... As a diehard VR enthusiast that's been in this thing since literally the original 2012 Oculus Rift DK1 Kickstarter (still have mine), I cannot for the LIFE OF ME understand who exactly the Steam Frame is even for... ESPECIALLY if it ends up costing >=$1000!
It's not a "next-gen" standalone headset replacement for Quest 3 owners, as the Frame's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is literally just 1 year newer of an SOC than the 8 Gen 2 based XR2 Gen 2 in the Quest 3/3S... (Despite the Frame coming out THREE YEARS LATER! 🤦😑).
This means that the GPU will only be around ~+30% faster, and the CPU (which is arguably even MORE important for defining what is/isn't possible) will only be like ~+10-20% faster, as the Frame has to run things like the inside-out SLAM tracking algorithms on the CPU cores themselves instead of on dedicated ASIC blocks like with Qualcomm's dedicated XR chips...
And the Frame's display + optics stack isn't an upgrade AT ALL from the Quest 3, as it's essentially identical... It has the exact same display type (bog standard LCD), with basically the exact same resolution, and basically the exact same kind of lenses...
(In fact I would bet some real money that the Frame's pancake lenses actually end up being noticeably inferior to Meta's 🤷).
And for PCVR users, the display + optics stack is woefully, WOEFULLY noncompetitive! And people who are diehard wired cable players (be they sim-racers/flyers, or people who just can't stand video compression artifacts, even w/ AV1) don't want to have to pay for an entire full-blown ARM computer that they have zero use for AND which makes the headset significantly heavier...
Even for wireless PCVR users, they would just want a super basic SOC that can handle modern WiFi & video encoding standards to maximize battery life and minimize cost + weight, NOT something powerful enough to natively play games on.
Basically, Valve tried to make a single VR headset for literally everybody, and in doing so succeeded in making a VR headset for literally NOBODY but Valve fanboys or people that want a standalone VR headset but hate Meta... 🤦
All Valve needed to do was wait an extra ~6 months before finalizing the Frame's hardware spec so that they could use QC's new "Reality Elite" SOC (basically the XR2 Gen 3) that is ACTUALLY a true generational leap forward in performance! (Especially as it has all the VR specific ASIC blocks to take a ton of load off of the CPU!).
And considering the delayed launch, it wouldn't have even changed when the headset had released!
Valve recently added a reservation system for the Steam Frame to Steam's backend. And now, it seems it might be different from the one used for the Steam Machine and Steam Controller.
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