Ulasan Steam Frame

Valve revealed the Steam Frame, along with the Steam Machine and Controller almost a year ago in November 2025. And while it’s taken quite a long time for all three devices to make it to market, the Frame is finally here to complete the set. Right off the jump, the Steam Frame comes off as just another VR headset, and an excellent one at that, but in the two weeks I’ve spent with this thing, it’s become one of the best ways to play pretty much any game on Steam.

While the Steam Frame’s built-in Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is strong enough to play a lot of indie games on a 2D virtual screen, where the Frame really shines is when it’s streaming content from a desktop system. Pairing it with a gaming PC strapped with an RTX 5090 and an AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D, streaming games like The Blood of Dawnwalker or Onimusha to a private theater screen with maxed out settings is probably one of the coolest gaming experiences I’ve had in years.

The problem for a lot of people, though, is going to be the price. When Valve revealed the Steam Frame last year, it said it wanted to keep the price under the $999 Valve Index. But due to a RAM crisis that just doesn’t seem to want to give up, the Frame ultimately came in at $1,059, $60 more than the Index when it came out in 2019.

Price

Just like with seemingly every piece of hardware this year, the Steam Frame’s price is hard to ignore. The headset starts at $1,059, which will net you 256GB of internal storage, or you can get the 1TB model I reviewed here for $1,299. That price is probably going to be a dealbreaker for a lot of people that just want a good standalone VR headset, especially with the $599 Meta Quest 3 on the market.

Then, there’s the $399 PS VR2, which now technically works with PC, but with lower resolution optics than the Steam Frame (though it is OLED), and a face gasket which has never quite fit me well. Plus, in order to even connect it to your PC, you’re going to need to buy a $79 adapter, and even then you’re going to be hardwired to your PC the entire time you play.

But the Steam Frame is primarily meant to be a wireless PCVR headset with standalone capabilities, rather than the other way around. Valve has put a lot of work into making the wireless PCVR experience as smooth as possible, thanks to the 6GHz wireless dongle included in the box. That, combined with inside-out tracking via the four cameras on the front of the headset, plus internal eye tracking, puts the Steam Frame in competition with dedicated PC headsets like the Samsung Galaxy XR headset or the Play For Dream MR headset, which will set you back $1,799 and $1,999 respectively – albeit with much nicer optics.

I don’t think the Steam Frame is the Meta Quest 3 killer a lot of people were probably hoping it would be, but it is still one of the best headsets I’ve ever used. Whether or not that’s worth the extra cost is ultimately up to you, but after using it for a couple of weeks, I’d buy it in a heartbeat.

Design

I’ve used a lot of VR headsets over the years, and the Steam Frame is easily the most comfortable one I’ve worn. While there are a lot of headsets that feel like they’re pulling your face or weighing down the top of your head, I can wear the Steam Frame for hours without wanting to shove it in a box in the corner.

A lot of that comes down to how light it is. The Steam Frame weighs just 440g, which is 15% lighter than the Meta Quest 3’s 515g. The weight is more evenly distributed, too, thanks to the battery being mounted on the back of the headstrap, rather than on the main unit.

It’s a beautiful headset, with an attractive all-black design and glossy front cover, which holds two of the tracing cameras. Because the battery is located on the strap, the headset doesn’t protrude as far in front of your face as some other wireless headsets.

On the bottom of the headset on either side are two vents, which help keep things cool, and then there’s another, larger vent located up top. When you’re playing standalone games, these vents can get quite warm to the touch, but they do a good job of directing the air away from your face, so you don’t need to worry about getting blasted with hot air.

Behind the vent on the top of the headset, you’ll find an IPD dial. This will let you manually adjust the distance between the lenses in order to make the image clearer and more comfortable to look at. I have a very narrow IPD of around 57mm, and I was surprised that I was able to actually get the headset to adjust to that. There’s even a switch between the two lenses that’ll lock your IPD setting in place, so the lenses don’t move when you’re taking the Frame off or putting it on.

The Steam Frame has pancake lenses with an FoV of up to 110 degrees, which means you have a wide field of vision, which should do a lot to combat motion sickness. As for the display, the Frame has a per-eye resolution of 2160x2160. The refresh rate varies from 72Hz to 120Hz by default, but it can go up to 144Hz via an experimental mode. Most of the time when I was playing a game locally on the Frame, the refresh rate would default to 72Hz, but it would go up to 90Hz or 120Hz when streaming from my PC.

