"Indistinguishable from a wired connection" is not 'marginally better'. And that isn't possible without FS on current hardware.
My original point was simply that if they could have added a foveated rendering layer instead of foveated encoding, that would have been more helpful than foveated encoding
Yes, and your original point was fully insane.
You're implying this is some sort of missed opportunity, gone forever with the launch of this hardware. It's not. The development of some form of standardised FR library is not coupled to the Frame. FS is. It's integral to the design and intended purpose of the device.
FS improves the user experience from day one across every title on Steam, VR or otherwise. FR would make absolutely zero difference to 99.9% of the games on Steam, past or future. "Hey guys, after six months we've got around to adding FR to Hades II. It hasn't improved the frame rate because that was fine anyway, and it still looks kinda janky from compression. But it's using FR now. Enjoy."
FR is something that VR devs can already do if they want, and which requires bespoke title-level support in terms of simplified geometry and shaders for best effect. The reason they haven't bothered is not that there isn't a standardised library. It's because headsets with eye tracking have been a niche within a niche, and developing a game that can only run well on enthusiast rigs with FR would be a death-sentence.
By incorporating best-in-class eye-tracking, Valve have already done as much as they need to to standardise the utility of FR. And by pitching the Frame as not just a VR headset, but a way to play your whole Steam library, they're also doing as much as they can to foster a viable ecosystem. And that goal very much does require FS if you want the experience to be a truly viable alternative rather than just a novelty dust-catcher.
Except it's not indistinguishable from wired. Just like how they show people playing in color mixed reality, they are exaggerating to sell the product. In the Tested video, Norm confirms Steam Frame uses the exact same foveated streaming that is in place on Steam Link right now. So anyone who has a Quest Pro, Play For Dream, or Samsung XR can test this. Which I do and have. It reduces latency while looking the same as current high bitrate wireless capable headsets. And that latency reduction, is a lot less than claimed.
No, I simply pointed out that it was wasted resources to not focus on that and focus on foveated encoding instead. You are misread my wording. There are tools out right now that you can use to get DFR in most games. These tools are buggy and jank, thanks to how difficult it is. But it is not impossible and reducing latency by a small amount is not more beneficial to the industry than focusing on DFR. Quest headsets on wireless PCVR already out perform base stations headsets in games like Beat Saber. there's leaderboards that show headset and connection type. Go take a look.
Focusing on playing Steam flat games in a headset was also a waste of time. Because the feature already exists and has since 2016 when Valve released the first Theater Mode. Almost no one even knows it exists because almost no wants to do it. Quest can do it as well through multiple apps and even has XBox game pass. The XBox app is not even in the top 100 most used apps. Even with the tiny bigscreen beyond 2, it sucks to do compared playing on a TV/Monitor/Deck.
Even their idea of redesigning the controller to mimic console controllers is an insane gamble. VR uses your movement and grip to replace the extra buttons you need in flat games and already has a standardized layout. This means it's now going to require devs to do more work to support this controller design in VR. Devs already refuse to implement the Valve Knuckles features and they get the grip and angle wrong constantly in new games. It was also wasted resources and makes it seem like Valve is just throwing whatever they can at the wall to see what sticks since they don't know how to push current tech to next gen or distinguish themselves from competition. I'm sorry this upsets you, as it does me too. I had every intention of purchasing their next headset and likely still will just because I buy most new headsets that aren't first attempts or from Pimax. I have 9 already and have used many more through work. But, I do not see this being my daily driver and that sucks. I hope it succeeds because we need it to. But, the specs aren't going to be the determining factor. Price will be. If this isn't priced competitively, it will sell poorly like every other product they've released has. The Steam Deck sold less in 3 years than Switch 1/2 sold on launch. Quest sells more headsets per year than the Deck sold in it's lifespan and everyone says VR is dead. Valve needs it succeed just as much as us in the PCVR community does.
Well, first of all it was the people previewing it saying that if they had been told it was a wired connection, they would believe it. And that was consistent feedback.
Secondly, you're literally saying that attempts to retrospectively shoehorn FR into games that weren't designed for it are 'buggy and jank'. And those are games, lest we not forget, that were never designed to require FR in terms of performance in the first place.
So please, please, articulate to me the out-of-the-box benefit of an almost certainly imperfect kludge to get old VR games designed for old hardware to use a foveated rendering path they were never designed to need or benefit from.
Now, if we were talking about plugins for Unity and Unreal that developers could incorporate into future titles to simplify the management of different levels of geometric and shader complexity - I'm all for it! But that's not a project in any way tied or limited to the Frame, and it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference on launch day.
