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Up front, I want to say thank you to Valve for sending me a 2TB Steam Frame for review. They also sent their Ergonomic Accessories Kit and 2.5M Charger Cable with the review unit.
Additionally, thank you to Arturus Vision for providing their Colour Passthrough camera addon for review.
After a little over two weeks spent with the Steam Frame, Valve’s Standalone and Wireless Streaming focused VR headset, I am left incredibly uncertain how I ultimately feel about the device.
It’s the most comfortable VR headset I’ve experienced for long term play, but its battery life is pretty rough. Its visual quality is pretty solid, but can be matched by headsets around half the price. Its Steam integration opens up access to a pretty wide library, but compatibility information is incredibly sparse at launch. It supports full desktop access, but sells important functionality as accessories.
At its best it feels like a nice step forward, but certain aspects I consider essential are pricey add-on purchases on top of an already expensive base device.
There are times I imagine making the Steam Frame my default VR headset of choice, but a number of edge cases are holding me back from jumping head first into making that transition.
Standalone Vs Wireless
The Steam Frame is a VR Headset straddling the line between standalone headsets like the Meta Quest 3, and providing a Wireless equivalent to PC powered headsets like the Valve Index. You can turn on the headset by itself, log into Steam OS (the same operating system seen on Steam Deck and Steam Machine), and install both VR and Non VR software to run natively on the headset’s built in graphics hardware. Alternatively you can boot up a PC, plug in the included proprietary dongle, and stream the game graphics to the headset over a dedicated wireless connection.
Fundamentally I think the Frame is more exciting as a stand alone headset, but it would be a much harder sell without the wireless PC streaming to fall back on.
One of the biggest wins in the Steam Frame’s favour, compared to other comparable VR headsets, is its level of comfort out of the box. Standalone VR headsets have a bit of a reputation for being front heavy, due to having computing tech and their battery in the front. This usually necessitates having the headset tight to stop it moving, causing some discomfort in long play sessions.
The Steam Frame by comparison places the battery pack on the back of the head, evening out the weight distribution considerably. As a result the default configuration of the headset, featuring just side straps and no over the head strap, is able to stay comfortably in position without needing to be nearly as tight as something like the Quest 3. Often when taking off the Quest 3 for example I’ll have strong indentation marks on my face after a relatively short play session, but by comparison the Steam Frame was far more comfortable for far longer, not leaving pressure based marks on my face.
However, in order to get the headset as lightweight as possible, one of the more major tradeoffs made is to the Frame’s battery capacity. When playing VR games in standalone mode, the Frame’s battery life was in some use cases less than one hour. Streaming from PC fared better, with battery life around 90 minutes at default settings, and closer to 2 hours if turning some settings down (such as reducing framerate from 90FPS to 72FPS.
I very much found that the best way to use the headset for an extended period of time in standing room VR games was to wear a bum bag (fanny pack) containing a USB power bank. This largely retained the benefits of being able to play freely, not thinking about a cable tethering me to a base device, for a more intensive play session. It’s an additional step which I’d rather not need, but it gets the job done.
The built-in battery life is plenty if you’re mostly jumping into the headset for an hour of Beat Saber over lunch, or playing seated VR games plugged into the mains, but requires some support if you want a long enough battery life to get properly immersed in narrative focused roomscale titles. By comparison the Quest 3 easily crosses 2 hours of battery life with a game like Beat Saber running natively on the headset, without having to alter settings or stream remote gameplay to reach that benchmark.
The Steam Frame, when used as a stand alone headset, is pretty damn comparable to the Meta Quest 3. Both of them have little wins when pitted directly against each other, but the Quest 3 is the right place to set your base expectations of the Steam Frame if you’re going to primarily use it as a standalone VR device.
The Frame is more comfortable to wear for long periods, and features more buttons on each controller (for playing non VR games), but has a noticeably worse battery life than the Quest 3, and only black and white passthrough (by default) compared to the Quest’s colour vision. The visual quality between the two headsets is pretty comparable – text is maybe a little easier to read on the Frame, but not by much. You’ve got access to Steam rather than the Meta store, which has its own pros and cons.
