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
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.
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.
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
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’
And Android titles through Lepton.
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.
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.
If the ARM translation ends up being something that can be done to run Steam games on Android that would be so cool.
No Mans Sky will not run well on the HMD you’ll want to stream that one from your PC.
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
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.
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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