- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
256 GB model: $1,059 USD
1TB model: $1,299 USD
Preorder list randomized, goes out Sept 17th
Power supply not included, costs $29 (same as Steam Deck power supply)
3rd party addon available for color passthrough, Arcturus Vision Camera, $149
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As a 1990s kid, I’m still stubbornly waiting for VR to be the big spinny thing you get into like Pierce Brosnan.
I love to hate to love that film. The Stephen King short story it was based on was about a man who saw that his landscaper was working in league with a demon and ended up being hunted for his discovery. The movie was an absolute assault of mid-nineties cyber-slop. VR! SGI CG! Hollywood OS! Gyroscopes are cool! But, one of the characters did have a lawnmower. Fucking brilliant. Did you know that Stephen King sued the movie makers to keep his name off the project, twice, and won, also twice? Love it.
Damn it.
Thrillseeker put up a pretty good hands-on report recently. I do a lot of sim driving in VR and I mainly just want to get off the Quest/Meta ecosystem. It was either this or the Pimax Crystal Light, and I think this is the more versatile machine.
Can’t wait to see how much better these get in a decade or two. I still don’t really feel like it’s advanced enough for me to give up on regular screen gaming, but it seems pretty cool.
Needs some games where depth perception is important. Like, american truck simulator is a good start, but maybe construction simulator where you need to operate a digger arm?
DOA. Maybe it’s not fair because it’d probably be $700 and in my budget if memory and storage had stayed steady instead of ballooned, but I’m not interested in this or the machine at the prices they are debuting at
Is it because of the inbuild computer?
As someone with a gaming PC already, I’m confused why we want to pay for the headset to have a computer capable of running some small games on its own? Is there a good option for VR with an existing computer?
This is the good option for VR with an existing computer. ‘Good’ being relative
I’m pretty sure they literally talked about this at launch. One of them said “we wish this could have been the price we had for it even a year ago.”
Fuck AI.
Considering everything else they’ve been putting out right now has been selling out quickly despite price increases, it’s probably going to do just fine.
But I for one am also priced out of it, so. 🫠
I’m sure others are interested. $1000 is what I thought it’d cost too.
Joined the list for the 1TB. Guess I’ll be selling some CS2 items. If the Jetset AK goes as well I may add well pick up the Vision Camera.
Curious why the 1 tb? What’s your use case? I assume lots of standalone gameplay… but what about the low end snapdragon performance compared to pc streaming?
Just trying to wrap my head around the things.
1tb isn’t all that much these days. Especially considering one of the big selling points of the Frame is “access to the biggest existing library and ecosystem”.
1tb would have been a lot in, say, 2009. But, now, in 2026 (almost two decades later), there are multiple games that won’t even fit on 256gb even if you got the whole 256gb and there wasn’t os or anything.
And considering the thing is basically a pc at this point, there’s a TON more than just vr or flat screen gaming that you’re gonna be able to do on it. And, sure, it has a microsd slot (but no headphone jack, fuck you apple!), but I don’t want to rely on that and would much rather have that as an option down the line, years from now, when things get even bigger.
I want to remember people, that I was right and Tyler McVicker was wrong. He predicted a launch price of 1500 Dollars. There were entire articles and discussions in the web around that prediction: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/112988/the-steam-frame-could-be-priced-at-dollars1500-at-launch-according-to-insider/index.html and linked to Lemmy post for discussions: https://lemmy.ml/post/51014971 I just find it fun to see and read what people expected, and then what reality is.
I quote myself:
BTW the article is based off Tyler McVicker’s prediction. He was never good at predicting…
how come you have gone back with your account to lemmy.ml?
I actually don’t understand your question. My current account https://lemmy.ml/u/thingsiplay is the last and newest one I created. Before that, I had an account at beehaw instance. I had disagreed with a deletion of my reply, just because they didn’t like it (or even understood). No toxicity was involved. … aand before that I also had an account on kbin, but switched over to Lemmy, because kbin seems to be dead. I didn’t check in years.
Unless I misunderstood your question.
