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Reservations Go Live for Valve's Steam Frame VR Headset. An Experiment in Progress? (cnet.com) 62

Posted by EditorDavid from the gaining-steam dept.
Reservations are now live for Valve's "Steam Frame" VR headset (with its Linux-based SteamOS and an ARM CPU). "It starts at $1,059 for 256GB or $1,299 for 1TB," reports CNET, "and every purchase includes a copy of Half-Life: Alyx if you don't already own it." Reservations are open through Sept. 17 at 10 a.m. PT, "with customers randomly assigned a place in line after the reservation window closes."

CNET's editor at large even argues that the Steam Frame "isn't necessarily the future of XR, as much as it's a framework for evolving beyond the present." Their review calls it an "ambitious" VR headset that "feels like an experiment in progress." The ability to run other apps in windows can make Frame feel, at times, almost like a computer. Linux apps in desktop mode range from Chromium to Firefox to a bunch of other tools. I watched YouTube in one window while playing Portal 2 in other, and started to marvel at how flexible Frame could be. But VR games require a full immersive takeover of the headset... The Steam Frame can convert games intended for both PC VR and even Android APK files, using a conversion tool called Lepton... I haven't sideloaded anything yet, but Steam Frame in theory could be a Rosetta Stone for VR gaming, even tapping into some Android XR titles, but not out of the box...

2D games can be projected onto a near-range or farther-off theater mode screen that can be dragged around, resized and turned into a curved or flat monitor, much like with the Apple Vision Pro, Samsung Galaxy XR or Meta Quest. You can download any game in your Steam library to test, even if it's not technically listed as "Great on Frame" yet...

But the name "Frame" suggests a framework, something Valve's team acknowledged when I spoke to them during my review process... "We want this to be your PC, and people mod it, take it apart, make accessories for it," says Jeremy Selan, a software developer on the Steam Frame team. "We'll be putting out the CAD for all these [Steam Frame] systems. This is entirely based on open-source technology stacks based upon SteamOS. Our hope is that this isn't just one device, that this would be sort of the root of a growing SteamOS ecosystem. It already encompasses gaming and Proton and SteamOS and those Linux gaming capabilities. This is going to lay the foundation for a new sort of evolutionary tree of that, to also bring it into the VR and XR space."

Reservations Go Live for Valve's Steam Frame VR Headset. An Experiment in Progress? More | Reply

Reservations Go Live for Valve's Steam Frame VR Headset. An Experiment in Progress?

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  • I'm still not interested in VR.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ls671 ( 1122017 )

      Me neither but I ordered 3 dozens to take the RAM out of them and put it in my Beowulf cluster. At $1,299 for 1TB, it's really a steal at that price for 1TB

      From TFS:

      Reservations are now live for Valve's "Steam Frame" VR headset (with its Linux-based SteamOS and an ARM CPU). "It starts at $1,059 for 256GB or $1,299 for 1TB,"

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Beowulf cluster mentioned, pants jizzed.

      • I'm sure you're making a joke, but I'm not sure what the punch line is supposed to be.

        That's storage ("disk" space), of course. It's only got 16GB of RAM.

  • Some people will certainly buy it at that price. I'm not even saying it's overpriced for what it is today. I'm saying you can't make it highly successful at that price.

    If they can cover their costs they get into a product and get a bunch of experience and IP for the future in which it actually is viable to make it cheap enough to be successful, so it might be worth doing. But it's hard enough to sell the kind of game consoles everyone is comfortable with at that price "in this economy" etc etc.

    • When the controllers went on backorder instantly I'd heard that it can be hard to "launder" money out of Steam, and so first party hardware that you can sell third party is more attractive than most platforms. I'm not sure how people tie excessive value into Steam that they want to cash out in the first place but perhaps it is more prevalent in genres of games I don't play.

      • It sounds like you didn't make any effort to find out what Steam even is.

        • I buy games there, I don't use it to store money I need to cash out by pawning hardware and can't be bothered to figure out why anyone would do that. I'm just aware it is 'a thing'.

          • Did you consider that it may not be a thing, and you may have misunderstood somebody yapping (or trolling) on social media?

