Got my Steam Frame yesterday and had a chance to play with it a bit. Figured I’d leave some details here since I haven’t seen much.

Some background: My last headset was the OG Vive with Index Controllers. I’ve never used another headset other than a Quest 3 at a museum exhibit for a few minutes. So for me, the jump in quality is huge, but if you’ve kept up with the hardware it might not be.

So far, I’m really enjoying the Frame though it’s not without issues. The headset is really comfortable and the initial setup was mostly pretty smooth. I did run into a bug where the keyboard input just stopped working while I was entering my wi-fi password, but a reboot fixed that.

I haven’t been able to get streaming working (more on that later), but installing games on the headset worked well. I played Eleven Table Tennis (supported) and Maestro (not supported, but works) without any real issues. Neither of those games requires moving around the room so it was nice to be able to stand in the living room and just set my location instantly to start playing. No full room setup like the Vive so I’ll definitely be using this more often. I’ve seen some complaints about the passthrough camera, but it worked great for me. I can’t read text in that mode, but I was able to walk around the house without bumping into stuff just fine.

The streaming was the only real problem I had. I run Fedora 44 and was able to get the Frame to connect using the wifi dongle and give me the option to stream from my computer, but it would always fail. If you don’t have SteamVR running on the host PC it just fails silently, but when I had it running I would get an error about video compression not being supported by my graphics card. I have a RX 9079XT so I doubt that’s actually the problem, however I still haven’t been able to figure out what I need to install to get it working. If I manage to fix it, I’ll report back.

I got about an hour and a half of gameplay before the battery died on my but I expect that to be a bit better when streaming. You can play while plugged into power but the power supply that you can buy from valve doesn’t have a super long cord.

Happy to answer any questions if you have them. I’m overall satisfied with the purchase and hope to see some software updates to fix the issues I did run into.

  • master_of_unlocking@piefed.zipOPEnglish
    17·
    2 days ago

    The specs shown for the official charger are PD3.0 Type C power supply, 45W so I bet a decent power bank would work.

    I did experience a little eye fatigue but nothing too crazy. When the battery ran out I still felt like I could have gone at least another hour.

    • cynar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      17 hours ago

      It runs fine on a power bank. It’s happy charging and playing simultaneously. I clocked about 15W when it was on but idling, with 50% battery.

    • lime!@feddit.nu
      4·
      2 days ago

      is that better than on the vive? i’ve used an index before and my eyes started hurting after like 20 minutes.

      • ExperiencedWinter@lemmy.world
        4·
        21 hours ago

        With the index I found I was always trying to get my eyes positioned perfectly, and things outside the center of my vision were still blurry. The frame has much less positioning, and is much clearer when reading text.

      • master_of_unlocking@piefed.zipOPEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        I’m not sure. I never had any issues on the Vive and so far the Frame seems ok, but I’ve never used an Index before. From what I’ve heard, the Frame’s display is very similar to the Index though.