You’ve got access to your existing Steam library, but how much of that will work natively on the headset is anybody’s guess right now. You can also access Half Life Alyx, but is that enough to encourage you to move to a new ecosystem if you’re someone who already owns a bunch of VR games on a competing ecosystem?
As someone who is invested in VR gaming already, I already own Beat Saber on Quest and PlayStation. Do I want to purchase it again on Steam, alongside the DLC packs I like, just to be able to move to using the Frame as my primary VR device? If this is your first VR headset that’s not a concern, but as someone who has largely invested in other VR ecosystems already it’s a really big part of my calculus in sticking with this new platform.
As a standalone headset the Steam Frame is in so many ways comparable to the Quest 3, with its biggest differentiator the fact it’s also set up to play Non VR games from your Steam Library, albeit with mixed success.
You can definitely play a good percentage of 2D games, titles like Hades 2, at framerates nicely above 60FPS in standalone mode. Playing Hades at above 60FPS on a screen the size of my entire living room wall is a great experience, and genuinely something I could see myself doing in a hotel or on a longhaul flight. 3D games work with mixed success too – Portal 2 and Bioshock Infinite are “Steam Frame Verified”, but playing indie mountain climbing narrative simulator Cairn required making a lot of compromises to visual quality to get a stable framerate experience. Don’t expect Steam Deck levels of game performance on more demanding games – definitely don’t expect to be playing Cyberpunk 2077 at more than 10-15 FPS even with major graphical compromises.
This isn’t helped by the fact that the “Steam Frame Verified” game list at present is pretty miniscule, with most games not currently rated for Steam Frame compatibility. This will hopefully improve over time, but at present means booting up games at random and rolling the dice whether they will run.
VR Game compatibility in standalone mode right now is equally spotty, with very few games formally verified as working on the device. While games like Tetris Effect ran well after some settings tweaks, many other VR games will simply refuse to boot at all for seemingly no reason.
To my understanding a lot of this comes down to the Steam Frame being ARM hardware, and needing to run through a translation layer. This is similar to how the Steam Deck runs windows games despite being a Linux system via Proton. The issue on Steam Frame is that games are having to run through two different translation layers, not only Proton but also one called FEX to translate X86 commands to run on ARM hardware. This combination of dual layers of translation seems to be at the root of the hardware’s somewhat random game compatibility. This is something that may improve over time, but I can only review performance as it appears at launch. Right now, it feels 50/50 whether a game I try to launch on the headset will or won’t boot.
The Steam Frame can also boot into a Linux desktop environment, operating as its own Linux PC. I’ll go into this in more depth later in the review, but for a very specific kind of user this might be the big selling point to differentiate it from the Quest 3. You can connect a bluetooth keyboard and mouse for productivity tasks, or use this mode to sideload content such as emulators, or non Steam software.
In a perfect world, I had hoped the Steam Frame would be something of a Quest 3 killer. As someone who owns a Quest 3, and uses it as my primary VR headset of choice, I don’t like recommending people purchase one. Put simply Meta is a company I don’t really want to trust with my personal data, and would rather not have an account with. If I could avoid using their products entirely, I would.
I had hoped that the Steam Frame would be able to become my new go to standalone VR headset of choice, and an easy all around recommendation over the Quest 3, but it just doesn’t get there unfortunately. The reduced battery life and black and white passthrough are a hard sell, but so is the price.
A 256GB model Steam Frame, with no accessories, costs £889 here in the UK. I will justify this later on, but I do think that an additional £60 spend is basically mandatory, bringing the entry price of the Steam Frame to around £950. You can get a Quest 3 for £475, basically half the price. If you’re looking for a standalone device, even as someone trying to decouple from Meta, double the price for Valve’s headset is a hard sell when the visual quality is so comparable between the two devices. Sure the Frame is more comfortable, and has access to your Steam Library, and can act as a Linux desktop, but should a device at double the price have as many caveats as I have when recommending the Frame? Should I be talking about sub 1 hour battery life I have to mitigate with an external power supply at this kind of pricing?
