im confused, its specs are amazing and on paper is more powerful than the meta quest 3, but its mainly being advertised as a streaming headset that goes from your vr spec pc (that is becoming more and more expensive these days for people).

so can it play games natively on the headset or not? i want to get it for my birthday as i see it as a worthy sucessor to my quest 2 that is amazing, but its controllers are drifiting to an unrepairable degree.

imagine no mans sky on it :0

  • WFH@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    26
    ·
    2 months ago

    Yes. The Steam Frame will come with the following technologies:

    • SteamOS, just like the Steam Deck, so you can play Windows and Linux games on-device with Linux (both pancake on a virtual screen and lower requirement VR games will be supported)
    • FEX to run x86_64 games on-device (small performance hit, but access to the vast majority of the Proton-compatible Steam library in return)
    • native ARM games are confirmed to be side-loadable (VR or not)
    • a wireless streaming dongle to natively stream PCVR, with foveated streaming to increase quality and reduce bandwidth requirements.

    I’m super hyped and will most probably (pre)order it day one to replace my shitty CV1. I’m also hoping for a Steam Deck effect by pushing developers to optimize and use foveated rendering as it drastically reduces hardware requirements for high quality graphics.

    • soulsource@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      2 months ago

      small performance hit

      How big the performance hit is depends on the game. If the game logic itself is CPU-heavy, the performance hit will be big. If the game spends most of the CPU time in system-supplied libraries or isn’t CPU-heavy to begin with, it’s gonna be small.

      The good news is that many VR titles aren’t CPU-heavy.

      • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 month ago

        Even for CPU-heavy titles it depends on the exact instructions. Sometimes multiple instructions in one architecture can be replaced by a single one in another. But that’s rare, on average performance will be negatively affected.

      • WFH@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        2 months ago

        I know. I swore my next headset would be Linux-compatible so I can reclaim the space of the windows partition I made exclusively for VR, but unfortunately, until the Frame, only old-ass headsets barely improving from my CV1 were available.

  • CaptDust@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    2 months ago

    Yes it can be used standalone, however Quest games are built for the Quest. Frame games are PC games translated to ARM. That’ll unlock a lot of games for standalone use, but I seriously doubt it’ll have the resources for something like NMS to run on it’s hardware.

    • Lfrith@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      2 months ago

      If the ARM translation ends up being something that can be done to run Steam games on Android that would be so cool.

  • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyzM
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    2 months ago

    Basically it can play lower power games directly, or display higher power games from your PC.

    Both the Quest and the Steam Frame use ARM hardware, this is the same type of hardware used in phones. This hardware is noteworthy because it’s more power efficient that x86 type hardware, which is what traditional PCs use. Many VR games are made to run directly on the Quest and should be hardware compatible with the Steam Frame too since they both use ARM.

    The Steam Frame can also run x86 games thanks to an emulation layer called FEX that valve has been working on. This is something the Quest cannot do, but many PC games will likely be too demanding to run this way. VR games are naturally performance demanding since the game needs to be rendered twice for both eye perspectives, and needs decent resolution. Valve has said that it will be slightly weaker than the current Steam Deck in performance, and that’s probably before we consider the extra performance requirements of VR and the performance overhead of FEX.

    So based on that, I would assume NMS would not run well directly on the Frame itself, and you would instead need to run it on your PC and display it on the Frame.