Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame isn’t the company’s first foray into VR, but it’s the first time Valve will offer a completely wireless VR headset. As anyone who has experienced both wired and wireless VR gaming will tell you, the freedom of movement wireless VR offers is crucial. No matter how great your headset is, you won’t feel completely immersed in the VR world when you’re trying to untangle a cord.
Although we won’t know for sure how well the Steam Frame handles until it’s seen more testing, it certainly looks like a quality VR headset on paper. The Frame has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and storage options from 256GB to 1TB. You’ll be able to expand the storage with a microSD card.
The display offers a resolution of 2160 by 2160 per eye and a refresh rate of 72 to 144Hz. One of the more interesting features is the headset’s foveated streaming capability: It improves the image quality directly where your eyes look, as opposed to providing better quality for the whole image. The headset tracks your eyeball movement to pull off this feature.
Thanks to outward-facing cameras, you can view the real world beyond the headset, a feature becoming increasingly common in modern VR headsets but absent on the Index. The head strap has small speakers at the side and a battery pack at the rear. Valve says it designed the system to create a good front-to-back balance, which is essential for comfort.
Credit: Valve
We’re intrigued by the controls, which Valve designed for both VR and non-VR gaming. They have the same magnetic thumbsticks that show up in another new Valve product, the second edition of the Steam Controller.
One of the most critical features of the Steam Frame is the wireless adapter. The USB adapter plugs into your PC and lets the headset stream games via a 6GHz connection. The dual radios handle the Wi-Fi connection on the one hand and audio/video on the other. The Frame is capable of storing and playing games on its own (without help from your PC or other devices), but we suspect most users will spend more time streaming games than using the headset in standalone mode.
Overall, it looks like the Steam Frame will be a major (if long-awaited) improvement over its older sibling. The Index headset, which was the first to be completely produced by Valve, showed up in 2019. It was a worthy headset in its time, but it was encumbered by a physical connection to the PC. The Steam Frame’s design seems inspired by the Index, but thanks to its wireless connection and forward-facing cameras, it looks like it will be a massive step up from the Index.
Valve plans to release the Steam Frame in early 2026, but hasn’t provided pricing information yet.