            • Could be, sure, plenty of normal reasons to have bought video game hardware to resell if you think it'll sell out. It also wouldn't surprise me if there are paid randomized lootboxes for some of the games for in-game hats that people put real money in for or similar type behavior that pools money that is otherwise nontrivial to extract again.

  • eh (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nomadic ( 141991 ) <nomadicworld AT gmail DOT com> on Monday September 14, 2026 @09:53PM (#66338022) Homepage

    Ok, I'm tempted. Not enough to preorder, but if the reviews are good enough I might go for this.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I'm glad that they made the pre-orders fair. I'm not after one, but too often they open in the middle of the night (for Europeans) and by the time we are awake are sold out or all the "early bird" deals are gone. I hate that, I'm not paying more that someone else just because they found out about it first, or I had to be asleep so I could work the next day.

      This way where there is a large window and then the queue order is random is much better.

    • I have no idea how this will play out, but I suspect this will go fairly well for Valve. Probably not gangbusters brilliantly, but fairly well.

      Where Meta, Apple and others have failed is content. Meta has a bit, that's for sure, but they have to pay for it. Valve can likely encourage game developers to use some different dev tools to make their 2D plans into 3D-compatible games. So they can get lots of content over the next few years at (probably) a lot less outlay than Meta will have to spend to get someth

      • Don't know about others, but for me meta was an absolute no go because of the privacy implications. Oculus is heavily subsidised by collecting and selling your data. Frame reviews seem positive, so I will finally be getting into vr.
        • That's how I felt when Index came out so I grabbed one. 7 years is a long time to go with no new headsets though so I ended up getting a Quest 3 - the OS sucks but the hardware is quite good. Pico might have been a better choice. I wish Valve had released a slightly upgraded Index, it's still a great headset now and I use it instead of the quest almost every time but the resolution and sharpness are really quite dated.

  • Steamy (Score:2, Funny)

    by BladeMelbourne ( 518866 )

    We all know this is going to end up being used by people with pr0n habits - and at that resolution they might even see parts of the female anatomy that they didn't know existed.

  • I just want a nice VR headset for my PC (Score:5, Interesting)

    by _Shorty-dammit ( 555739 ) on Monday September 14, 2026 @10:36PM (#66338034)

    And unfortunately, this is not that. For PC usage they seem to be doing the same thing that Meta foolishly did. They turned it into a video codec system that encodes video on the PC, streams that to the device, and the device decodes it and then displays it. Encoding and decoding via video codecs take time. That means the latency is going to be horrible, just like it is with current Meta video players. Gamers Nexus showed latency numbers for the Steam Frame, and while it is better than the Meta crap, it is still crap itself. I just want a nice VR headset for my PC. My PC can already run games. I just need a display device to connect to it. Hopefully the RAM/storage crisis will have them develop a "dumb" version that's just a regular ass VR headset. I'd buy one of those. I ain't buying this video playback device.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by RitchCraft ( 6454710 )

      Just spitballing here, but the encoding/decoding is probably needed so the image being sent can be shaped properly first. I've had a look into a few VR headsets and the optics can get pretty wild in those.The image going into them is a fish-eyed mess but the optics displays it properly. Just a hunch on my part though.

      • You're talking about rendering done by the app. I am talking about these devices taking what has already been rendered by the app, encoding it with a video codec, and decoding it at the other end with a video codec, and playing that back for you. It is a completely separate and unnecessary set of two operations.

    • Re:I just want a nice VR headset for my PC (Score:5, Informative)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @03:16AM (#66338136)

      There's nothing "foolish" about this. One of the biggest problems with early VR was tethering via cable. It was a miserable experience in every way and on that not infrequently caused people to actually ruin their headsets.

      As for the latency, sorry but you are talking rubbish. VR is one of the most latency sensitive things we do. The slightest latency causes motion sickness and makes any fast paced gaming impossible to play. And yet both work perfectly fine with countless PCVR fans happily using the system from everything to high speed rhythm games to fast paced shooters.

      The latency issue is something complained about by people who have not used the product. What you want is something you made up in your head, not a realistic requirement.