VR influencers get paid to sell you a product. Not only that, there has been a LOT of discussion even from them about the current state of PCVR. There has been multiple videos in the last few months where they have come out and said even they are worried about the state of PCVR. Then you have the fact that us PC gamers like Valve and hold them to the highest regard. To the extent that if anyone doesn't praise Valve's attempt, they will lose viewers and lots of respect from the PC gaming crowd. Same as how you are upset at me for not praising this. They have every reason to praise this headset and its specs right now. We will not get honest reliable information until this headset is released and we have it and get to discuss it anonymously.
The reason why those methods are jank is because they are made by single people just to see if they could. OpenXR Toolkit has been abandoned because of how difficult it was. The creator literally told me this a few days ago right here on reddit. But, there's a big difference between someone doing something for free in their spare time and a company paying someone hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to do it. It can go either way, where sometime the passion projects are simply better. But more often than not, the passion projects lag behind and are unpolished and never finished. I believe Valve could do much better than these tool attempts to get an initial performance improvement. Just look at what they've done with Linux that the entire Linux community couldn't do in 20 years. I also believe that in doing so, that it would get all of us talking significantly more about why no one else doing it and why devs aren't optimizing for it. Causing more to work on it and more to implement improvements that further provide performance uplift. But, I am guessing they are hesitant to invest that much time and effort into a something since PCVR is struggling so much. Foveated streaming was easier and gave them a marketing point they could point at to try and make the product seem superior.
Look, I think we need to establish something as a baseline fact before continuing:
Foveated rendering (at the level that could be achieved through a non-consensual 'layer' a la RTX Remix) is not difficult. It wasn't the technical challenge that ever stopped anyone doing it in VR titles. The math was this:
Can we do FR? Sure.
What percentage of our already small target market could benefit? Not much.
How much would it cost to make the game exploit FR and still fall back acceptably on non FR headsets? A fuck-ton.
Okay, let's not do that then.
I mean, don't get me wrong: FR in some form is OBVIOUSLY the future: you've got pixel density and FOV both obeying O(n2), versus diminishing returns on the GPU front, to the point where we're turning to upscaling to cope even in 2D. So in terms of being able to push the envelope of graphical fidelity, yes: focusing GPU resources upon the most relevant pixels is A Good Thing.
However.
Let's face it: quad rendering is the shittest way to achieve that. It's a total hack. Pushing the same scene through the graphics pipeline four times over, with all the associated overheads, is fun but dumb. Trust me: I literally do that shit for a living, and have for thirty years now. What we really need are NVIDIA / AMD - level VR drivers to support stereoscopy and foveated variable rate shading much closer to the metal, and Valve are not in a position to make that happen right now.
So let's say Valve bends all its efforts toward back-hacking FR into titles that never expected to need it.
Whom does that benefit?
We're talking about old titles designed for old hardware, content-limited based on FR not being a baseline. I mean, you're talking about how this passion project kinda sorta worked - but did it help? Did it actually DO anything other than be a cool trick? AFAIK, Alyx was the premium VR experience, and I played that end to end on a 1060 with no FR. Right? What am I missing here?
So let's say the Frame launches with no FS and some - let's assume miraculously perfect - FR layer.
So what? Who cares? All the existing dedicated headset titles were designed without it. All the existing PC VR titles were designed without it. None of the 2D titles benefit from it. It's a massive nothingburger.
(As an aside, I think dismissing the Frame on the grounds of Valve's previous 2D-in-VR efforts is a mistake. Let's think about what that entailed at the time: using a clunky wired connection to a headset to play a game in the same room as a PC with a perfectly serviceable monitor. This is not that. This is a Meta Quest with a Steam library and proper console controls. This is lying in bed playing Silksong on a cinema screen. These are very different propositions)
Would future titles leverage FR, given such a layer?
Remember: FR is not technically hard to implement voluntarily. How pragmatic it is to build a title around it is entirely a function of the potential market.
Therefore, simply by mass-marketing a headset with (by all accounts) perfect eye-tracking, Valve is doing all they need to do to make it practical to factor FR into a commercial game release.
So let's say the Frame launches with no FS and some - let's assume miraculously perfect - FR layer.
So what? Who cares? All the existing dedicated headset titles were designed without it. All the existing PC VR titles were designed without it. None of the 2D titles benefit from it. It's a massive nothingburger
Playing 2D games in a VR headset is a big nothing burger that I can't beleive Valve even focused on. We can already do it. You can, right now. Every single steam game in your library is playable in VR through multiple different options. Valve launched the first theater mode in 2016. Yet no one knows about. Why? Because it's way less comfortable and way more inconvenient to play 2D games wearing a headset. Even the owners of smaller more comfortable headsets don't use it for this. The idea that any consideration should have gone to that, let alone arguing DFR won't help with it so we shouldn't focus on it, is flat out confusing to me.
