New Steam Frame headset and DCS

[MichaelJWP15]

Just wondered what people think of the new Steam Frame headset, in relation to potentially using it for DCS? I think it looks promising?

[speed-of-heat]

it feels very similar , on the surface to Quest 3, the Foveated Streaming is interesting, and maybe that will offset the compression issues that others have seen using that approach before, honestly at the moment its a bit early for any conclusions, so watch and see i would guess 

[VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants]

Pro:

1. About 100 degrees FoV

2. 6GHZ WiFi

3. Foveated streaming

4. No base station needed

5. Handtracking possible(?)

6. Eyetracking

7. Up to 120Hz, 144Hz experimental

8. Light weight

9. Basically it is Stream Deck -- VR edition, may be some non-Steam PCVR capability

10. Pancake lens

Cons:

1. Price (at around US$1000?), not competitive

2. LCD only

3. Resolution subpar

4. Sound is not great by default

5. It is kinda a catchup Nothing Quest or Primax has not delivered, for quite some years.

6. No cable link mentioned from what I have watched so far.

IMO. Agree it is a wait-and-see.

Edited Thursday at 12:21 PM by VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants

[speed-of-heat]

Yeah that would be a hard nut at 1000USD 

[VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants]

Unless for a die hard Stream gamer, I feel there is little so far to be excited about. I recognise SteamVR has improved a lot since then, but it is still some time a pain in the neck. From the interviews I have watched so far, only talks about how the new one surpasses the old SteamVR headset, some time, HP G2 is mentioned but the world has moved on greatly since then...

[ChariotOfFLAME]

Yeah, I’m very underwhelmed for all the reasons listed above. Most important for us is battery life:

- best case: ~4hrs

- worst case: less than an hour (for real, wtf?!?!)

That makes it a novelty and not a gaming device, and removes the capability to go untethered for us DCS folks (if you even can play while it’s charging, which is unclear).

If it’s more than $600, the market won’t bear it at all. It’s a Quest 3+, essentially, so it needs to be priced that way or it’s going to only sell to tech YouTubers and Steam chads.

[Mr_sukebe]

It has roughly the same specs as the Quest Pro, i.e. slightly better resolution, eye tracking, but no DPMI connection.

As CoF has stated, it's really not a great solution for DCS.

We need to have a tethered solution to avoid battery life issues, and if you do that, you might aswell include DPMI connection, remove the battery and most of the complex onboard processing capabilities.  

The Pimax Dream Air SE has the best looking proposed specification, i.e. light, DPMI connection, no battery, eye tracking, decent resolution without requiring a 6090 GPU, all at what appears to be a sensible price.  The only questions are when will it arrive and will it have the usual Pimax "areas of opportunity".  If HTC or Meta made the Dream Air SE, I'd be throwing my money at them, as they give me confidence that it'll do what it says on the tin.

[Morat]

I was waiting for this announcement. I bought a PSVR2 as a stopgap when the G2 was (prematurely) pronounced to be dying. I see no reason to buy the Steam Frame to replace a PSVR2 for DCS, especially as it's LCD. The Eyetracking makes it a good step up from the Quest 3, but I've got that already.

[some1]

17 hours ago, ChariotOfFLAME said:

 

That makes it a novelty and not a gaming device, and removes the capability to go untethered for us DCS folks (if you even can play while it’s charging, which is unclear).

Every headset can be charged while being used. With this one you're not restricted to tethering to your PC, you can run a thin charging cable (as opposed to a thicker data cable) straight from a wall charger if you have one nearby, or use a power bank in your pocket. Steam Frame is said to use around 7 Wh when streaming, so it should provide around 3h of play time on internal battery alone. Higher power consumption is when you run the games directly on the device.

Overall this should be like an improved Quest 3. Better image quality due to much more efficient streaming, better performance if the game supports foveated rendering, and maybe better comfort as it's much lighter. And of course easier to set up, as PCVR is the primary use case instead of a barely supported afterthought as is the case with Meta products.

If intended to be used exclusively for DCS and other flight sims, there are better headsets out there (or on the horizon - at least on paper), but also more expensive. 

[RealDCSpilot]

Idk, i have the feeling that the price will much lower than 1K$. 500-600ish. 

[VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants]

Lower price or not, we shall wait and see about that. It is good to have competition.

As for charging the headset on the fly (pun intended), I have a battery which can put around the shoulder if needed. It uses USB-C and works with my Quest Pro and provides roughly an hour worth of juice, but I never run it from full to dry to find out how long it actually lasts.

Edited Friday at 10:34 AM by VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants

[some1]

1 hour ago, RealDCSpilot said:

Idk, i have the feeling that the price will much lower than 1K$. 500-600ish. 

Unlikely, as this is the price of a Meta headset which has worse hardware, while at the same time Meta can use economy of scale and sell them at minimal profit as they are burning money on VR anyway.

[Aapje]

It feels a bit like a Quest 3 Pro to me.

From what I've seen so far, it seems that they have put a lot of effort into the details, so I do expect it to be more pleasant in practice than the specs suggest.

