oculus rift in the big 26? wow you 100% need the frame
I know. I swore my next headset would be Linux-compatible so I can reclaim the space of the windows partition I made exclusively for VR, but unfortunately, until the Frame, only old-ass headsets barely improving from my CV1 were available.
The quests are compatible with Linux as Steam supports streaming to them natively.
part of me wants to get the first ever oculus headset just for fun. i love old tech
My cv1’s base camera died last year :D
so can it play games natively on the headset or not?
Yes. It’s a “streaming first” headset, but you can also run (very basic, not demanding) games on the headset itself.
The hardware is stronger than the Quest 3, so it should be able to run the same titles. It does lose out a bit because of all of the translation layers tho.
Yep, just won’t be able to run a lot of PCVR titles. It should be able to run native Android games as well, which I believe is what the Quest uses, and the Android XR platform definitely does.
It can play games standalone, but unless they’re specifically made for it, they will run through a translation layer that will have a performance cost. I’d expect similar to slightly better visuals compared to a Quest 3. I don’t think No Man’s Sky VR will run standalone with playable performance.
i can see it handling vrchat or possibly even bonelab fine. possibly half life alyx? i assume valve will make a version specifically for the frame
They are reportedly working on it and fairly confident they can optimize it well enough to run standalone.
No Mans Sky will not run well on the HMD you’ll want to stream that one from your PC.
Yes it can be used standalone, however Quest games are built for the Quest. Frame games are PC games translated to ARM. That’ll unlock a lot of games for standalone use, but I seriously doubt it’ll have the resources for something like NMS to run on it’s hardware.
NMS specifically I think might work. It can run on some pretty low-end hardware on their lowest settings, so you might be able to play locally on the Frame.
It’ll need to be some very low settings to hit 4k @ 90fps minimum. Sacrificing frames or resolution in VR is a non-starter. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, but sounds extraordinary craptastic to me.
Yeah, I once had to play NMS on low settings, before I had a GPU, and it’s not an especially good-looking game like that. The Frame will probably have better specs than my stop-gap Ryzen 5600G build, but it’s definitely a game that’s more immersive with good hardware.
If the ARM translation ends up being something that can be done to run Steam games on Android that would be so cool.
Basically it can play lower power games directly, or display higher power games from your PC.
Both the Quest and the Steam Frame use ARM hardware, this is the same type of hardware used in phones. This hardware is noteworthy because it’s more power efficient that x86 type hardware, which is what traditional PCs use. Many VR games are made to run directly on the Quest and should be hardware compatible with the Steam Frame too since they both use ARM.
The Steam Frame can also run x86 games thanks to an emulation layer called FEX that valve has been working on. This is something the Quest cannot do, but many PC games will likely be too demanding to run this way. VR games are naturally performance demanding since the game needs to be rendered twice for both eye perspectives, and needs decent resolution. Valve has said that it will be slightly weaker than the current Steam Deck in performance, and that’s probably before we consider the extra performance requirements of VR and the performance overhead of FEX.
So based on that, I would assume NMS would not run well directly on the Frame itself, and you would instead need to run it on your PC and display it on the Frame.
ah i see. maybe a game like hotdogs and hand grenades?
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Yes it can.
Valve is a PC gaming company, so of course they also cater to people who want to run their VR games on their monster gaming rigs.
It’s just like the Quest 2.
It supports some small limited library of games without a PC, but can be used for PCVR for streaming VR experiences over WiFi, exactly like the Quest 2. I have never personally touched any of the on-headset apps on the Quest 2 apart from Virtual Desktop and have only ever used it as a PCVR headset because it’s so cheap compared to the Index etc., and am also looking for an upgrade to the Steam Frame, for PCVR exclusive use.