Moving onto the PC streaming experience, the Steam Frame ships with a dedicated wireless streaming dongle, so that you can run more powerful games on a dedicated PC, and stream that gameplay to the headset. The idea here is to reduce the stress associated with a cabled setup – No risk of tripping over a long cable near your feet, pulling over your PC via the cable, or accidentally pulling the cable in a way which damaged the port it’s plugged into, as well as increased freedom to play in roomscale without fear of getting tabled up.
I cannot deny, the quality of the PC streaming experience is superb. I genuinely would not have known I wasn’t receiving footage over a wired connection in a test scenario. Video footage is by default transferred by a combination of dedicated wireless dongle signal and your home WIFI network, and that combination definitely seems to avoid even minor momentary drops in visual signal which could have caused motion sickness.
This setup works amazingly if you want to be playing a game in VR, but also showing a non-VR feed for others in the room to watch along with, as well as if you want to play a more intensive non-VR game at a high framerate on a large virtual screen.
This is the other area where the Steam Frame has a definitive edge over the Quest 3, which supports PC VR but only when tethered via a cable. For ease of use and the convenience of wireless play, this is a better solution than most of its competition if you want to play PC VR games, or intensive 3D non-VR games, on a VR headset.
Steam Machine Compatibility
One unfortunate negative, at present you’re not able to stream VR or Non-VR games from the Steam Machine to the Steam Frame using the dongle. This support apparently may be coming in the future, but is not available at launch.
Tech Limitations
In terms of more broadly discussing the Steam Frame’s tech setup, the tracking range of the headset is pretty decent, with good coverage on the outside edges of your arm’s movement range. If there’s anywhere that the tracking is a little weaker it’s directly in front of the headset there may be a slight weak spot, but I’ll come back to that later.
The Steam Frame does feature eye tracking tech, but not for game facing purposes. Eye tracking is used for something called Foveated Streaming, basically increasing the game resolution at the part of the screen you’re looking directly at and reducing it in your peripheral vision, used in part to increase the quality and stability of video streaming from a PC to the headset.
I was honestly a little disappointed to learn that eye tracking isn’t available on the Steam Frame for games to make use of. The last time I reviewed a VR headset prior to this was the PlayStation VR 2 in early 2023, which allowed for eye tracking to be used as a game input. My most memorable experiences with that headset were games I could control exclusively using eye tracking, such as selecting targets to fire at with my eyesight in REZ Infinite. That tech felt truly next generation, and trying a new VR headset which doesn’t support the technology does feel like an unfortunate step backward.
The Steam Frame also doesn’t support hand tracking as a game input, at least at launch.
The Steam Frame also doesn’t feature a 3.5MM headphone socket, requiring any headphones to be bluetooth paired. While this isn’t a huge issue, it’s also a little disappointing. I’ve experienced some awkwardness moving my bluetooth headphones between pairing to my phone and the Steam Frame, and would rather have the option to just plug in a wired pair if needed.
Half Life Alyx
One of the biggest reasons someone might be motivated to choose a Steam VR headset over one geared toward its competition is the video game Half Life Alyx. That is as true today as it was six years ago, for better and worse.
Every Steam Frame headset comes with a free copy of Half Life Alyx, which has received a ported version designed specifically to run directly on the Steam Frame in Standalone mode. It’s still the most impressive longform narrative adventure game available in VR, which is in some ways a bit of an indictment of the health of the VR game ecosystem.
For anyone who hasn’t played it, Half Life Alyx is a standalone adventure taking place immediately before the events of Half-Life 2. The core gimmick is you have a pair of “gravity gloves”, which allow you to pull remote objects from a distance toward yourself to grab. The player solves puzzles in first person, scavenges for resources, and fights off enemy creatures with ranged weaponry.
In terms of games to ship for free with the Steam Frame, in many ways Half Life Alyx was the correct choice. The game is incredibly scary and tense, with monsters that lurch toward you fast enough to be a worrying threat, but with enough stumbles that you have time to react. The game is incredibly comfortable to play in VR as a motion sickness prone player due to its solid implementation of teleportation. The Gravity Gloves are a superbly cool gimmick, it never stops feeling cool to whip an object toward yourself and grab it from thin air. The tiny specifics also help to really sell the reality of the world, such as hearing mactches rattle when shaking a matchbox, or watching fluid behave realistically inside glass bottles.