      • Wrong. Someone objectively measured the latency with electronic equipment. The latency is objectively bad. I use my VR headset for racing cars in iRacing. The cable is irrelevant to me. I want a low-latency VR headset, which this thing is not. You have no idea what you are talking about, as much as you think you do. The latency of this thing is over 70 ms. We specifically avoid doing things that add a mere 16.67 ms because we are affected by it. We've tested both ways extensively, and the extra 16.

        • No, the latency is a number that is bigger than you arbitrarily care it to be, nothing more, nothing less. Latency always exists, the question is what is the performance criteria required for the latency number.

          That's where you fall down. You play racing games? Great. Now tell us how the 70ms affects you directly. Right now you're only complaining about a number, nothing more. You've provided no objective performance criteria, nor defined how it affects you.

          We've tested both ways extensively, and the extra 16.67 ms is noticed in blind testing. It matters.

          I call bullshit on your blind testing. The require

          • Not sure how much it applies to VR, but as a point of comparison, VHF dominates drone racing because it has super low latency (15ms). Racers put up with it despite the crap quality, despite DJI and walksnail offering systems with 20-40 ms latency. Maybe DJI race mode (15ms) is changing that.

            To somewhat discount this perspective: latency isn't the only benefit of analog... factors such as interference and penetration also come into play, as does price. But still, at 60 MPH, every 10ms is almost a yard of ext

            • And yet the majority of drones on the market transmit digital re-encoded signals even without low-latency. The point I was making is that just because something isn't suitable for the most extreme condition doesn't make it "horrible" or "foolish". The world is dominated by the general purpose use case, not the niche extremes. There are more city bicycles in the world than high end racing bikes. The fact you don't see them in the Tour De France doesn't make their existence horrible of foolish.

              I've also had m

            • but as a point of comparison, VHF dominates drone racing

              Ok, but the drone market is a lot bigger than those 12 users, so it's not a very good comparison.
              They only need to sell what they make for it to be 100% successful.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
              In racing i would thaing jitter is way more annoying, but maybe yjat's not an isue on whf since ther realy isnt any congestion controll to speak about

          • You're full of shit about consumers not caring about latency. How do I know? Because consumer monitor reviews always measure it and they measure it because people used to get mad about the increasingly bad latency in monitors after the CRT era ruining how games felt to play. According to rtings 10 ms is a noticeable difference. I will concede, however, that this is only if you pay attention to such things and the entire chain including the input latency and rendering is not so much longer that it would abso

        • 70ms seems unrealistic. Steam Home Streaming has lower latency than that. And Gizmodo's review says 30ms for streaming when using an included dongle.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Hentes ( 2461350 )

        The cable is only an issue because someone decided to turn VR into the Wii and the rest of the idiots in the industry followed suit. Motion controls combined with VR are always going to be dangerous cable or not. I just want to play with a controller sitting on my ass. As for latency, we are trialing a number of headsets at work, and you can absolutely tell the difference (also there are compression artifacts but those aren't that bad). If these don't bother you then by all means go for it. But they bother

        • VR without motion controls is just a bad display with bad ergonomics. Cardio is the only good use case for VR as far as I'm concerned.

        • The cable is only an issue because someone decided to turn VR into the Wii and the rest of the idiots in the industry followed suit.

          That is an incredibly dumb assessment precisely because you completely failed to address the problem of the cable. The number of people who have accidentally ripped their headsets from the head due to the cable is near enough to 100%. A very very significant portion of people have damaged their cable or their headset, often beyond repair. The defining failure mode of the Rift CV1 wasn't the headset, but the fact that no replacement cables are available. Heck one of my friends ruined his motherboard thanks t

    • What utter bullshit. Latency isn't horrible, encoding/decoding is getting better and better, and thanx to foveated streaming AND rendering (which both still will get many improvements), wireless streaming is almost as good as cabled DP, only in side by side comparison AND looking for it, you will notice the difference, but during regular gameplaying you wont. Streaming has come a long way since years back. To me it's actually any company that creates a headset with cable only is a doa headset.. cable has be

      • Sorry to break it to you, but in something as latency-demanding as iRacing we notice the 16.67 ms added by switching FFB modes. Adding over 70 ms for video encoding and decoding latency is horrendous. At 300 km/h / 186.4 mph you will travel 6.25 m / 20.5 feet in 75 ms. Heh. That's an eternity.