On the right side of the headset (when it's on your face), there are two buttons: a recessed power button, and a button that’ll let you point at things with your face and essentially use the headset itself as a mouse. This sounds like a super niche use case, but it’s actually very useful for when you put your headset on before you turn on the controllers, and need to turn on Room View to see where you put them.

There are two buttons over on the left, too, but those are just volume rockers. I do like that volume is easy to adjust, because the placement of the speakers means sound does tend to leak. The speakers are found right around where the strap meets the headset, and I was immediately worried that they wouldn’t sound great. That worry was unfounded – even when I’m playing games in a loud room, I can still hear everything that’s going on. But, so can anyone else in the room.

Right out of the box, the light seal wasn’t great for me, but Valve also sent me its ergonomic accessories kit, which included a larger light seal. That solved the issue for me immediately, but it does seem like the larger light seal should have just come with the Steam Frame, rather than being part of a $59 accessories pack. Valve said it did this to help keep costs down, but it’s just a little piece of rubber, so I don’t know how much adding a second light seal would have raised the cost.

The face gasket is a pretty standard foam attachment, and while it’s incredibly comfortable I do worry that it’s going to soak up sweat fast, especially if you play a lot of high-movement games like Beat Saber. Luckily, it’s just magnetically attached, and it’s easy to pop off and either wash it or replace with a new one, which Valve will be selling for $59.

The rest of the headset comes apart pretty easily, too. Once you pull off the face gasket, there are three little switches, one at the top and one beneath each lens. Flick those over to the side, and the whole strap assembly slips off of the headset, leaving just the lens and display assembly. I love that the Steam Frame comes apart so easily, because that means it’ll be much easier to clean, or to swap out different elements if something breaks.

Valve also included an expansion bay at the top of the headset, which will allow you to mod the device in ways that I can’t even foresee yet. When I talked to Valve, the Frame’s engineersit told me that there are different camera attachments that are possible, and I’m sure that’s just scratching the surface. There’s also a microSD card reader on the bottom of the headset, so you can expand your internal storage too. Honestly, it really seems like you can do whatever you want with the Steam Frame, and that’s huge.

The strap that comes with the headset does a good job of supporting the weight of the device, and a lot of that has to do with where the battery is mounted. Valve slapped a 21.6Whr battery on the back of the strap, which will sit right on the back of your head while you’re playing. The battery is lined with the same foam as the face gasket, so it’s surprisingly comfortable. I’ve even laid my head back on the battery while playing non-VR games, and if I didn’t already know there was a battery mounted back there, I would never have guessed.

The Steam Frame probably would last a lot longer with a bigger battery, but keeping the battery capacity down makes the headset much lighter, and with how comfortable it is, I can live with charging a little more often. The USB-C port also lives on the battery itself, so even if you want to run a wire to keep it charged, it’ll stay out of your way. Although, I will admit that I basically used the battery life as a reminder to take breaks.

The Steam Frame also comes with new VR controllers, and they look a lot like the Meta Quest 3’s touch controllers. The real difference, though, is that between the two modules, you get a full controller layout. For VR games, that doesn’t matter too much, but if you’re streaming non-VR content from your PC, it means you don’t have to connect a whole new controller just to play games.

There’s plenty of great tech built into the controllers too. They have the same TMR thumbsticks as the Steam Controller, and they feel incredible in games. Valve also worked in some incredible haptics, along with capacitive finger tracking. I’m glad that finger tracking is still there, but you will probably need that accessories kit I mentioned earlier to take full advantage of it. After all, if you loosen your grips on the controllers without the hand straps that come in that kit, you’re just going to drop the controllers.

The controllers also don’t have rechargeable batteries, and are instead powered by a single AA battery each. I actually don’t mind this approach, because it keeps the total amount of cables you need to charge the system down, and you don’t have to worry about the internal battery dying over time, either. It helps that over the course of testing the Steam Frame, the controllers only dropped to 75% battery life, so the batteries will last you a while.

You can always connect a regular controller to the Steam Frame via Bluetooth, but I never felt the urge. There’s just something super chill about kicking back and playing a game on a controller that’s essentially split in half. That’s something that I still love about the Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Cons, and now I can get that experience on PC too.

VR Headset? Or Gaming Monitor?

When Valve first revealed the Steam Frame, I was honestly a little surprised that it was launching a VR headset in 2026. VR gaming has a super dedicated following, to be sure, but it’s not exactly what I’d call a growth category right now. But now that I’ve used the Frame a lot over the last couple weeks, I get what Valve was trying to do here.

