Valve Steam Frame reviewed: lighter, sharper, and able to run standalone

Valve’s Steam Frame, the company’s second VR headset of its own design after the 2019 Index, is arriving, and the first reviews describe a lighter, sharper machine that works both connected to a PC and on its own.

The Frame weighs 440 g in total, down from the Index’s 800 g and below the Meta Quest 3's 515 g. About half of that sits in a 21.6 Wh battery mounted at the back of the headstrap. Each eye gets a 2160x2160 screen, up from 1440x1600 on the Index, with a refresh rate between 72Hz and 144Hz. Pancake lenses replace the older fresnel design, and cameras built into the headset handle movement and position tracking, replacing base stations placed around a room.

Inside there is 16GB of memory, twice the Quest 3's 8GB, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor. Eyetracking is built into the headset. It can stream from a PC and also run standalone.

Reviewers agree on comfort but split on standalone use: one calls it a pleasure for PC-to-VR while holding reservations about it as a standalone device, and another says it feels at once overengineered and underbaked.