Steam Frame: Valve's standalone SteamOS VR headset ($1,059) | Hacker News Reader

Steam Frame: Valve's standalone SteamOS VR headset ($1,059)

store.steampowered.com

23 pointssirlancer15 comments

What's really cool is that it has an ARM64 CPU. If it can run any Steam game, it's very possible we'll see Steam on Android phones/tablets.

> Steam Frame is a PC, and runs SteamOS powered by a Snapdragon® 8 Series Processor. With 16GB of RAM, Steam Frame supports stand-alone play on a growing number of both VR and non-VR games without needing to stream from your PC.

Stretching the definition of a PC here but it is interesting they have ported SteamOS to ARM with x86 translation.

Agreed, though for what it's worth, Windows and Mac both run on ARM and/or phone processors now, so.... they're not the first to say that?

Qualcomm (and Nvidia I think?) are the only mainstream ARM SoCs vendors that support TianoCore/UEFI on their chipsets.

Why is it stretching the definition? If compute sticks running windows are PCs why isn’t this?

I take your point.

But I do think if everything is a PC it becomes a meaningless term: fridges, watches, TVs, calculators and phones.

I think cellphones are in fact PCs. Thinking of them as some other category is part of how Apple justifies it’s behaviour with regards to preventing you from installing whatever software you want on your own device; an action that would never fly on macs, but somehow and iPhone and an iPad don’t cause because they’re not PCs, they’re smartphone and tablets.

The only real difference between and iPad and a MacBook at this point is formfactor. There is no reason for not treating them both like the computers they are.

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700661

Idk much about VR, is 2160^2 per eye enough to not have screen-door effect? Can I replace my multi-monitor setup yet?

It's around what the Quest 3 has. There is no noticeable screen door effect on that headset. Since you can make the monitors as big as you like, you could do a multi-monitor setup, maybe. ... as someone who uses VR pretty heavily though, I'm not sure I'd personally ... want to?

90% of screen door effect disappeared when we switched from pen-tile OLED to ordinary RGB matrix.

The remaining 10% still remained with the HP Reverb and the Pico 4 which I've used quite a bit, so it's not a solved issue but it's a world of difference from the old Vive or Quest 1 if that's your reference frame.

("pancake lenses" is a similar upgrade over the old fresnel lenses)

Vision Pro is 4x the resolution of this and is 100% suitable as a monitor replacement. Not what you asked, but maybe provides an upper bound?

What a killer on the cost. I wish they gave a discount for a Steam Machine user

It's about $150 more than the original Valve Index, which given inflation and ram prices is honestly pretty good

Reservations are open now. $1,059 for the 256GB model, $1,299 for 1TB.

It's a lottery rather than first come first served. Valve randomizes everyone who signs up before Thursday at 10AM PT, so there's no advantage to reserving in the first five minutes, and late signups just go to the back of the waitlist. Half-Life: Alyx has a native ARM64 build that runs standalone on the headset with no PC involved. Valve says eye-tracked foveated rendering was what finally made it feasible, on top of roughly a year of Vulkan driver and SteamVR work. Some of those Alyx optimizations apparently carry back to the Windows build too. Since I already own Alyx I'm curious as to whether I can gift the second copy to a friend.

I'm curious how well Proton and FEX actually hold up for the flatscreen catalog running on-device. That seems like the more interesting question than the VR-native stuff.

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