I’m asking because this account of yours is just 8 months old, but I have seen you around for a long time. also I think you had more upvotes counted in voyager
This is my only account I am using, since I abandoned my previous main account with same name and icon. My previous account was on beehaw instance at https://beehaw.org/u/thingsiplay , joined 3 years ago. I left that place because I disagree with moderation and switched to lemmy.ml. I do not use multiple accounts at the same time, BTW, always a single main account.
Just curious why .ml?
You mean why this instance specifically? I looked around and there was a few candidates. For one, I wanted a big one with many people. One of the reasons to is, so the instance seems to be lively and won’t close too soon. Because I don’t want another kbin situation. I don’t want want that blocks many instances or get blocked by many (besides the extremes off course).
One that is not tooo much opinionated like beehaw, because I don’t want that anymore. I looked into the rules, and some instances had bad rules, don’t remember details. It’s even run by the Lemmy’s developers themselves. Not sure if that is a good thing, but it ensures a bit of longevity I think. And first class support and updates.
Other than that, I don’t remember too many details. Why you guys chose the instance you chose?
.ml has a reputation of hosting lots of tankies, which is why some people have the whole instance banned, I chose sopuli because low ping
Had a VR headset but didn’t really use it enough to justify the cost tbh. These are double the cost too.
If I had that much money to spend I think it would be better to spend it on a screen instead of a VR headset. Should look up screens actually, aren’t they usually getting better/cheaper still unlike all other components? Could probably get a really nice screen for the cost of an RTXanything at this point.
Not that my current one is bad though. 1440p 144hz, think its only like 5 years old. Of course £1k could get something much better.
Same here, luckily I didn’t pay for mine, work paid for it
I am on the nice monitor bandwagon and I strongly recommend geting something with a VESA DisplayHDR True Black certification. Also 4K is very enjoyable if you can get it, you can always decrease resolution for FPS when gaming but the crispness of text and interfaces while doing desktop things is very nice.
What is HDR support on Linux like these days? Not looked into it too much as I am pretty sure my monitor isn’t HDR.
Would love to see some different monitors to actually compare tbh. My current screen essentially has built in motion blur, most visible with text if moved across the screen there is a slight trail behind it. I think its a common thing on loads of screens but some are better than others.
That kinda stuff also gets into the area where its harder to tell which screen is better, resolution and refresh rate are easy stats to look at.
What is HDR support on Linux like these days?
Pretty good for KDE and GNOME at least. Both DEs support HDR monitors with pretty easy setup now. MPV and GNOME Videos both support HDR for your properly obtained movie files, idk about KDE’s video player. Browser support is still lagging, experimental HDR on Firefox usually works for videos when enabled but photos less so. Photography tools like Darktable and GIMP do not support it yet.
HDR for video games running on proton is something I haven’t tried enough to tell you. I know people have it working, but I think it sometimes requires messing about with proton environment variables.
That kinda stuff also gets into the area where its harder to tell which screen is better, resolution and refresh rate are easy stats to look at.
Once you learn about the color gamuts of different displays and the HDR certifications they are also easy stats to look at. It all depends on your priorities though. Whether it’s maximizing refresh rate and fps for competitive games or doing art or having high resolution for productivity, it all changes the tradeoffs.
Many monitors nowadays support 100% DCI-P3 color gamut and that’s what most HDR media is mastered for, so that’s a pretty easy one to look for. The VESA DisplayHDR certifications also make it easy. True Black means the contrast ratio is very good for dark detail like with OLED. The number of the certification is the peak brightness in nits that the display can reasonably produce. So DisplayHDR True Black 600 would mean good contrast and 600 nit peak brightness. And a DisplayHDR 1600 would be able to go much brighter, but not necessarily have inky blacks like an OLED.
If you want something that cuts down on motion blur, the website BlurBusters.com is still an excellent resource.
I’ve had a Quest 1 for years and it’s starting to show its age. I’m excited to get this as my new headset.
I hope these won’t sell out/queue up as much as Machines and Controllers do, since I can only safely afford it after a few months after a recent PC purchase.
But since this doesn’t have competition like the Machine (if you hate Meta), I’m worried.
