Steam Frame Is $1059 & Comes With Standalone Half

Valve just officially revealed Steam Frame‘s price, announced that it comes with standalone Half-Life: Alyx, and opened reservations to secure a unit.

First revealed 10 months ago, Steam Frame is a “streaming-first” standalone VR headset with a USB dongle in the box that creates a point-to-point wireless connection between your PC and the headset.

Like Steam Deck and Steam Machine, the headset runs Valve’s Linux-based SteamOS, adapted here for VR. It can run compatible Linux and Windows games locally, including SteamVR titles, using Proton for Windows compatibility and FEX to translate x86 code for its ARM processor. Android games run through a separate compatibility layer called Lepton, with developers able to distribute their mobile-optimized Android builds directly through Steam.

The headset does not require or support base stations. It tracks itself and its included controllers using four onboard grayscale tracking cameras, two of which can be used for monochrome passthrough, and it also has eye tracking for foveated streaming.

Steam Frame Hands-On: UploadVR’s Impressions Of Valve’s New Headset
UploadVR’s David Heaney and Ian Hamilton went hands-on with Steam Frame at Valve HQ, trying both standalone use and PC VR.
UploadVRDavid Heaney

UploadVR has a Steam Frame review unit, and we’re currently working on a review. In the meantime, you can read our Steam Frame specs rundown from its announcement and our hands-on impressions from the reveal event.

Price & Ergonomic Kit

Steam Frame comes in two storage variants, a 256GB model for $1059 or a 1TB model for $1299.

Both storage SKUs come with the headset, tracked controllers, and USB dongle.

To be clear, though, the headset has a microSD card slot, so you aren’t limited to the onboard storage.

For improved comfort, Valve is selling an Ergonomic Accessories Kit at $59.

The Ergonomic Accessories Kit includes a headset top strap as well as Index-like controller hand grip straps, and an extended light blocker that attaches to the nose to reduce light leak.

Valve also sells two other more minor accessories:

• PSU:Steam Frame charges via USB-C, but, as with many USB-C powered tech today, does not come with a charger. Valve will sell you one for $29, if you want a Valve-branded one for some reason.
• Accessory Replacement Kit:if you damage or lose the included accessories, Valve will sell you a kit for $49 that includes a face gasket, head cushion, and light blocker.

Half-Life: Alyx Standalone

Other than the price, Valve’s bombshell announcement today is that it has a native 64-bit ARM build of Half-Life: Alyx optimized to run standalone on the headset. That means you can play Alyx on Steam Frame without a PC.

The company says fully integrating eye-tracked foveated rendering was the key breakthrough that made standalone AlyxeamVR tweaks, and optimizations to Alyx that will also carry over to the Windows PC build, including depth reprojection

Crucially, Valve says it didn’t make any content changes to the game, and thus Workshop items automatically work. Steam Cloud support for saves mean you can even switch between standalone and PC VR streaming at will.

Half-Life: Alyx is included with every Steam Frame for those who don’t already own it.

70 Other “Great On Frame” VR Titles

Additionally, Valve has already tested and confirmed 70 other VR titles that run and perform well standalone on Steam Frame, earning them the ‘Steam Frame Verified’ tag:

Arcturus Vision Color Passthrough Addon

Out of the box, Steam Frame has monochrome passthrough, grayscale tinted blue, that in terms of angular resolution feels sharper than Quest 2 but significantly blurrier than Quest 3, as well as lacking color.

To solve this, Valve has closely partnered with Arcturus Vision (formerly Arcturus Industries), a startup making a $149 addon that attaches to Steam Frame’s PCI-E expansion port.

The Arcturus Vision Camera weighs just 10 grams, and features dual 32-megapixel Sony RGB sensors, adding high-quality color passthrough to Steam Frame. It automatically works across all apps that use passthrough.

Arcturus also has two apps on Steam, one that lets you capture 5K HDR stereo footage using the camera, and another that lets you capture and explore photorealistic Gaussian splats of your physical surroundings.

Arcturus Vision Camera will go on sale when Steam Frame starts to ship, priced at $149 or equivalent in the US, Canada, the EU, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea.

PC VR Streaming Improvements

Since we last tried Steam Frame back in November, Valve has made some key improvements to the wireless PC VR streaming tech, which we already found to be excellent at the time.

As you will know by now, Steam Frame creates a direct 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E connection between itself and the included USB dongle connected to your PC. It also uses foveated streaming

Since the reveal, Valve has added two other technologies to improve the stability and quality of wireless PC VR:

• Multi-Link Streaming:this uses the adapter and your local Wi-Fi network simultaneously, choosing the lowest latency connection per packet so that neither USB nor local network issues can interrupt your VR gaming.
• PC-Side Contrast Adaptive Sharpening:uses AMD’s open-source image sharpening algorithm to improve the quality of the visuals.

Reservation: How To Get A Steam Frame

Unfortunately, you can’t just place a conventional preorder for Steam Frame. Due to some combination of the production scale and expected demand, as well as the company’s desire to limit reselling scalpers, Valve is using a similar reservation system to what it had for Steam Machine’s launch.

You can register right now, choosing which storage SKU you want.

Then, on Thursday at 10am Pacific Time, exactly 72 hours from now, Valve will randomize the order of existing reservations to assign each a position in a virtual queue. This means as long as you reserve within 72 hours, you have the same chance as anyone else.

Later on Thursday, Valve will send out the first purchase offer emails to those whose position in the queue is less than or equal to the number of units the company has produced so far. Everyone else will be on an automatic waitlist until units become available, and new registrations will go to the back of this queue.

Valve isn’t disclosing how many units it has made so far, nor how many it’s producing on an ongoing basis.