    • "They turned it into a video codec system that encodes video on the PC, streams that to the device, and the device decodes it and then displays it."

      What kind of system do you think *doesn't* involve encoding and decoding, other than magic?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sad_ ( 7868 )

      it can also run applications/games on the headset itself.

  • ... VR Headset. An Experiment in Progress?

    What consumer oriented VR headset is NOT an experiment in progress? Various human computer interaction issues and ergonomics issues are still being worked out.

  • Does it use the same 3d rendering a Quest, aka no 3d movies from the likes of Disney? Or does it use a standard that plays nice?

  • VR is guaranteed flop unless they can make a headset under 100 grams, 4K per eye, and 120 fps. If it can't be done, VR can't be done. If the laws of physics prevent it, the laws of physics prevent VR. Even Meta's future headset, Phoenix, may flop because although it is (supposedly) 75 grams it will likely be a mere 2.5K and only achieve 90 fps. Of course when it fails they will claim the VR concept itself isn't wanted by consumers rather than blame their stupid implementation. Don't even attempt to make a V

    • Oh utter bullshit. Even the Quest 3 and the Pico 4 as standalone headsets give an awesome VR experience.. you're just talking out if your ass with BS specs.. yeah of course the lighter the headset and higher resolution the better, but saying without it it just isn't VR is really utter BS.

      • Meh , maybe don't call it "Reality" then. As we perceive, if we are lucky and healthy, it's 32K (AI guess) at 60fps

        I had Quest, too heavy, made my eyes hurt. Max play time 1hr. It was fun for a few weeks, good for jump scares.

        I dont get why we put all the weight on the head, I'd be ok with cpu gubbins on a waste belt and a wire to some glasses

        • Next version coming out are what you want, light glasses with puck at belt. But having used several headsets with a tethered batterypack(for very long times), I can honestly say that I'd rather have a slightly heavier headset with everything built in. The Pico 4 is a great example of a perfectly balanced headset, and I can easily play for many hours, but I do have to extend it with an extra batterypack sadly. Quest without a thirdparty headstrap sure is much less comfortable, but there are a few excellent c

    • VR is guaranteed flop

      There are more VR headsets that Nintendo 64s and Gamecubes combined, and the VR community is very active. It's a niche yes, but there's nothing "flop" about it. The question is one of price and performance. Apple flopped on price.

      Also listing weight along shows you have no idea what you're talking about. Weight distribution on the head and the head mounting arrangement is orders of magnitude more critical than weight alone. The 100g numbers is arbitrary and useless.

  • Half Life: Alyx _was_ a good game (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Wolfling1 ( 1808594 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @01:54AM (#66338112) Journal
    When it was first released, it was actually quite excellent. Beautifully showed off some of the really jaw dropping features of VR. Also, it was perfectly aligned with canon, and the game play was nicely paced for a VR experience.

    Then, the headset manufacturers discontinued support for the headsets that were around at the time, and the game makers patched the game for newer headsets, and now it doesn't work on the older headsets. It just crashes all the time.

    This is the reason people don't want VR headsets. They're obsolete before they even get out of the box, and the software manufacturers couldn't really care less.

    And they're giving away this particular game with a new headset. That's the joke.

    • You're applying an early adopter approach to products which are no longer early adopter category. At the start of any new technology you can expect precisely the problems you described, it was an incompatible cluster**** of problems.

      But that was close to a decade ago now. The reality today is that anything that works on the Quest 3 that supports the hardware of the Quest 2 still works on that 6 year old headset. The reality is that anything you bought on PCVR for the a Rift CV1 back when you connected cable

