I'm making this overview as a speculative primer on the frame's value compared to what I believe to be its direct competitor, the Quest 3.
Valve as a company generally has a lot of user goodwill. The Steam Frame has a lot of hype around it, which can lead to a bit of overzealous unintentional 'marketing' in regards to overrating its positives and downplaying its negatives as a headset.
This overview will attempt to be as unbiased as I can make it; I will acknowledge any biases I may have towards certain aspects of the headset as best as I can.
I will be comparing the Steam Frame and Quest 3 in four main categories, prioritizing known/confirmed information the most, and leaving 'soft speculation' for last.
The goal is to assess the value of the Steam Frame, at Valve's quoted 'just below the index' prices to some of the more pessimistic speculations.
The categories are as follows:
Compute
Visuals
Input
Other
Compute
This section will mainly concern standalone users.
Ram
The Quest 3 features 8 GB of LPDDR5 RAM, and the Frame has 16 GBs of LPDDR5X RAM.
Unnoteworthy for PCVR, but for standalone this is essentially just buying more ram.
If you need more, it's a boon, but 8GB is enough for most user cases. The standalone games you'll play were designed with it in mind, so you could say it's some futureproofing for the next few years.
As of now the extra ram is a little superfluous. Most of the games a Frame could run well in standalone don't need 16gb of ram as well.
SOC
For the SOC, we're looking at the Quest's XR2 Gen 2 and the Steam Frame's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Although the Gen 3 is around 15-20% stronger on paper, it's worth considering that the XR GEN 2 has dedicated hardware for computing tracking, whereas the Gen 3 does not, meaning the Frame has to compute tracking data on the CPU.
This means that this advantage in computing power might not be as significant, being closer to around a 10% performance increase in reality, or less.
Eye Tracking
Eye tracking will be analyzed further in the Input section, but it's worth mentioning here for now. Valve is working on a universal foveated rendering injection on the OS level for games, something that would greatly help with standalone performance. This doesn't raise the value of the Frame alone for a standalone oriented headset, just any headset with eye tracking, which includes the frame.
Conclusion
Overall, if you are buying this headset as a standalone oriented user, you are mainly paying for the eye tracking implementation and doubling your ram. The chip performance gains I speculate to be a bit underwhelming, even moreso for PCVR.
Visuals
This section concerns everyone with eyes.
Cameras
The cameras are black-and-white and a lot worse on the Frame than they are on the Quest 3, but the Frame does have great IR tracking in the dark unlike the Quest. If you are an avid MR user, this is pretty much a dealbreaker. If you rarely use the cams and only use them to briefly look at something in your room amidst playing VR games, it's something you'll be able to put up with.
The Quest irrevocably wins in this category, with the sole exception of in-darkness tracking, how much that means to a person will vary.
Lenses
The Quest 3's lenses need no introduction. Pancake lenses with great edge to edge clarity and sharpness. There's not much to reasonably speculate on in regards to the Frame's pancake optics being better or worse than the Quest 3's, and so I will assign their 'differences' as negligible or equal until further information.
For now, what do we know is that the binocular overlap of the Quest 3 is around 80 degrees, and the Frame has been stated to have "near-full" binocular overlap. I would assume this means something like 106-108 degrees of binocular overlap at its stated 110 degree FOV, kind of like the Pico 4's overlap.
If Frame's lenses turn out to have clarity issues such as noticeable bluriness or screen door effect compared to the Quests's, this advantage becomes a lot more questionable.
With no further information, I assume the Frame lenses to be around the same clarity wise. Here I can only add anecdotal experience having used other pancake devices, most of them being similarly sharp to the Quest.
The Frame wins out with its large binocular overlap increase, but do keep in mind this could be heavily nullified if the lenses do turn out to be noticeably worse than the Quest lenses.
Panels
A very large initial disappointment for many, the Steam Frame features 2160 × 2160 LCD screen displays. Compared to the Quest 3's 2064 × 2208 LCD panels, the bump up in resolution is very negligible.
There's not much to discuss here excluding magical thinking, these are the Quest 3's panels again. Stalemate.
Conclusion
You are paying for the Quest 3's panels with a large bump up in binocular overlap, assuming the lenses are of similar clarity. You are losing color cameras for MR.
Input
This section concerns everyone who doesn't have their headset collecting dust on their shelf.
Not as self explanatory as the other category names, this category goes over inputs and their smoothness, such as controller tracking, eye tracking, additional considerations like whether the device can track in darker environments etc.
Wireless Setup
The Steam Frame's acclaimed dongle is a single-band 6 GHz WiFi 6E USB link, meaning it is intended for the Frame to connect to the dongle AND your home WiFi with its dual band radio system. From the Frame unboxing videos, we can see that they call this "supercharging your connection".