Half Life Alyx is 100% Steam VR’s killer app, and it does run great on the Steam Frame. If you’re someone who’’s previously been a Meta or PlayStation VR gamer then finally getting access to Half Life Alyx is a major point in this headset’s favour, but the fact that Steam VR’s killer app is a six year old game kind of highlights an ongoing issue with VR gaming as a whole. The fact that six years later Valve didn’t launch a new exclusive title for the Steam Frame, instead relying on a six year old title as the hardware’s pack-in launch game, demonstrates that we’re really not seeing a lot of ambitious and exciting new VR games released anywhere in the industry as a whole.
Unboxing
From an accessibility perspective, let’s shift to unboxing the Steam Frame.
While the initial shipping box the Steam Frame is sent in is sealed shut with tape and features minimal clearance to grip the inner boxes for removal, the Valve produced boxes for the headset and the Ergonomic Accessories Kit themselves are decently designed, with a small grip tab helping to make it easier to remove each box’s cardboard seal strip.
The optional Power Supply add-on unfortunately doesn’t feature this accessible packaging design, and is sealed shut using difficult to remove tape.
Once inside the core packaging the Steam Frame itself features plastic pull tabs, to make removing the lenses cover and battery compartment tabs easier.
It is unfortunately a little tricky to remove the additional headset spacer from its cardboard enclosure due to the spacer’s shape.
The Wireless USB Dongle is pretty tightly taped up, and a little tricky to open if you suffer with reduced manual dexterity.
The headset’s included USB-C cable is held shut by rippable cardboard seals, with a grippable tab.
The power supply was not only sealed shut with tape, but also secured inside the packaging with a cable tie, which may cause issues for some users with reduced dexterity.
All accessories in the Ergonomic Accessories Kit are organised using rippable cardboard sleeves, with grip tabs included.
What’s Not Included in the Base Package
If you’re just ordering the Steam Frame itself (256GB for £889 or 2TB for £1,089), there’s a number of add-ons that aren’t included in the base price.
Ergonomic Accessories Kit
The Ergonomic Accessories Kit costs £59, and includes an overhead strap, controller hand straps, and a larger light blocking rubber nose guard.
The overhead strap honestly feels super unnecessary, as the redistributed weight design of the headset makes it comfortable with only the side straps.
The Hand Straps allow you to open your hands entirely without dropping your controller, basically only important if you want to be able to fully open and close every finger on your hand in Half Life Alyx – A nice feature, but not vital to playing the game.
In my experience, and that of my wife, the larger rubber nose guard is absolutely vital. Without it we found that the Steam Frame’s level of light leakage around the nose was unbearable, quite unplayable. I genuinely think this should have been included in the base package, and that it being exclusively available as part of a £60 bundle of other peripherals is audacious. Plan on needing to pick this up to properly enjoy the Steam Frame.
2.5M Power Cable
Valve sells a 2.5M 45W power cable for £29. This isn’t strictly necessary, you can use any existing 45W USB-C charger to charge the Steam Machine, but not including this lengthy power cable in the base package does feel odd given the headset’s subpar battery life. If you want to play seated or standing VR, not in roomscale, without thinking about battery life or a portable battery pack, you may want this length of dedicated power cable.
Color passthrough by Arcturus Vision
I want to say a big thank you at this point to Arcturus Vision, who separately sent me their Colour Passthrough camera to be able to cover in this review.
By default the Steam Frame’s passthrough cameras are black and white, tinted with a blue hue inside the headset. They’re the kind of passthrough cameras seen on the Quest 2, where if you look at something like a phone through them the screen is basically impossible to see.
For £129 Arcturus Vision sells a small lightweight Steam Frame peripheral, a higher resolution colour passthrough camera which clips onto a port on the front of the Steam Frame, right above the nose ridge.
