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.

  • punkfungus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    I’m on the reservation list but haven’t got my order email yet. I’m also on Fedora so this is relevant to my interests. Were you using SteamVR beta as is mentioned on the support page? And have you swapped your mesa driver for the rpmfusion one that enables proprietary hardware encoders?

    Fedora has a philosophy of not shipping with non-free software, it leads to stuff like the GPU’s encoders not working out of the box and is a bit of a pain point if you don’t know about it.

    • master_of_unlocking@piefed.zipOPEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      Right now the regular SteamVR and the beta are the same version, but I do currently have it set to the beta. The issue is almost certainly the mesa driver. I installed some of the proprietary encoders but I have a feeling I’m missing something. Going to keep trying tonight but unfortunately there’s not a lot of information on the requirements just yet.

      • punkfungus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        6·
        1 day ago

        It used to be you needed to swap the default mesa drivers for the freeworld ones, but it seems that’s changed with Fedora 44. Now you should run:

        sudo dnf install libva-utils
vainfo

        That will show you the VAAPI profiles currently enabled. If your setup matches mine that will be profiles for JPEG, VP9 and AV1 but not H264 or HEVC. If that’s the case install the codec-enabled driver:

        sudo dnf install mesa-va-drivers-freeworld

        Running vainfo again should then show a bunch of new profiles for H264 and HEVC.

        If you have the H264 and HEVC profiles available but are still experiencing the issue then we probably need to wait for Valve to do their thing.

        Edit: also you should probably reboot before trying to stream a game after installing the driver.

        • master_of_unlocking@piefed.zipOPEnglish
          4·
          1 day ago

          Hey thanks for this! After installing the drivers I can stream 2D games but unfortunately VR streaming is still broken. Hopefully they can fix it soon.

      • chamomile@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        6·
        2 days ago

        A friend of mine also running Fedora was able to get streaming working, in its case by installing the mesa-vulkan-drivers-freeworld drivers from rpmfusion.