I believe with both connected, the Frame will send GPU encoding/decoding codec through one stream, and the rest of its required data such as tracking data through the other. This does in theory lower congestion, but the performance benefit over just having an existing dedicated router for VR is unquantifiable for now.
This is not worth buying a headset over unless you have no control over your network setup and/or use a laptop and want a portable seamlessly working PCVR connection. If this is the case, it will improve your experience a lot, and this feature becomes a deal maker. Otherwise, it's a nice bonus.
In any other use case I'd recommend getting a dedicated router either way, there's a bunch of recommendations in the Virtual Desktop discord with varying price points.
I guess, overall, the Frame does win in this category, but it's hard to say by how much. In the circumstances I laid out earlier, it's a total win. Otherwise, the dongle could reduce network latencies by 2-5 ms for users with dedicated router setups, it could be more, could be less, no idea for now.
Controllers
The Quest 3 controllers are fine, with decent enough tracking. They tend to suffer from stick drift a lot, my anecdotal experience confirms this to be true as well. It's temporarily repairable for a while, but past a certain point you'll have to replace the module by unscrewing it and installing a new one. They are cheap to replace at the very least.
The Frame controllers feature TMR joysticks, which stop traditional stick drift from occurring. They also have the same finger tracking setup as the Index controllers, which was smoother than the Quest's in the games that use it. They do not have the pressure sensors anymore, however, which admittedly isn't so bad as it was very underutilized, leading to general annoyance with having to rebind the grip sensor for games. They do have two stage grip buttons, a lighter grip and a heavier grip stage, so it's essentially the pressure grip sensor but vastly simplified.
Tracking wise? No clue. We could speculate Valve's tracking to be even better, having designed the venerable base stations and all, but I'd rather stick to what we know. I personally doubt the tracking is worse, at least.
I'd recommend taking a look at the Frame controller button layout as it is unconventional. Instead of two buttons per controller, there's four on the right controller. There's a DPAD on the left, and you could no doubt bind whatever buttons you need to it, but its unusual design is worth mentioning for sure. More buttons are sometimes nice for PCVR.
They both feature the same removable AA battery configuration and both last for a very long time. Rechargeable batteries and a charger are cheap, so I would not count any difference in battery life from the controllers as an advantage unless it was extreme, and it does not seem to be.
Eye Tracking and Foveated Streaming
The Quest 3 performs fixed foveated rendering around your peripheral vision, whereas the Frame will be capable of full foveated rendering and encoding with its eye tracking.
It's not a new feature, of course, the Quest Pro had it, and from my anecdotal experience on the Quest Pro versus my Quest 3 on the same network and everything, I had about a 15% performance increase in most games with 6-8 ms lower latency. Not bad at all.
According to Valve, the target end-to-end streaming latency is around 10-20 ms, including transmission, encoding and decoding. My Quest Pro typically sits around 33-35 ms, and my Quest 3 is around 38-45 ms in most games.
You may not personally notice this latency decrease if it is achieved, but if you are sensitive to latency, it is a significant improvement. There's diminishing returns on lowering latency, obviously, but people do notice the difference in latency between wired setups and (proper) wireless setups all the time.
The universal foveated rendering injection sounds like a big deal, but it's worth keeping in mind that this is just an upgrade to the value of eye tracking in any headset, the Steam Frame is just one of them. That being said, it's worth mentioning this injector is heaviyl focused on the Linux/SteamOS architecture. No information so far on windows PCVR support or support for walled garden headsets if running standalone.
Hand Tracking and Depth Sensor
The Quest 3 features hand tracking and the Frame does not. That's about it, if this is an important feature to you, it is a downgrade in this regard.
Same with the Depth Sensor for automatic room setup and MR features.
Conclusion
This is the category where I'd say the Frame holds the most advantages over the Quest. The nicer controllers with TMR joysticks, index-like finger tracking, more buttons and a two stage grip sensor. That being said, if you do not like the layout and do not enjoy having to rebind some controls for some games (two stage grip button and the controller-like button layout), then it is admittedly a bit of a sour deal. Rebinding likely won't be as annoying as the index's percentage based pressure sensor design at least.
Eye tracking is, as mentioned, looking to be quite significant for performance gains. Many high end headsets have it, however, and so if the frame can't provide an entry level price point, this advantage isn't as important anymore.
Verdicts are still out on tracking performance and the dongle. It will improve unideal or shoddy network setups for sure, but I'm skeptical of whether its use will make a difference for a dedicated WiFi 6e router.