The headset doesn’t look quite as stylish with this obvious add-on bolted to the front, but the upgrade is immediate. The camera resolution and framerate for passthrough are much higher, more comparable to the passthrough on the Quest 3. The upgraded passthrough also correctly picks up the image of a phone screen, meaning that if you need to for example read a confirmation code in an email, you can do so without removing the headset and needing to memorise the code.
As someone who experiences chronic motion sickness, I found that when spending extended periods of time using passthrough, I experienced reduced amounts of motion sickness using the Arcturus Vision than I did with the headset’s default passthrough cameras.
Additionally, and this is anecdotal, but having the Arcturus Vision installed seemed to help improve front facing direct controller tracking compared to the base experience.
The colour passthrough camera does require a little fine motor control to fit to the headset, removing a small plastic covering from the connector, and then fitting the connector snugly into a port on the front of the headset. This may require assistance for some disabled gamers to install.
The biggest pro of the Steam Frame compared to its competition is, in my opinion, its lightweight and comfortable nature, which make me more likely to want to use it outside. While I know you need to be careful using VR headsets outdoors (sunlight directly shining on the pancake lenses can burn their internal screens), I did really enjoy a couple of sessions of playing games on a large virtual screen outdoors, and doing so with the Arcturus Vision camera was a much more pleasant experience. If I end up using this headset on a longhaul flight or lengthy train journey, I’ll appreciate the upgraded cameras for certain.
Arcturus have done a really solid job with this camera peripheral, it’s a well made addition that notably improves the experience of using the Steam Frame, if money’s not a factor for you. The biggest complaint I have is honestly that this feels like it’s a necessary part of making the Steam Frame feel like a modern, up to date VR headset. If the base headset wasn’t already £890, with another £60 on top for the improved nose light guard, this would be an easy recommendation.
Again, I don’t think £130 ish is outrageous in a vacuum to add colour passthrough to a VR headset. I do think it feels ridiculous when the headset is more than twice the price of competitors headsets which support it as standard.
If you’re already picking up a 256GB Steam Frame and Ergonomic Accessories Kit then adding the Arcturus Vision to the bundle brings your price up from £950 to around £1,080. When you’re already spending double the price of its closest competitor, maybe it’s worth it to add on that last additional expense, but it is a hard recommendation through no fault of its own.
Steam OS
I’m going to skim over Steam OS in this review, because this is already very lengthy. If you want to see my in-depth thoughts on Steam OS’s accessibility, check out my recent Steam Machine accessibility review, linked here.
Steam OS is largely the same here as it is on the Steam Deck or Steam Machine, in terms of the core accessibility settings options offered on an Operating System level, with a few notable exceptions. You lose access to text to speech menu narration seen on the other Steam OS devices, as well as colour filters (the menu still appears, but only default appears in the dropdown). This is disappointing, as the consistency of accessibility settings offered on Steam OS regardless of device had until recently been one of the ecosystem’s key strengths.
I would highly advise Valve to list somewhere online which SteamOS accessibility settings are not offered on Steam Frame, to reduce the risk of someone picking up the headset under the assumption it’ll include a feature that a user relies on when playing on a different SteamOS device.
The Steam Frame does feature a few unique settings options, which I’ll give a quick runthrough.
The headset’s default FPS is set to 90, but can be customised as high as 144 and as low as 72. 72FPS is generally comfortable enough for VR gaming, and a compromise you may wish to make to increase battery life, but I find 90FPS is a better sweet spot for avoiding motion sickness as someone who chronically suffers with the condition.
You can also alter brightness and toggle on motion smoothing.
There’s a setting to autodetect flicker in the passthrough video and reduce it, or you can manually set it to account for 50 or 6p Hz.
I described the black and white roomscale view earlier as tinted blue, but this can be customised.
By default the headset sharpens the game image where you’re directly looking. If a post processed sharpened image is distracting, you can turn this off.
Lastly, you can activate Pupil Perspective Compensation, to try to help account for the changes to pupil spacing distance inherent in looking around your field of view rather than straight forward, if you find things out of focus when looking to the edges of your field of view
Play While Lying Down
Similar to the Quest 3 and PSVR2, the Steam Frame doesn’t allow a player who is lying down, facing the ceiling, to set their centred view in VR games to the ceiling. As such, even VR games which in theory could be played lying down, such as Tetris Effect, need to be played unfortunately sat up.
