I've tested the Steam Frame for a month now, and I've never wanted a Steam Deck less

Before I review the Steam Frame, I feel it's only fair that I give you some important context. I'm a big supporter of VR gaming; I'm an enthusiast of the technology that's used for it, and I've been waiting for the arrival of the Steam Frame for so long now that I find it difficult to believe it's actually on my face at times. In my role as a Hardware Editor here at GamesRadar+, keeping tabs on the best VR headsets is one of my absolute joys.

I don't say all of that to immediately undermine how useful this review will be, but because I feel it's important for you to know where I stand. It feels like when it comes to VR, you're on one of two sides as a gamer these days. You either read every headline about it with a patronising shake of the head, thinking, "When will this die already?", or you're like me, and you appreciate that this is a different genre of gaming that just hasn't found its own sustainable way to thrive yet. It'll never be truly mainstream in my opinion, but companies like Valve are trying to make it work in its own niche way, and I want them to succeed. That doesn't mean I'm going to give this headset a pass where I shouldn't, just that I'm not going to write it off for the tiniest flaw like others might.

Unfortunately, the Steam Frame arrives in a market that seems to be collapsing in on itself. Meta has finally yielded that its affordable Quest 3 headsets aren't sustainable; it's closed down its gaming studios, laid off large swathes of its VR workforce, and is course-correcting to smart glasses. Meanwhile, PlayStation has just sold all of its VR patents to Meta, signalling Sony's departure from the market. And pretty much every other brand seems to be chasing the Apple Vision Pro's high-end, unaffordable aura. Valve feels like one of the only companies left actually trying to harness this technology for the benefit of gamers, but due to the RAM and storage crisis, it's had to price it above $1,000/£800. Does the Frame do enough to succeed in these trying times? Let's find out.

Design

Don't expect a straight-shooting sequel to the Valve Index here. Where that somewhat rigid and bulky headset made a lossless connection to your gaming PC the priority, the Steam Frame is lightweight, portable, and is all about freeing you from cables. In fact, there isn't a way to wire this headset up to your PC, so if lossless connections were what you were hoping for, look elsewhere at something like the Pimax Dream Air.

In my opinion, this is the first major weakness of the Frame. I don't see a reason why the Frame couldn't have put a DisplayPort connection somewhere on the headset for those PC gamers who want that sort of experience. You don't need to make the displays any more high-end, but the option for a wired connection to a GPU would have given this thing more scope.

Without it, the Steam Frame is a standalone device that comes with a wireless dongle that creates a dedicated path in your home network for streaming games from your PC. Think of SteamLink from a Quest 3 or other third-party device, but turned up to Super Sayain 2.

It can't be denied that the Steam Frame looks really quite high-end. It's got a highly reflective face that trounces the design of the Meta Quest 3 and 3S in the class department. Then, there are classic Valve design flavours with graphite touches and a dotty, textured facial interface cushion.

The headband isn't fixed like it is on Meta's headsets either, and tightens to your face via two clever sliders that push and pull the elasticated material of the band. The headset as a whole is very, very lightweight at only 440g. Maybe that's thanks to clever trickery of putting the battery on the back of the headstrap to distribute that weight well, but overall, it's a very easy headset to wear for extended periods of time. Meta might be gunning for a full glasses design at the moment, but a headset this lightweight will be more secure on your face if you're playing VR games that involve a lot of head movement. Both for wearing and carrying around in a bag of some sort, this is one of Steam Frame's big design wins.

There's yet more convenience baked into this device. The facial interface is magnetic and clicks on and off with absolute ease - sometimes too much ease, but I'm choosing to respect the innovation here. Mostly, because the Quest devices have plastic clips you always feel are snapping something when you try to remove their interface. Everything about the Frame's design is really easy to click on and off if you need, and it all just feels to me like it's screaming out for third-party brands to create accessories for it to really bring it to the next level. I hope that happens.

A lightweight design and some very plush cushioning add up to a headset that's super comfortable to wear.

What isn't great design is that the inside of the headset (the bit you put your face into) is quite narrow. Valve includes a glasses spacer that allows a little more room for your specs if you need them, but testing both of my sets of glasses frames, which have larger lenses but certainly aren't close to being bulky by today's fashions, I can't fit them and my face in the headset.

