Too bad it's a bit too much of a hassle to remove the pancake lenses if you don't need them.
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2026
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I maintain that it always should have been a streaming-only headset. Without controllers. Everyone seems to agree the older Index controllers are better.
They mention that the compute required to support streaming was also already enough to run standalone games. Removing the ability to run games on the headset wouldn't have changed the design much anyway.
Where do they say this? I don't know why that much ram and processing and storage would be required for just the streaming and fov stuff.
I've heard it in a few places, one that comes to mind being an interview with some engineers that PC Gamer did. The RAM was originally half (on par with the Quest 3) but once they realized how much the potential library would expand, they bumped the RAM to 16GB.
This decision was made pre RAM crisis, of course.
The RAM was originally half (on par with the Quest 3)
If they could reduce the RAM by half and still have a streaming capable rig that's about $100 off the bill of materials and potentially doubles your manufacturing capability (assuming the bottleneck is RAM acquisition).
If this is true, why couldn't Valve just release a Frame Lite in ~6 months that is stream-only?
No one is paying 90% for a shittier product.
I can't imagine them doing that. Here's my reasoning: You can't make everyone happy. People are already mad that the frame isn't EXACTLY what they expected it to be.
So you're proposing one solution, to appease one group of people. Essentially the same Frame but just half or less a quarter of the RAM? To save a hundred bucks?
Then what? You'll have a device that can TECHNICALLY run some games locally, but now it's underpowered. But people will get confused and try it anyway and be mad. Or they'll get confused and buy the wrong one.
They could make it painfully clear that it's streaming only, and even limit the software so it can't play locally. But people will hack it and try anyway and probably still complain.
Or claim that valve is scalping money for the higher ram version.
Or any other number of problems that involve people not being happy with them. And all of it costs them money to produce the second SKU.
Maybe they'll do it if everyone cries loud enough. But in my opinion, it's smartest to keep one product, with one performance profile to target. Just like the Deck.
It's not worth the hassle for them, and it's not worth saving $100 for me.
In my opinion.
It's not a new idea for companies to make a lower end SKU of their product. Don't pretend like it's some untested thing. And there's plenty of people (myself included) who're wanting to only stream with it.
And it's not just a $100 off the price tag. I was basing it off RAM prices today. What if RAM prices continue to go up, or if they have a harder time getting more chips at any price?
RAM is currently the limiting resource in building electronics. Any reduction in the need for it in a product means that product can more easily withstand changes in component prices and availability.
It's not untested or impossible, but clearly they didn't do it, so there must be a reason.
I'm saying that I think the reason is because it doesn't make sense to do it, for all the reasons listed above.
And yes RAM is currently the issue, but I imagine they don't want to make massive changes to their production plans just to accommodate the AI bubble that may or may not pop soon. The same way RAM manufacturers aren't making massive changes to their plans to ramp up production, because who knows what the market will look like.
And yes RAM is currently the issue, but I imagine they don't want to make massive changes to their production plans just to accommodate the AI bubble that may or may not pop soon.
At the moment, RAM is projected to be a PITA through at least 2028. If you're able to produce a chopped down SKU to alleviate that it's likely worth it, especially if they have issues with filling orders in a reasonable time frame
But that would have been in response to non streaming, where the headset handles everything. I'm talking about non streaming.
Several people around here keep claiming valve said the hardware in it was pretty much the same hardware needed for a streaming only design, but no one has actually been able to provide a source of them saying it, and it sounds like BS in a rumor mill at this point. Especially because it doesn't make any sense.
*Edit: See. Silent downvotes and no links of anyone from valve claiming that pretty much these specs were required for a streaming only system.
*Edit: See. Silent downvotes
This gets you a downvote. Feel better now?
Yes. It affirms that there's a bunch of fan boys in here that are parroting off what they heard from other fan boys and that there is nothing from valve saying they needed the same spec to make a streaming only system work.
It affirms that there's a bunch of fan boys in here that are parroting off what they heard from other fan boys
You're an idiot.
I'm already in an argument with someone else on here due to me being skeptical about needing the same amount of RAM for streaming as running native.
But to you, that's apparently *bEiNg A fAnBoY wHo JuSt PaRrOtS".
Go touch grass. You've gone off the deep end
How does that even work? You can stream 4k games from a Raspberry Pi. That's why there's an entire industry dedicated to exactly that.
The point they are getting at is that in order to stream games to a VR headset, that headset needs to have a certain amount of compute power in order to interpret the stream while also handling tracking, connecting to controllers, etc. That amount of compute power is also capable of running games in standalone, so they may as well support that option as well.
But that isn't true at all, and I've still seen no one from valve actually claim it is true.
That makes no sense. It requires more compute to run a whole-ass game along with tracking controllers than it does just tracking controllers.
Streaming to a VR headset involves the headset computing more than just controller tracking. It needs to interpret the incoming stream and all sorts of other various things that need to be computed. A VR headset that has a processor that is powerful enough to stream heavy games is also powerful enough to play light games in standalone.
Streaming to a VR headset involves the headset computing more than just controller tracking.
Yes but not much. Again streaming games from weak hardware is a whole industry. It's the point of platforms like Luna, GeForce Now, Stadia, etc. Streaming from cheap Android TV boxes and such. Valve even sold their own cheap streaming box, the Steam Link.
Yes but not much.
