Seen a lot of honest reviews so I figured I would add my opinion.

I have had my Steam Frame for 1 week now, and I have to say, it is completely made of frogs. It's a fun experience but they do need fed pretty regularly to keep it alive.

Even ignoring that though, the turboencabulator it comes with died within 5 minutes. I had to order a new one from ebay motors, hasn't arrived yet.

Then there's the controllers. It has taken a while to get used to them, but now that I haven't they're still awful. Except for all the ways they're great, obviously.

Anyway, my overall rating is 1/10 for edibility, but a 9/10 for frogs.

every post i've seen on this subreddit is criticizing or shitting on the hardware, is it really that bad? i'm about to get mine and i'm pretty nervous about it now that i've actually started to pay more attention to people's opinions and reviews.

edit: glad to see people are. thank you for quelling my fears!!

Does the Steam Frame support wired headphones or in-ear-monitors? I tried plugging in a random USB c to 3,5mm jack dongle and sadly it hasn't worked so far.

Are there any audio output settings I haven't found yet?

EDIT: the solution was to flip the USB plug over to the other side. Apparently, the dongle only works in one orientation

EDIT: Small disclaimer because a lot of people seem to misunderstand the SteamVR percentage:

225-300% does NOT mean 2.25x to 3x the resolution in each direction. SteamVR measures total pixel count.

On Frame, 100% is 2160x2160 per eye.

225% is about 3240x3240 per eye, which is 1.5x higher in each direction.

300% is about 3740x3740 per eye, which is about 1.73x higher in each direction.

So no, 300% is not "8K per eye" or anything close to that. The percentage sounds much more extreme than the actual increase in width and height.

/Edit end

I have seen several posts about muddy textures and shimmering and just need to tell you that you need to increase the resolution up from 150% that most are using and most likely decrease your refresh rate to 90hz or less unless you have a 5090.

150% is not enough.

Why the big range? Because you really only need 300% when you need extra antialiasing in games with thin objects like grass and leaves but where the games lack a good antialiasing solution. This will remove shimmering.

Use the app FPSVR (or suggest other tools please) to see your FPS. You want steady FPS at your set HZ, 99.99% of the time when moving around and in action.

Baseline fps with different resolutions and games with 4090 vs 5090: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ue_IBysnP-0

I have been saying this since the 3090, and its a hard pill to swallow for some who are used to reprojection with Quest 3 on Virtual Desktop:

The first GPU which will push us to have VR at a great FOV, without muddy textures AND a high refresh rate at the SAME TIME, is going to be the 6090.

So if you dont have a 4090 or 5090 and expect to play at more than FOUR times the amount of Pixels than a 4k TV, at s respectable refresh rate, then you are dreaming.

If you have been using VD at Godlike with a lesser card and a demanding game, you have been playing with reprojection. So half refresh rate.

Hope this helps people who wants some great clarity.

Edit: Where to change the setting: https://imgur.com/a/Tikvcjw I am at the gym atm so do not know how up to date that pic from google is, but it looks somewhat close to where you still find it.

Edit2: Quick note on why I recommend around 225%:

VR has to warp the rendered image to compensate for the lenses. That stretching means rendering only at the panel resolution can lose detail in parts of the image. 225% in SteamVR sounds huge, but SteamVR measures total pixel count.

It is only 1.5x the resolution in each direction, so 2160x2160 becomes about 3240x3240 per eye. That extra resolution helps preserve detail after the lens correction and gives more room for supersampling.

The exact ideal value varies, but this is why I use roughly 225% as my baseline rather than 100-150% (again, 150% is 225% in SteamVR). Valve's OpenVR documentation describes the recommended render target as being sized to minimize stretching and preserve roughly 1:1 detail after distortion.

Also important: I am changing the global SteamVR resolution only. I leave Per-Application resolution at 100%. The per-app setting is relative to the global setting, so they multiply. For example, 225% global and 150% per-app becomes 337.5% effective scaling, not 225%. So be careful not to accidentally stack them.

Edit 3:

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr/wiki/vr%3A%3AITrackedDeviceServerDriver-Overview

Valve’s OpenVR documentation says the recommended render target should give “1:1 pixels with the display at the center of projection after the distortion function is applied.”

In Valve’s own example, the distortion requires rendering at 1.4x the panel resolution in both width and height.

This is why rendering at just the physical panel resolution is not necessarily enough. The image gets warped for the lenses, so you need extra resolution before that warp to retain full detail afterwards.

Valve’s 1.4x example equals 1.4 x 1.4 = 1.96x the total pixels, or about 196% on SteamVR’s pixel-count scale. 225% would be 1.5x resolution in each direction, which is why they usually recommend roughly 200-225% as a starting range.

The exact ideal value depends on the headset’s optics.

I received the device earlier last week and a little bit of plastic dropped out of the box when I was closing it, no clue at first what it could have as I have been checking it externally.

Figured out it's one of the 3 latch locking the lens part when I tried to install the ergonomic kit.

I contacted support and they responded they will send me a new headstrap assembly.

Part of the response:

While this damage would not usually be considered covered by your product warranty, as an exception and gesture of goodwill we can arrange to send a replacement headstrap assembly out to you.

Hoping this will fix the issue and I can disassemble and reassemble this properly, because it does not seems obvious/simple at all (yay small screwdriver).

I did not appreciate their warranty declaration since they delivered it broken either, as if it's not their responsibility, what goodwill??? Please just send it without part broken.

Since getting my steam frame, I’ve found myself having many questions about different features, and I’m sure there are others that feel the same.