It's a painful irony, but I can't get my frames inside the Frame. This is not a headset I'd recommend if you have a strong prescription you can't see detail without. Thankfully, I've been just fine wearing the headset and using it extensively without glasses, but prescription lenses might be the best best for you.

On the outside of the headset you'll find a couple of handy controls. First up, there's an IPD adjustment scroller which you can lock into a set position. Then, there's a power button, an interaction button in case your controllers run out of battery, and then a volume up and down key. Up on top, you'll find a vent to exhaust some of the internal heat. I'm not sure what kind of airflow trickery is going on, but sometimes I feel a flow of air hitting my face when I'm wearing the headset - I don't know if it's intentional, ambient air getting in from the outside, or I'm imagining things, but the Frame feels cooler on the face than any other VR headset I've tested.

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That's not the entire Steam Frame package, however, because there are some accessories sold separately that are important to evaluate because they somewhat alter its design. I think it's a sin these aren't included in the price of the inflated and much delayed Steam Frame, especially given the accessory pack is what you need to fork out extra for if you want a power adapter.

That's right, the charging cable you'd use to plug this thing into the wall is not included in your cost of entry - utterly ludicrous for any piece of technology in 2026, but even worse when you consider the battery life issues this one has.

The accessory pack includes an extended light blocker for folks with differently sized noses, some hand wraps for the controllers to secure them with a bit more insurance, and a top band for the headstrap. On top of the power adapter, I really struggle to see why this should warrant an additional cost of $59/£59.

Features

I think the natural first point of comparison for the Steam Frame is Meta's Quest 3 and 3S visors. All three are standalone devices that can run games natively, but when it comes to gaming, a lot of emphasis for all of them has been put on streaming from a PC or laptop.

Now, all three of these headsets use a Snapdragon ARM processor, but Valve's is newer and more powerful. Moreover, Frame has a bit more freedom thanks to a compatibility layer that can, in theory, let it run any x86 Windows or Linux game. The Quest 3 ecosystem is locked to Meta's Horizon OS, whereas Steam Frame runs via SteamOS with the same sort of Linux freedoms as any other device harnessing that platform.

Like the Pico 4 Ultra, the Steam Frame also features more RAM than the Quest 3, and a larger ceiling on storage options. Its dual LCD displays have a higher resolution and match the Quest's refresh rate options. Both the Quest 3 and Steam Frame go toe-to-toe with 110-degree FOVs and Pancake lenses, but Valve has tried to push the envelope by including eye-tracking and foveated streaming - a version of foveated rendering tilted toward streaming the detail that you're looking directly at in clearer fidelity.

All in all, the features of these headsets are pretty similar - the reason the spec table above will draw a lot of attention is because of how much the prices differ.

It's been known for a while that Meta has been selling the Quest headsets at a loss, and Reality Labs just isn't pulling in profit from its affordable pricing. Valve was always going to charge more than Meta here, but because of the global RAM shortages and massive price inflation on a slew of technology, that's likely come back to bite the Steam Frame more than was ever intended.

The Quest 3 now sits at $599, but the Steam Frame's most affordable configuration costs $1,049 / £889. If you opt for the 1TB model, you're talking $1,089 / £1,299, and although you get Half-Life: Alyx included in all of those costs, it's a dramatically more substantial price tag than the mainstream option that's been on the shelves for three years.

That's where the Steam Frame goes beyond the spec tables and more into user philosophy. The Quest devices were designed with gaming in mind, but their main goal was to get mixed-reality hardware on the faces of as many social media users as possible as Meta planned to take over the internet with its Metaverse. Its passthrough cameras are full color and otherwise unmatched in the industry - they're still the only headsets I've worn where you can read text on other screens.

Valve's monochrome passthrough cameras don't live up to that, and that's because mixed-reality is so far from the goal of the Steam Frame. Its aim as a bit of hardware is, in my eyes, to provide an alternative to a Steam Deck for those who don't like handheld play or who also want access to VR games. I wouldn't recommend buying a Steam Deck or Steam Frame as your sole platform for gaming if this is your favorite hobby, only because their processors aren't the strongest - you'd be limiting the types of games you'd have access to.

Expensive as they are, the Steam Deck and Steam Frame feel like Valve's second platform offerings for people who want to take their library of PC games on the go, or who want to experience them in a different way. This is also true of the Steam Machine, which isn't going to give you a desktop experience, but will let you play less demanding titles in a more comfortable environment than at a desk. The Steam Frame has the capability to play plenty of non-VR games, as I'll come onto shortly.