You can however play non VR games on a large virtual screen, positioned on your ceiling. The headset is fairly comfortable to wear while lying down thanks to ample padding between the battery and the user’s head. Obviously lying on a battery may not be wise long term due to head, but if you want a giant virtual screen above you in bed, the Steam Frame does make that possible.
Desktop Mode
I was initially under the impression the Steam Frame didn’t support Desktop Mode, as seen on Steam Frame and Steam Machine, because I did not see an option to launch Desktop Mode in the power off menu. Instead, you tab to desktop mode using the bottom navigation bar on Steam Frame.
Desktop Mode on Steam Frame features mostly the same pros and cons seen on other SteamOS devices. You can install Linux programs in desktop mode, then sideload them into Steam gaming mode to boot. You can connect a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and use it as a dedicated desktop, which actually worked pretty well.
I was able to pretty effectively sit and write an article on a virtual screen in my headset, a benefit when compared to the Quest 3. If I wanted to work on an article on a flight or train that involved confidential information, I can see how it would maybe be beneficial to be able to write that article on a virtual screen in VR rather than on a laptop screen which someone else could lean over and read or photograph. I don’t think that’s a likely usecase, but it is one I thought about during the review period.
Accessibility Controller Support
For more in depth information on Steam OS support for accessibility controllers, see my recently published Steam Machine accessibility review, linked here.
The Steam Frame works well when connected to the Xbox Adaptive Controller wirelessly via bluetooth, including 3.5mm input switches and any connected Xbox Adaptive Joystick.
The Hori Flex, Byowave Proteus Controller, and a solo connected Xbox Adaptive Joystick all work with the Steam Frame, but require a USB-C to USB-A adapter, which can be awkward to wear due to the placement of the headset’s USB-C port on the back of the neck.
The PlayStation Access Controller does not work correctly with the Steam Frame.
While none of the above controllers are designed to work with VR specific game builds, they do work with some VR games that support traditional controllers, as well as for playing non-VR games on a large virtual screen.
The Steam Controller does connect to the Steam Frame via Bluetooth. Its location at launch isn’t tracked in 3D space. It can be used for non VR games, and supports the same accessibility positives discussed in our recent Steam Controller Accessibility Review video.
Final Thoughts
In a world where the Steam Frame, with colour passthrough and larger nose light guard, was closer in price to the Meta Quest 3, I think I would have a much easier time recommending it. Even if the price was a couple of hundred pounds more that Meta’s 3rd Gen device I think I probably would have pitched this as the Quest killer I had been looking for.
Yeah the battery life is a little worse and may need a battery pack to accommodate, and yes you’ll need to rebuy your library if you’re bought in on another ecosystem already, but you get a more comfortable experience and a linux desktop, alongside the flexibility of wireless PC streaming. The tradeoffs aren’t ideal, but it’s a better choice than giving your money to Meta.
But when you’re looking at £1,080 to get the 256GB Steam Frame up to feature parity with the Quest 3, more than double the competition’s price, it’s a lot harder to overlook the negatives or justify the positives.
I do think I will largely move to playing future VR games on the Steam Frame going forward, if for no other reason than physical comfort. I don’t know if I’ll rebuy my game library, me and my wife will probably just keep the Quest 3 around as the default Beat Saber headset because it’s got more battery life and all our DLC purchases are already on it.
For travel I will likely experiment with bringing the Frame with me on work trips. It’s a great headset for playing non VR games on a big virtual screen at high framerates, and works decently as a work desktop for certain kinds of tasks.
If you’re someone with money to throw around, the Steam Frame is a really cool VR headset. You’ll probably need to play it with a battery pack in your pocket, and it’s not got in game eye tracking or any similarly next generation feeling tech, but it is a really nice and polished device that feels premium and comfortable and you will kind of want to show off.
Owning a Steam Frame, I do really like the device, but I can’t avoid comparing the price to that of the Quest 3. Yes it does more, but it’s not the Quest killer I had hoped, and there’s only so much price increase that “escaping Meta”’ can make worthwhile.
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