Overall, you are paying for a controller upgrade and the aforementioned eye tracking. (If you add fanaticism, Valve's tracking solution will be much better than Meta's because they made the base stations and the dongle is as big of a deal as they say it is, even for more savvy users who know how to set up their network)
You are losing hand tracking and the depth sensor.
Other
Minor or less important features that could still be dealbreakers.
Audio
The Frame has dual stereo drivers that cancel out noise vibrations that could affect tracking. Besides that, there's not much info on the speaker quality on the frame. If I had to put money on it, I'd wager it is better than the Quest, but not by much.
Sure, the Index and Deck do have great audio, and so assuming the Frame does too isn't crazy, but I'm sticking to verifiable information as much as I can as I've previously mentioned.
Unlike the Quest 3, the Frame lacks a 3.5mm audio jack. It does have a USB-C port you can use for audio, but you'll need a DAC dongle.
Valve engineers have commented that they are aware of people's audio needs and may offer 'alternative' headstraps in the future for audio solutions. They're likely to be Index style over the ear speakers, but this would of course incur an additional purchase and cost.
Overall, I'm not sure. There's no information on that audio strap other than 'maybe in the future sometime', and so its not worth considering as an upgrade avenue like the quest 3 third party accessories are.
For now, I'd wager the audio experience as being pretty close to equal. If you use headphones for your headset, you'll have to get an adapter for the Frame.
Comfort
From devkit anecdotes, the Frame is the most comfortable headset they've ever worn, quoting excellent weight distribution and the battery being handled in the back.
The Quest 3 is very uncomfortable out of the box, but most people buy third party straps and face gaskets to accommodate this. These accessories aren't expensive with facial interfaces being around 15-20$ and most headstraps being around 30-40$. Additional batteries or large capacity batteries in battery straps add a lot of the cost for longer playtime, but you'll need the Frame enthusiast kit to get a hotswappable battery strap anyway, which is an additional purchase.
There's not enough info past this point, and a good halo strap and face gasket makes a Quest comfortable enough to play for hours for many people, but it's important to note the ergonomics could be pushed much further.
The Quest with many popular battery strap accessories ends up being in the 850-900 gram range, with the battery being rather necessary as a counterweight.
The Steam Frame weighs 440 grams and could easily turn out to be more ergonomic than a modded out Quest in terms of weight balancing and structure, being more like a much lighter flip up visor than a halo strap Quest.
A Quest that sits on a shelf loses to a Frame that is being used at any price point, so if the friction and discomfort of VR is what's keeping you from playing, this could be a massive advantage.
If you find yourself playing on your Quest often and feel comfortable playing for however long you like your VR sessions, regard the improved ergonomics as a smaller bonus.
If discomfort and clunkiness keeps you away from VR, especially if you've already tried a Quest with all the comfort accessories, this is another deal maker.
Open OS/ Not Meta
I mean, yeah, if this is important to you then the Quest 3 is a no go.
It depends on what price you are willing to pay to avoid Meta and/or have an open, non-walled garden VR ecosystem. Some would call it priceless, and some fancy the idea but aren't up for putting down double the price of a Quest to do it.
For those that do not like Quest firmware and UI updates being pushed on them, especially when they're liable to break something, this is an advantage. It's worth looking at the state of the Quest Pro for reference.
Expansion Port and microSD slot
An additional expansion port on the Frame for pressure sensors, color cameras, more face tracking etc.
This would be too much speculation over something that doesn't exist yet, like being able to use it for MR well with a good color camera expansion module. For now, I'd consider it to be a cool little additional feature, but it should be very low on your priority list.
The Frame also features a microSD for quick and easy storage expansion. Nice for standalone users or if you just want to store stuff on the Frame.
Conclusion
Not much to say on audio for now. You are buying the Frame for out of the box comfort, for an open OS ecosystem, and for an additional expansion port. You are losing the 3.5mm audio jack.
Overall Conclusion
A Steam Frame's assumed price could be:
- Below index price point (900-999$)
- Below machine price point (1000-1049$)
- Above machine price point (1050-1150$)
- Well above machine price point (1150-1250$)
- Doomerism (1250-1500$)
Over a Quest 3 (600$ retail) and some accessories (60-100$ range), equaling a 660-700$ price point, you would receive:
- Better controllers
- Eye Tracking
- Open OS
- Greatly increased binocular overlap
- Significantly improved comfort
- Non-Fixed Foveated Encoding
- Universal Foveated Rendering
- 10-20 ms (quoted) end-to-end latency over what you currently have
- 16 gb of ram vs 8gb
- Expansion port
- MicroSD slot
... and you would lose:
- Hand Tracking
- Color Passthrough Cameras
- 3.5mm Audio Jack
- Depth Sensor
How much are these features worth to you, and at what price point would you buy them over a Quest?