In essence, the Steam Frame's features outmatch the Quest 3 in only a few areas. If that isn't enough to justify the massive price disparity between the two products, maybe think about how you'd use either device. For PC gamers with a big Steam library who want to be able to run some games natively on the go, the Steam Frame actually compares directly to the price of the current generation of handheld PCs.

Controllers

What must be applauded is that Valve has taken a revolutionary approach to VR controller design. Gone is the annoyance of having two face buttons on each hand now - these are honestly pointless because they never end up being used by most VR games, and makes VR controllers in general feel totally foreign to most gamers who have held a normal gamepad before.

On the Steam Frame's controllers, Valve has taken the sensible decision to cut a regular controller in half. There are four face buttons on the right controller, a D-pad on the left, and one TMR thumbstick for each hand. There's also still a grip button and trigger on each, but a bumper button that means translating the headset to something that can play flat-screen games is a very easy and intuitive experience.

Before you have concerns, Steam's VR Input will automatically detect disparities for the games you play if there are any, and the D-pad acts as buttons for the VR games that need left-hand functions. It all works just fine, and I, for one, prefer the familiarity of this layout over the other VR controllers I've tried.

I would argue that what doesn't work so well is that the grip buttons don't feel quite as robust as the ones on Meta's VR controllers, and they have an additional click at the end of their actuation. This helps navigate menus by activating pointer mode, but it causes a bit of confusion when you're in the middle of a VR game. Do you need to hear this click for the button press to register? Does it have an additional function when you're in a game? Any communication on that when you're setting up a new game or initialising the headset would be really appreciated. The menus for the controllers don't live up to the ones for the Steam Controller, and I think those would be really useful things to have on Frame.

Other than that, I don't have many complaints about the Steam Frame controllers. They give a decent amount of feedback; they're comfortable, well-weighted, and, despite not having tracking rings, only suffer the occasional placement glitch when I'm in a game. Overall, these are the best VR controllers I think I've used.

Performance

There are two parts of the Steam Frame's gaming performance to review here. Firstly, as a VR headset, and secondly, as an on-the-go option for flat-screen games.

I'll say that the biggest issue facing either is the battery life, which has received improvements throughout my testing period, but is still pretty lacklustre. I ran Big Walk natively on it, and the headset lasted an hour before telling me I needed to plug in or go away. With an improved firmware patch and some game streaming as opposed to using native processing power, I've pushed that further toward 90 minutes, but it's still not great for a headset that makes freedom from cables such a pillar of its design.

For context, the Quest 3's battery life has always been considered dire, and even it can last around two hours.

As a standalone VR headset, the Steam Frame can run your VR games just fine, but this isn't the experience I'd recommend to get the most out of the headset. It'll run the VR games in your Steam library, with even the most demanding ones like Half-Life: Alyx now having improvements for eye-tracking, performance, and generally just running natively on an ARM processor. Similarly to Blade & Sorcery and Walkabout Mini Golf, these games run fine and are certainly playable, but they're not quite as polished yet as I'd want them to be for this kind of price. Meta's native games, even with a less powerful processor, run really well, and I've never had an issue with performance when I'm playing something on the Quest store, probably because games are running on a dedicated version for HorizonOS. Steam Frame doesn't have that luxury, and you can tell it's working harder to make it all happen.

I'm talking about more jaggy lines, strange visual noise in the backgrounds of games, motion where there shouldn't be, even when you play with the appropriate motion smoothing and refresh rate settings. Like I say, these games will run, and you can play them just fine, but you'll likely know from looking at them that they're running natively.

The situation changes when you stream from a gaming PC, as detail suddenly sees a marked improvement, any visual noise is gone, and actually, VR games stream from a PC far better than they do to a Quest 3 using Steam Link.

One of the reasons for that is the wireless dongle creating a streamlined connection, but the other is that with the Steam Frame you have access to a whole menu of visual and graphical settings that you won't see on Steam Link on a Quest device. There's a whole Remote Settings menu that doesn't exist on Quest 3's Steam Link interface, and it allows you to more finely tune the graphics and the way you want to run your PC game on your headset.

Moreover, Foveated Streaming really kicks into play here, and it does an excellent job of applying more detail to the thing you're actually focusing on. While testing Blade & Sorcery and Walkabout Mini Golf directly streamed to both the Quest 3 and Steam Frame, I found I was having much smoother, higher-detail sessions on the Frame, and everything about the hardware was enhancing my time on Valve's headset - especially the controllers. It's a much better VR headset for gaming than Meta's when you use it in this way.