I hope the prepared enough considering that wayy more people are gonna be queueing for the cheaper one, probably
Ahhhh ehhhhhhhhhh
If I didn’t have a Q3 already maybe. But for $1k I can’t swing it.
Excited to see where all this x86->ARM translation work goes though. And hopefully some new VR games market’s been stale.
The Meta headsets were a no-go for me due to the huge privacy concerns. I’ll gladly pay a premium to have hardware I actually own.
Wow. I was looking forward to one but I’m skeptical about the standalone mode.
I want to play games like No Mans Sky in VR but I don’t think that’s possible. My only gaming PC is a steam deck.
It really is meant to primarily be a PCVR headset
Since this is an ARM device, can we play traditional x86-64 games on ARM64 now? Like, on other hardware besides Steam Frame?
There are SteamOS builds for several arm64-based handhelds already and they can play many x86-64 games through FEX. Look at Armada OS, which is basically Bazzite for arm64.
Wine has CPU emulation hooks since some time, and now protonGE is split into Arm and x86_64 branches. So yes? I think LTT even tested windows games on Steam Frame and it kinda worked
I didn’t try it yet but yes, FEX is open source: https://fex-emu.com/
Actually not terrible. Wow.
$1050 is not terrible for you? Ok…
Go look up the price of what the last ram kit, ssd, or SD card you bought costs right now, I guarantee you’re going to be surprised. No one likes the price, but I was ready for it to be way worse.
That doesn’t make this price not terrible. It just alligns with the terribleness we exepect nowadays.
Price is relative
Price is objective. Cost is relative. The price is high and the cost is poor when compared to other offerings.
The cost is high, the price is relatively cheap because materials cost too much due to the slop bubble
Do you have the BOM to substantiate your claims or are you just winging it? This device does not seem to be that much better than a pico 4 ultra to justify the price difference.
It can do more than some $3500 headsets (run desktop class applications natively)
That’s so extremely vague that I don’t even know how to respond. What’s desktop class for you? x86? What type of “apps” would you want to run on a vr headset?
Basically games that were only written to run on Windows. If someone likes the idea of playing, say, Ori and the Blind Forest, on a virtual movie theater screen, this is a way to do that, no porting from the original authors needed.
Afaik, the list of titles you can do that with is around 130. On top of that, the “great on frame” baseline is 30fps at 720p. If you also take into account the fact that the snapdragon 8 gen 3 is already 3 years old and how little the Steam Frame battery lasts, then the whole idea starts to sound a lot worse.
Is it cool you can do it? Sure. Would you actually want to do it and will you have a good time? Not sure, but doesn’t sound like it.
Okay, but what are your other options?
Pcvr?
your negativity wont stop us from running firefox and text editors on it. a wayland compositor placed in 3D space, anyone?
That’s not a thing exclusive to the steam frame. But sure, have fun.
it still seems like a good experience for flights
Better bring a few battery packs. Battery on standalone lasts like 1.5hrs.
I think a lot of people were worried that it would be ~2k from the way they were talking.
So still terrible but slightly less so? Specially considering the accessories (except the charger) are required according to reviewers. So the “real” minimum price is like $1400. And on top of it all it has monochrome passthrough? I really don’t see why people would buy this thing. I really wanted to get one but can’t justify the price.
Why is everyone so concerned with passthrough these days? MR apps are the worst XR apps of them all
IYKYK…
All jokes aside, one reason is MR to watch a movie while being able to see outside. Another is when you kneed to step out of the room for just a moment or talk to someone that just came in or maybe even just grab the controllers while seeing what you’re doing.
Do you really think cameras with color are that much of an ask in 2026 on a device that costs over $1k?
The addon costs $150, if they increased the price by $150 and had color passthrough included in the box, you would be happy, but everyone who would be forced to buy cameras for a use case they are not interested in wouldn’t be.
Imo all of your use cases for color passthrough are weak. You want distractions from a movie? You need to step outside, take the headset off lol.
If they launched at $1200 way more people would be complaining about the price
Like the other guy said, using color cameras would not have costed much more. This is an expensive device with some budget entry-level features. There’s no excuse.