One of the problems I’ve always had with VR gaming is that I needed a dedicated device that only really played VR games. That’s always led to headsets collecting dust in my closet after I finish whatever VR game got me to dig it out in the first place. But what makes the Steam Frame different is that it’s great for any type of gaming.

It’s wild that during the process of testing a VR headset, there were entire days I spent with this thing without even touching a VR game. More often than not, I just kicked back and played some Zero Company or Blood of Dawnwalker from my host PC without even thinking about games like Half-Life Alyx.

But at the same time, just by virtue of wearing a VR headset as much as I have been, I’ve been trying out a ton of VR games, like Stellar Cafe, that I otherwise would never have given a second look. In essence, the Steam Frame has become a sort of enhanced gaming monitor, and it’s been a godsend during the last couple weeks, where the hot weather has made me not really want to sit next to my PC and play demanding games. Instead, I can just put on the Frame, sit next to my air conditioner, and play in my own private theater.

Over time, I’m fairly confident this will be the main way I use the Steam Frame, rather than playing VR games. I’ve spent a lot of time with XR glasses like the Viture Beast and the Asus ROG XReal R1 glasses, and the Steam Frame makes them completely irrelevant, at least at home. And, because it can run indie games just as well as a handheld, I can totally see myself taking it on a plane and just playing Hades II – albeit with a battery bank attached.

Performance and Gaming

The Steam Frame is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, 16GB of RAM and either 256GB or 1TB of UFS storage. That chip is a bit old at this point, debuting in smartphones all the way back in 2023, but it can still play games. Valve did get SteamOS and Proton running natively on this headset, which is a huge development.

While not every game I tried to run on the headset worked – there were a few, like Darkest Dungeon II, that straight up crashed the entire system – there are plenty you can play natively on the headset without connecting to a PC. Just temper your expectations.

For non-VR games running natively on the Steam Frame, the default setting will limit them to 720p. You can change that, but keep in mind that raising the resolution is just going to be more demanding on the limited GPU. At that default resolution, I’m able to get 120 fps in a game like Hades II, but raising the resolution to 1080p drops that to about 83 fps. And Hades II isn’t exactly what I’d call a demanding game.

There are VR games that will run natively on the headset. I spent a lot of time playing Beat Saber locally on the Steam Frame, and it was awesome. The game felt smooth, and the only time I really felt the urge to stream that game instead was when the battery frequently died after about an hour.

Valve even got Half-Life Alyx running on the Steam Frame, and I’d say it felt good enough. Running Alyx locally on the Frame gives you an image that’s pretty pixelated, and you can tell it's running at a pretty low resolution. And even with lower visual quality, the frame rate is all over the place – sometimes I’d see Alyx hit 80-90 fps, only for it to drop to the 40s in another scene. So while you can play VR games natively, I’d recommend streaming them from your PC instead.

Valve has made a big deal out of its wireless streaming solution for the Steam Frame, and it works wonders. There’s a 6GHz Wi-Fi dongle in the box that will serve as the primary connection to your PC, but the Steam Frame will also connect to your PC via your network. The idea is that, for each packet being sent to and from the Steam Frame, the device will use whichever connection has the lowest latency at that moment.

In practice, it resulted in a rock-solid connection where I couldn’t tell the difference between the Frame standalone and when it was streaming from my PC – at least as far as input lag is concerned. However I did have some growing pains. My PC was initially connected to my network via Wi-Fi, so I’d occasionally get latency spikes. But as soon as I stopped being lazy and connected my PC to my router via ethernet, the problem immediately vanished.

I do wish that the Steam Frame at least had the option to connect to your PC via USB-C instead of only relying on streaming, especially for folks with crowded networks like mine. But at the end of the day it was an issue that was easily solved.

I did end up streaming from my PC way more than playing standalone games, and a lot of that came down to the battery. In the interest of keeping the weight down, the Steam Frame only has a 21.6Whr battery, and it does not last very long at all. Playing Beat Saber locally on the Frame will completely drain the battery after about an hour. There have been a few times where I’d get the little ‘10% remaining’ notification, thinking I could finish the song I was currently playing, only for the screen to go black about a minute later.

When streaming, though, the Steam Frame sips power. I had multiple sessions where I played about two hours of The Blood of Dawnwalker on the virtual screen, and ended the session with about half of my battery remaining. Just another way that makes it feel like the Steam Frame’s standalone mode is just a bonus, rather than the focus.