Valve intros new Steam Frame VR headset: plays your entire Steam library, uses Snapdragon chip

Valve has had a busy random day of the week between the announcement of three new products, the Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and the new Steam Frame VR headset... the perfect combination for a release of Half-Life 3, soon, hopefully.

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The new Steam Frame is a standalone VR headset with a high-end Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen3 processor, capable of playing regular flat-screen Windows-based games through the on-board storage, or from the built-in microSD card slot. However, Valve has a major trick up its sleeve, as the Steam Frame VR headset can stream games directly to the headset through a short-range, high-bandwidth wireless dongle that plugs into your gaming PC.

• Read more: Valve's new Steam Machine console, 4K 60FPS gaming with FSR, SteamOS
• Read more: Valve's new Steam Controller: TMR thumbsticks + touchpads for unique design
• Read more: Valve says third-party Steam Machines may come with different levels of hardware

This means that either locally, or over streaming, you can play every single game on your Steam library wirelessly, without any cords attached to it. The dongle is included in the Steam Frame packaging, streaming your games over the 6GHz spectrum, with low latency and high bandwidth.

When in streaming mode, Valve uses a new technique called "foveated streaming". You might have heard about foveated rendering, but foveated streaming is something very exciting from Valve for its new Steam Frame VR headset.

Foveated rendering enhances what is directly in front of your eyes, lowering the resolution in your peripheral vision to optimize the performance on the Steam Frame. But with foveated streaming, the new Steam Frame VR headset uses its dual eye-tracking cameras (that are looking at your eyes 80 times per second) to make it easier to move compressed images from your PC.

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Valve explains: "Anywhere the user is looking, we spend as many bits as possible to give them a very high-fidelity, super-high-quality representation of where they're looking, and we've borrowed those bits from everywhere else in the image". The feature is "always on and always active" which means game developers don't have to do anything to get it to work.

This is a super-important selling point for the Steam Frame, and steps it out and away from competing -- and even far more expensive -- VR headsets. Not only that, but the Steam Frame weighs just 440g which is close to just HALF the weight of the Valve Index that weighs 809g. The PlayStation VR 2 headset weighs 560g, and the Meta Quest 3 weighs 515g for comparison.

Inside, Valve is using a last-generation Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen3 processor, which recompiles Windows x86 game code to run on-the-fly using an emulator dubbed Fex, so that it can run games on the Arm-based chip.

Valve Steam Frame VR headset features:

• Wireless Adapter and Dual Radios: The included plug-and-play 6GHz wireless adapter provides a dedicated link for both VR and non-VR streaming. Steam Frame's dual radios make this connection even more stable: One radio is dedicated to streaming the audio and visuals, and the other connects to your Wi-Fi. Two dedicated links, no competition for bandwidth.
• Introducing Foveated Streaming: Foveated Streaming is a new feature that optimizes detail where your eyes are looking, and typically offers over a 10x improvement in image quality and effective bandwidth. Behind the scenes, we're using low-latency eye tracking data to steer the best quality pixels only to where you're looking. This is all happening without you noticing, and works for your entire Steam library.
• Seamless Audio Experience: Steam Frame has high fidelity audio via dual stereo speakers within each pair are oriented in opposite directions to cancel out vibrations, which can be a tracking system buzzkill.
• Camera Tracking: No setup required. Four high-resolution, monochrome cameras provide controller and headset tracking. Infrared LEDs on the outside make tracking great even in dark environments.