That said, the Quest 3 still has a win to its name. Its LCD displays have slightly more exciting colors, with scenes in games like Walkabout Mini Golf and Tiny Flock popping and really giving them a wow factor. On the other hand, details are conveyed more accurately on the Frame as the resolution is higher, and I noticed Valve's pancake lenses giving me a wider area of focus, so it's a real toss-up. If Valve would allow us to play around with contrast, saturation, and other image settings, it could likely match Meta on colors.

Similarly, there's no avoiding the fact that the Quest 3's speakers are far superior. The bass quality they have just isn't present on the Steam Frame, where music and sounds are a bit more treble-heavy and less optimised. Valve's speakers still do the trick, but I expect Valve Index owners will be pining for a headstrap design with that headset's audio prowess.

Then, there's the flat-screen side of things. Thanks to really easy Bluetooth settings, you can pair up one of the best PC controllers to the Steam Frame and play with no latency in probably under a minute. You can use the included VR controllers too, but I have noticed a bit of latency from them when streaming flat-screen games from a PC.

What games you can run will be a continual game of trial and error for the forseeable. I've managed to play Big Walk, Hades, Sable, Towerfall Ascension, and Eastward natively on the Frame, and they run seamlessly. In that pile, Hades is the only one with official "great on Frame" accreditation, so there's a solid, undiscovered stockpile of games that will run well on the headset.

I think the key is not expecting too much from this thing. In the same way you wouldn't go to a Steam Deck to play brand new, technically demanding titles like Control Resonant, don't expect them to run well on a device like this. For context, I tried to play Dragon Ball Sparking Zero, and while it ran in 1080p, it was in slow motion because its frame rate was so low. There are games that will work, games that won't work, and games that will improve with time, just as the entire Steam Deck library has over the years.

Don't forget there's also the ability to stream flatscreen games too, and this works well for the most part. Interestingly, I've had mixed results with games that my PC is using upscaling for. In Hunt: Showdown, Control Resonant, and Crimson Desert, I think the combination of flat-screen games being locked to 60fps when they're streamed to the Frame, and the latency with DLSS, the connection to the headset, and then your controller, is a bit of a recipe for disaster.

I'd hope to see this patched out, but right now it means that any demanding game is harder to rate as playable, and I'm working with an RTX 5080 machine and a really strong internet connection. Personally, I'd be surprised if we didn't see more improvements to this with updates to DLSS and the Steam Frame's firmware. Thankfully, a few games like Dishonored streamed seamlessly.

Should you buy the Steam Frame?

As a fan of VR, I have no trouble recommending the Steam Frame. One of its biggest problems is poor battery life, and that's already seen improvements through updates, which shows that this device is only on the up and up from here. Running VR games natively is more than playable, and streaming them from a more capable PC gives as close to a lossless level of detail as I've found with a wireless VR headset. The controllers especially deserve credit, and the fact that it's all running within Steam makes it a perfect match for PC gamers who have built their gaming library in that ecosystem.

The Steam Frame isn't the most affordable VR device out there, but it still lands comfortably in the mid-range of the market. For its convenience, comfort, and strong design, it's pushing for that best overall spot on our buying guide. I wish there was an option for wired play somewhere, because that could really bolster it further.

However, the fact that the Frame can also act like a Steam Deck you wear on your face gives this thing a whole new lease of life. I hope to see plenty of support from Valve and game developers on the software side to ensure there's plenty to play on it.

Overall, the Steam Frame might not be the VR salvation I was hoping it would be, but it's a great device that shows us there's still a point to prove when it comes to this genre of gaming.

How I tested the Steam Frame

I put the Steam Frame to work in my gaming setup for a number of weeks before this review. I've used it for VR gaming, portable gaming, and at-home gaming plenty in that time, testing its various use cases and features. I've tested VR and flat-screen games both running natively and streamed from various PCs to check how they run. I've also performed like-for-like tests with the Meta Quest 3 to compare how both headsets feel and appear from a user standpoint.

For more on our testing methods, take a look at the GamesRadar+ hardware policy.

To see the sorts of add-ons I hope you can get for the Steam Frame someday, check out the best Meta Quest accessories and the best early Black Friday Meta Quest deals.