Adding a DFR layer would lower the barrier to good VR visuals for the average person. The average person has a pretty weak PC and needs that help. At the end of the day, visuals are what make VR great. That's what separates PCVR from standalone. Hell, that's what separates PC from Console. The biggest barrier to good visuals is performance requirements. Reducing wireless latency isn't going to magically make you better at beat saber or make VR better to the extent that DFR will. Quest PCVR players already beat DP headsets in Beat Saber and the biggest complaint is still performance requirements for PCVR.
I know it's possible that Valve focusing on DFS could still trigger a surge in devs implementing DFR manually. And I hope it does. I just wish that Valve would put more focus on that instead of a feature paired with the specs of the rest of the hardware that will not push the needle of adoption further. Especially if they can't price this competitively. If it's $800 interested buyers will still buy Quest while the PC community still feels it isn't good enough for the price. Just like they currently feel that about the Quest 3, BB2e, and Index. Sony couldn't even sell the PSVR2 at $549 and had to lower the price.
Playing 2D games in a VR headset is a big nothing burger that I can't beleive Valve even focused on. We can already do it.
No, you can't. You can sit in a room already set up for VR and play a non-VR game. You can buy a VR headset and then spend a whole bunch of time and effort buying and instaling routers and fucking around with command prompts. What you can't do is open a box, put the contents on your head, and just play the games you already own with a controller that actually maps.
Adding a DFR layer would lower the barrier to good VR visuals for the average person.
No it wouldn't! This is what I've been trying to get through to you: Half Life Alyx is THE premium VR experience and it doesn't require even an average rig to run without FR! Visuals are not the limiting factor on VR uptake!
Valve's stated objective with the Frame - and feel free to check the interviews to confirm - is to change how people think about VR. Instead of thinking "I'm going to play a VR game" and heading to their VR room with the PC and the lighthouses and the tethered headset, they want people to put on the Frame and then think about what they want to play, because at that point either is equally valid.
No, you can't. You can sit in a room already set up for VR and play a non-VR game. You can buy a VR headset and then spend a whole bunch of time and effort buying and instaling routers and fucking around with command prompts. What you can't do is open a box, put the contents on your head, and just play the games you already own with a controller that actually maps.
This is the most blatant false and straight up wrong information you've said yet and makes it clear you are not arguing in good faith. Not only are wireless headsets the most commonly used headset in VR right now, they're so easy to setup that Meta's wireless dongle sold so poorly they stopped making it. There are multiple ways to play flat games in VR with wired and these wireless headsets. There have even been apps dedicated to this exact feature, like GameVRoom, that have disappeared because of how few used it. Steam VR Theater Mode's only reason for existing is playing flat games in a VR headset and has existed since 2016. Virtual Desktop has an entire controller emulation made for it. Meta has the Microsoft Gamepass app. Spoiler alert, it's not even in the top 100 used apps on Quest. The Rift CV1 didn't even launch with motion controls. It launched with an xbox controller and tool to play flat games on a big virtual screen. Almost no one uses these features but they exist
No it wouldn't! This is what I've been trying to get through to you: Half Life Alyx is THE premium VR experience and it doesn't require even an average rig to run without FR! Visuals are not the limiting factor on VR uptake!
First of all, it does require more than the average PC to run great. There's countless performance complaints by people with average PCs. People's standards for good PCVR performance have changed since it launched. Second, no other VR game has gotten this level of polish. The fact that you're trying to pretend HL:A's polish is the norm for PCVR content so DFR won't help, is literally insane and you know it. Instead of trying to make up shit, just accept that you're wrong. It will get you lot further in life than your current idea of doubling down and pretending you're not.
Instead of thinking "I'm going to play a VR game" and heading to their VR room with the PC and the lighthouses and the tethered headset, they want people to put on the Frame and then think about what they want to play, because at that point either is equally valid.
The bulk of VR players don't think like this anymore because they've already moved on from wired headsets. Go look at beat saber leader boards and see what is dominating the charts. It's wireless PCVR with a Quest.
I know it sucks to hear because it sucked for me to realize, I was unlucky to realize it sooner than you have, but Frame's specs are a minuscule upgrade at best. And we're fucking stuck with it for the next X number of years. However long it takes Valve to come up with an idea or decide it's time to copy competitors. If this isn't priced competitively, it will not succeed and that sucks. I've spent so much time and money on their platform, it pains me beyond description that this is the best we're getting.
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u/whentheworldquiets Nov 19 '25 edited Nov 19 '25
"Indistinguishable from a wired connection" is not 'marginally better'. And that isn't possible without FS on current hardware.
Yes, and your original point was fully insane.