They’re already using a literal phone soc that HAS CAMERAS. Having two color cameras on board probably would have cost much much less than an external, $150, third party module, like maybe a tenth of that at scale so like maybe $15 more. OoooOOOOOooooo scary
They likely made compromises like this all over the device to keep the price as low as possible, this (and the ergo pack) is just one that they errored on and probably should have just included.
I just assumed they were more performant for their actual task of tracking. Everything else is secondary.
This is just an assumption, but, if true, give me the improved tracking over color passthrough any day.
Not that color passthrough wouldn’t be nice. But I don’t think it’s a cost saving technique
Well, I happen tl have dabbled a bit in image processing and applying a mask to make the image grayscale has a negligible (if not inexistent) impact in performance. I do admit that I’m unaware if there’s another characteristic this cameras have that make them better for tracking. If they do, it’s pretty weird that Valve hasn’t mentioned it.
I really wanted to get one but can’t justify the price.
So what was your, uh, upper limit on the budget there?
The accessories are only $50 total besides the charger. So no, the “real minimum price” isn’t $1400. Quit fucking lying
Accessories kit - $60 Charger + cable - $30 Headstrap + headphones and battery - announced, no price yet. Please note that, for some reason, there is no 3.5mm jack. If you want to use an external battery and headphones, you’ll have to buy some sort of splitter.
So yeah, far lower at $1149. It’s still way too expensive.
Lastly, take a chill pill. Sounds like you need it.
The accessories kit is really the only “mandatory” thing on this list due to the hand straps for the controllers. The top strap for the headset seems to be personal taste with some people hating it and some people needing it.
Charger + cable - $30 Most people already have chargers and cables for this, even for 45W.
Please note that, for some reason, there is no 3.5mm jack This has been a thing with smartphones and motherboards for years. This is too old to actually ve an argument anymore. If someone wants to use 3mm jack they most likely already have a splitter
Headstrap + headphones and battery - announced, no price yet That’s not really even announced yet. It’s an “fyi we’re wanting to dp this in a few months” they told reviewers
Quite being pedantic just because you got called out for being wrong.
You need to use a double linebreak after a quote to separate your response btw.
Most people already have chargers and cables for this, even for 45W.
Do you have any type of source for this? I know plenty of people that only have a 15/20w charger for their phone.
This has been a thing with smartphones and motherboards for years. This is too old to actually ve an argument anymore. If someone wants to use 3mm jack they most likely already have a splitter
It’s been a problem for years, yes. That doesn’t make it less of a problem. Also, I’ve yet to see a single motherboard that doesn’t have a 3.5mm jack. Lastly, why would you assume that they’d have a splitter? Now you’re not only expected to have dongles but also splitters? For a device that costs over 1k? Honestly, you’re playing yourself if you really think this isn’t an issue.
That’s not really even announced yet. It’s an “fyi we’re wanting to dp this in a few months” they told reviewers
That’s irrelevant. If you want to use it standalone or for a long period of time, this “accessory” will be a requirement.
Quite being pedantic just because you got called out for being wrong.
Having a different opinion is not something you can be right or wrong about. There’s this wonderful thing called “points of view”. You might want to look into it.
They said they were going for a price under the Index 999€ price point.
Then the rampocalypse happened, and they said they weren’t going to make it. I was expecting a 1200€ minimum.
So only being like 50€ over their target is not really bad.
Well, it is highly likely that at least some of the accessories were at one point just part of the base product. So I think they were off by quite a bit more than $50. Even so, being above an already pretty high target price IS bad imo.
Wasn’t there also supposed to be a sale on VR games today?
Yup, I picked up a few wishlisted items for like 65% off
I meant a sale event. There are always a bunch of games on sale at any given time, but I thought there was supposed to be a big event this week. That was one of the main reasons people predicted the reveal of the Frame was going to be yesterday.
Tbh, I’m not going to buy any VR games until I have a headset in hand. I wishlisted a bunch of VR games last night in preparation, but I’m not going to screw myself out of (at minimum) half of the refund window in case any are duds. Especially when the order queue starts off as a lottery.
This is good logic 🫡