2 hours ago, RealDCSpilot said:

Idk, i have the feeling that the price will much lower than 1K$. 500-600ish. 

That is an absurd expectation. It has more expensive hardware and will have less sales volume.

[Joch1955]

Yes, specs on paper (eye resolution, wireless, battery life) seem underwhelming, but reading the reviews, there are a lot of interesting details, like eye tracking and the “foveated streaming” feature. It looks like a lot of thought went into this. It will be interesting to see how well it actually works in flight sims.

[Mr_sukebe]

58 minutes ago, Joch1955 said:

Yes, specs on paper (eye resolution, wireless, battery life) seem underwhelming, but reading the reviews, there are a lot of interesting details, like eye tracking and the “foveated streaming” feature. It looks like a lot of thought went into this. It will be interesting to see how well it actually works in flight sims.

 

Agreed.  Whilst the specs don't look great to me, it could well be that those pixels are "very nice pixels".  We've seen before how resolution is not always the decider for actual image quality.

[RealDCSpilot]

2 hours ago, Aapje said:

That is an absurd expectation. It has more expensive hardware and will have less sales volume.

I actually miss "more expensive hardware" in the Steam Frame. Let's take the Pico 4 Ultra for comparison. The Frame misses two 32MP color cameras and has no dedicated iToF (Depth sensor), instead it has eye tracking. The LCD panels are also pretty cheap by now, every other HMD manufacturer tries to get into the MicroOLED business for the next iteration of devices and like Valve's engineers said themselves in videos, there are quite a lot of manufacturers for panels available today (very different compared to the times of the Valve Index in 2019). Yeah, the chipset is a bit better but who knows what deal Valve got...
In my opinion the real power of this device is in the capabilities of the OS anyway and software they developed for it. A swiss army knife with many surprises to come because of smart developers with crazy ideas.
And don't forget that this is not just a single VR headset, it is planned to be a device in the family of Steam devices which complement each other. If you set the price for a single device to high, this concept would be doomed right at the start.

Edited Friday at 02:37 PM by RealDCSpilot

[Joch1955]

comment from Valve on pricing of the Steam Frame:

Quote

Mercifully, it’s also going to be cheaper than the £919 Index; as with the new Steam Machine and Steam Controller, exact pricing won’t be announced for some time, but Selan confirmed to me that the Frame’s positioning will be "Premium, but less than [the] Index."

The Steam Frame is real, and Valve want it to be the last VR headset you'll ever buy | Rock Paper Shotgun

So it will probably come in at a price somewhere between the Quest 3 and the Index.

Edited Friday at 05:56 PM by Joch1955

[Aapje]

22 hours ago, RealDCSpilot said:

I actually miss "more expensive hardware" in the Steam Frame.

+ Snapdragon 8 gen 3 instead of the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2.

+ 16 GB RAM vs 12 for the Pico and 8 for the Quest 3.

+ Eye tracking (which is probably fairly expensive)

+ High quality audio with 4 speakers built in

+ SD card slot

+ Built in IR illuminators for use in the dark

+ Better IO chip than the Quest 3 (same as Pico?)

+ Up to 144 Hz display vs 90 for the Pico and 120 for the Quest 3

+ Heat pipe-based cooling is probably much better

- Monochrome camera's

- Smaller battery (?)

[VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants]

Gamer Nexus has a prolong discussion on the engineering behind the Steam Frame. If anyone interested in this aspect, please check it out.

The eye tracking part is done behind the lenses, iirc. I am not sure how Quest Pro and Quest 3, they both have it but Oculus (cough) keep the price to be more reasonable (still not cheap, imo) by slashing the margin

I for one would not install DCS World, or any serious sims similarly, onto a SD card.

From my sad experience from Quest Pro, higher refresh rate may not help with the VR experience, so I still stick with 72Hz on my Quest Pro, but I could be wrong.

As for the IR illuminators, I think it is in Quest 2 and there seems to be a lack of discussion on hand tracking without the controllers. IIRC, Linus Tech showed hand/finger tracking while holding the controller.

Heat pipe is great but I rarely get my headset too warm but cool headset may be beneficial to electronics efficiency.

For those who are into MR aspect of flight sim or racing sim, adding a colour camera, on the expansion port on the headset would be necessary

So far from what I get from all the news and reports, first it is really light and it has tracking built-in, unlike BigScreen Beyond 2 and the less expensive edition Pimax Dream Air and SE. And the dedicated port for 6GHz Wifi may be a game changer, but i doubt it can beat Display Port at any time, but not everyone likes to be tethered.

Just my £0.02.

[VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants]

Edit: watched ThrillSeeker's video on Steam Frame, 2 points to note:

1. The CPU is not VR-specific, rather, it is a mobile CPU. This is actually mentioned in other videos but some how I missed it.

2. No handtracking in-box.

[Dragon1-1]

On 11/14/2025 at 6:54 PM, Joch1955 said:

So it will probably come in at a price somewhere between the Quest 3 and the Index.

Myself, I'm just happy for the fact there's going to be anything but Quest in that space. Entry level VR offerings are sorely lacking right now. They're right to target this market.