    • Uhm, its Alyx still works perfectly on my original Vive and Vive Pro.. I think you mistake the Microsoft XR based headsets, which of course is ridiculous the manufacturers never supplied a SteamVR compatible drivers for, but the market is much larger as those.
  • Oculus Quest made a lot of strides with portability and untethered game play but the Frame looks like more of the same. It's good it plays games standalone and streaming too, but so did the Quest. It still doesn't solve the fundamental issue with VR that it is a niche and it still hasn't found a killer game to sell the tech. If Valve released a battle royale or an MMO and gave it away for free then it might incentivize people to buy and use the thing as a casual device. Think quests, skins, clan bases, hang
    • Does it matter it is niche? Isn't golf niche? Isn't surfing niche? Isn't carting niche? So many hobbies which require 'expensive' extras to do are out there, why should VR be any different, why would it need to be mainstream? Or just look at sims, people spend thousands of dollars on controllers, special seats or extra monitors.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        Yes it matters assuming Valve wants to drive sales and make the device popular & desirable beyond a small % of people who want to drop $1200 to play a golf sim.
    • The Batman game for Quest was pretty killer. It was included with the Quest 3. So was Asgard's Wrath 2. My main beef with the quest for gaming is that it is basically PS4 level graphics. Which is fine for things that are intended to look cartoonish. But it can’t touch the graphical realism of even the PS5, let alone a desktop computer.

      However, as a video device it’s pretty on point. With one main caveat. There are now 3d movies you can rent or buy nativity. There are work arounds, mostly invo

  • My take on the Steam VR (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Slashdotgirl ( 912338 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @05:35AM (#66338212)
    The Steam Frame is much more than a VR headset. It is effectively a standalone computer that you wear on your head, with its own Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, 16 GB of unified RAM, 256 GB or 1 TB of storage plus SteamOS. It can run games locally as its own computer or stream more demanding games from a PC.

    My main reservation is the 16 GB of RAM. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 architecture supports up to 24 GB, so Valve could potentially have provided more memory in this generation. For a standalone gaming computer where the CPU and GPU share the same memory, I would prefer at least 32 GB. I would therefore be inclined to wait for a future Steam Frame using a newer Snapdragon platform that supports 32 GB of unified memory.

    Kind Regards
    Slashdot Girl

    • Is the device powerful enough to run games limited by the RAM with satisfactory performance?

    • so Valve could potentially have provided more memory in this generation

      *hits buzzer* "What is... an out of touch comment for 2026?"

    • At first I was suspicious of the "needs more RAM" claim, from what I've heard people yapping, but before putting my foot in my mouth I usually check my facts... and I'm glad I did, because there's a million brands of RAM I can buy on [that site] for free pickup "tomorrow" at somewhat reasonable prices.

      I think the legit counterpoint is that, while the Snapdragon 8 might seem powerful running phone apps, probably most of the games are gonna be streaming from a PC and the 16GB is mostly for graphics. And it's

  • Every company wants its own VR flop (Score:3)

    by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @06:01AM (#66338218)
    It almost appears as if every vaguely related company out there really wants to experience a VR investment flop of their own, like it is a trophy to put up on your wall. I don't see any compelling reason why "this time" specifically their new VR headset should find an audience outside of the relatively small group that already enthusiastically tested the previously existing ones. I for one have had my 15 minutes of "ok, cool effect, but now let's do something else"-experience with a number of those devices, and I really don't see how the next one could lure me into wearing a headset for any extended period of time. (And no, it is not nausea I experience with VR headsets, I just think they are uncomfortable to wear.)

    • There's a not insignificant portion of people who used their headset for more than 15minutes. I'm sorry you didn't enjoy it, but the reality is you are a random person guessing on the internet. Valve on the other hand is a company who has immense amounts of data about the active use of hardware, active use of a dedicated API developed for VR (SteamVR) and a shitton of sales figures specific to titles dedicated solely to VR. And they have this data not including the fact that the most popular headset on the

    • I still use my headset a few times a week, and I’ve had it for two years. Though it’s not a great computer monitor replacement, nor are the native graphic of the games state of the art. It’s just okay for browsing the web.

      However, it is an excellent video watching device. Including home made 3D videos. 360 immersive videos in full resolution are pretty impressive. You can also stream multiple sports games on different large virtual screens at the same time while having conversations with

    • The fact that you thought they're a "vaguely related company" is a pretty big tell that your comment is gonna be full of shit. I mean... seriously.

      Also...

      I for one have had my 15 minutes of "ok, cool effect, but now let's do something else"-experience with a number of those devices

      So from your own personal experience, the very large pool of Steam users who don't have any of these devices are all potential buyers for multiple devices?!
      You can't even evaluate the business case of yourself. Why comment at all?
      And even...

      I just think they are uncomfortable to wear

      So again, based on your own personal experience, even you might be a potential buyer if they can nail the industri

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