Not much, but apparently enough that the minimum requirement is capable of running simpler games locally.
platforms like Luna, GeForce Now, Stadia, etc.
Streaming foveated VR is more computationally taxing on the client than simply streaming basic pancake games. You can stream Cyberpunk to your Chromecast because it just involves the server sending a video feed to the client and the client sending controller inputs back to the server. Streaming a VR game involves all those same things, but it also involves extra computation on the client side (controller tracking, eye tracking, headset gyro, and other various spatial calculations) that then get sent off to the server along with the controller inputs. That extra computation requires more client-side processing power than is needed for streaming Cyberpunk to your Chromecast.
Are you talking about game streaming some AAA ultra graphics Unreal game? Because there are a lot of other games that only take a fraction of compute (an extreme being doom) that take maybe even less compute ressources than trying to stream anything. And streaming can take a lot of compute if you ever looked at hardware stats during a discord stream. that would be especially true for something "surroundHD" like a 3D wirtual vorld where a lot of video gets to be stored or its going to be a pain in the eyes turning the head (and that ping will be too high for foveated streaming)
Yeah, the most powerful boxes are on par with the chip in the Steam Frame, aside from RAM and the SSD. The biggest costs are elsewhere. It's not the chip itself. It's just one CPU generation ahead of the same CPU series as the Ayn Thor base model.
The cost simply wouldn't go down enough by switching to the lightest CPU
The most powerful boxes are using a 10 year old Nvidia Tegra chip. Not to mention the rest of them.
There are devices more powerful than that. And from what I can tell, you'd cut $100 in SoC cost and lose 75% of the the performance compared to the closest competitors.
Again, you're comparing to devices which does not have to do onboard SLAM tracking, which displays a single output image instead of two, which does not need to meet the latency and image refresh rate targets, which does not connect two dual Wi-Fi connections for extra stability and redundance, etc.
Even if you go for the tightest margin, economics still give you mass market chips with excess capacity because you have to pick chips with enough ports, enough bandwidth, low latency, high maximum CPU frequencies, etc. And then the question is again back to a difference in parts cost between "can only ever stream" vs "can stream AND game locally" that's just some hundred dollars of parts cost.
Try decoding an AV1 stream from Sunshine without hardware acceleration. It takes a much higher compute performance than you apparently believe.
There's a fair bit of difference between streaming pre-recorded large frame video versus low latency live streaming with small frames and a bit less size efficient but more CPU efficient encoding, etc...
And because of how SoC chips are binned (what components are offered together, economy of scale, etc), once you pick a SoC with a GPU with enough power to accelerate this decoding, you also have enough power total to do other stuff like on-device gaming simply because if you ask for a cheaper CPU it will cost you more for them to make a custom assembly (unless you ask for a large enough volume of custom chips).
And don't forget foveated rendering. Most of the magic making it capable of gaming with high quality comes from that. They didn't put the highest tier chip in, they reduced the work it has to do instead
VR streaming is a lot more demanding. You need ultra low latency decoding of much higher resolution and frame rate than 4k60.
Where does the Raspberry Pi fit inside of that headset?
VR headsets effectively need to run two 4K displays, one for each eye, and you have all the processing for controller tracking too. You also have eye tracking, they're doing the whole foveated streaming thing everybody has been gushing over about (it's really cool tech!). The mobile chip they used is nothing special, it's a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, a 3 year old smartphone processor (certainly powerful enough to run lighter PC games, but nothing more than that. It's kind of insane that a phone can even do that nowadays!)
The mobile chip they used is nothing special, it's a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, a 3 year old smartphone processor (certainly powerful enough to run lighter PC games, but nothing more than that. It's kind of insane that a phone can even do that nowadays!)
Actually, you can totally run some more demanding PC games on it without any issues. A Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, so slightly weaker, is able to run The Witcher 3 at 720p, Steam Deck preset, in 30+ fps.
And that's with several compatibility layers in between the SoC and the game.
Mobile ARM chips have come so far we might as well be using them for laptops instead of Intel or AMD (just like the recent MacBook Neo using an iPhone chip). More than good enough performance, especially in case of 8 Elite, at a fraction of the power draw.
It’s kind of insane that a phone can even do that nowadays!
This is what also makes me very sure that being able to play offline will never go away regardless of how hard they try to push gaming into the cloud. Local processing power of common devices is more than enough for the decades of pc games that have been released sans the last decade or so, and they are also good enough to emulate a whole host of gaming devices.
It's 2x2k, not 4k
It's 2160x2160, so less than 4K (which is 3840x2160) horizontally, since it's a different aspect ratio but it's still more pixels. About 8 million for a standard 4K display, while it's 9 million for the Frame. Even streaming games on such a high resolution display is performance intensive, plus you have the controller + eye tracking
If it was, it would have been of no interest to me. I quite like what they made.
That's fine but it would have been way way cheaper, less noisy, lighter, more comfortable, more efficient, longer battery, etc. and they could have sold it to way more people. And you're not running much of anything natively on that Qualcomm processor anyway.
If you're using it for streaming games it already does better than any cheaper chip on older larger nodes in efficiency, therefore it is automatically the less noisy and longer lasting variant. Could drop a few grams maybe, a smaller fan maybe, but people already say it's the most comfortable VR headset out-of-the-box ever. And that's before the ergonomics kit.
There's a whole lot of assumptions in that statement.
I obviously havent tried the the frame controllers but the Index controllers are amazing.