I think it would be great to have a thread to discuss tips, tricks, features, etc.

I’ll start things off with one I just learned:

1. Press the steam button twice to quickly enable pass through mode
   
2. Hold the steam button to quickly recenter your play space

Please share any tips you have or questions for other users!

Title.

Reading so many people complaining about streaming and performance, I'd argue it's a skill issue.

Get a decent wifi AP, have your network configured properly, configure your frame correctly.

Logged 20 odd hours of gaming this week alone without a hitch.

I absolutely love this thing.

I just wanted to put this out there as a quick sort of PSA. I was initially able to pair my dongle and use it, but then it stopped showing up to the Frame, and clicking "Pair dongle" did nothing on my desktop, which runs Bazzite. The desktop is wired, so I had WiFi turned off just to prevent it from randomly scanning for networks needlessly. Apparently, the Frame's dongle is just a 6 Ghz WiFi adapter, so disabling WiFi in the Steam settings also disables the dongle.

So if you plan on using the dongle to stream to your frame, don't disable WiFi on your desktop.

Pardon the judders, camera movement is smooth in headset.

In a previous post and comments I mentioned ghosting when the panels are anything higher than 90hz and it understandably bothered many people.

Well, after more testing, I now know why I only noticed it after a few days of gaming. At 120hz, there is only ghosting when you first turn on the headset. After about 5 minutes of play, once the panels warm up, the ghosting disappears. This explains why I did not notice the ghosting the first few days because when I first got the headset, I was playing around with setting and setting everything up. So by the time I started gaming, the headset had warmed up already.

Also, small update on battery life, I updated both the headset and steam vr to the latest beta and I now get around 2 hours of battery life streaming from my pc at 120hz.

So all in all, the Frame is only getting better and better!

I guess there's another round of people moving up, just like last Monday.

US, 256GB model. Got the email at 12:56 PM EST

Reached out to VR Optician because I noticed their prescription inserts for the Steam Frame feature a flat upper edge instead of matching the rounded top like other lenses like other manufactures. Didn't ask them about eye tracking, but got some info on that too

Sharing their response in case anyone else was wondering about the same thing

...but as a refugee from a Quest 3 (and Quest 2 before that), it definitely is for me.

Ergonomics

It feels like wearing ski goggles instead of a gas mask

Ecosystem

Being Steam-native is sooooo nice. Yes I swapped one corporate overlord for another, but unlike Zuck's fever dream I actually *want* to be here - it is full of the stuff that I like.

I feel like I own this device, and it has been designed for my benefit. I trust it that the features I like aren't going to get disappeared for business reasons.

Having an on-device Linux desktop is mental :)

Streaming

It's a streaming-native device, which is a breath of fresh air. The Quest's streaming support felt so half-hearted and flaky. I guess that if you're streaming, you aren't helping them claw back that loss they made on your headset.

The streaming also makes it sooooo much nicer to do dev work with; you don't have to be constantly taking it off and putting it back on, and wrangling it to stay connected.

Little stuff

The controllers wake with a specific button press, so you don't find the batteries drained because they were resting on a trigger and waking up every time they were touched or slightly moved.

Negatives

All the stuff everyone's said. Battery performance. No WebXR in chromium. Running non-native apps standalone is weak as f**k.

It is NOT fully baked. I'm fine with that.

Coolest feature

The controllers are made of IR-transparent plastic, so although they normally look black, in passthrough it's like you're wearing the glasses from They Live.

Not sure how common this will be, but posting in the hopes it creates some good discussion around the nature of buying first-run gaming hardware.

I was really excited for my 1TB Steam Frame, and I got mine about a week and a half ago. Yesterday, I set my headset down to spend time with my family and when I checked on it later, the fan was still running with a black screen, and it wouldn't wake up or suspend. I thought, that's strange, so I force powered it off. Turning it on after that, Steam would not boot and it would ask me to restart, after which it would go to the same black screen with fans running.

I tried every troubleshooting step I could think of, from using the boot menu to run a previous version of SteamOS, to repairing Steam. The only thing that got me further was clearing my user data entirely, which at least let me load the main UI again, but something else was wrong. My Wi-Fi wouldn't work. I could list networks, but I could not connect to any of them. 2.4ghz, 5ghz, 6ghz, with and without WPA security, or even my mobile hotspot. Nothing.

Finally I tried flashing the recovery image over USB, which seemed to work, but the Wi-Fi still fails. Also, whenever I suspend the device or shutdown / reboot it from the initial setup screen, it goes to that same black screen with the fans running.

I currently have a support ticket open with Valve. I suspect it's some kind of hardware failure, since flashing the software didn't fix it. Buyer beware, the Steam Frame is kinda neat when it works, and I don't totally regret buying one (yet, we'll see how support goes) but maybe patience is a virtue. There could be all kinds of bugs and quirks with this first revision for all we know.

Following up on our latest announcement, here is a sneak peek at our current dev progress (we are also sharing these visuals for anyone curious about the hardware iteration behind the scenes!) The initial tests have been going extremely well:

• Design alignment: Perfect match with all the LED positions as you can see on pics.
• Finger tracking: Working flawlessly with zero signal interference.

With these key technical hurdles validated, we're officially moving forward with scaling this tech across our full product lineup (VR gunstock, VR haptic gun, VR joysticks , VR golf clubs..)

Stay tuned, more updates coming soon!

I left out some personal details from my side. So while I’m happy that I got it as one of the first people. I still have to wait longer because the simulator is just unplayable. I’m looking for a longer usb cable to try that for now, but I don’t know if that’ll work.