when the steam frame was revealed i was so hyped! coming from a quest 2 i thought that i will finally be able to get a vr headset that can compete with pc vr but standalone! maybe il stop being kicked out of vrchat lobbies for being on the cheaper and more affordable platform compared to a pcvr settup that could cost potentially thousands!
but no, its just a -very good- wireless headset that can play things standalone but not very well. i heard that it cant even play the flat screen game Hollow night silk song well. also due to ram shortages it could cost over 800£ compared to the 500 i thought it was going to be.
I made a deal with my mum that i will not get anything for christmas, and she will get me the steam frame for my birthday on march 6 :D. im probably going to get a quest 3 like i was originally going to get for Christmas. maybe il get metro awakening and bonelab with it aswell (instead of sailing the 7 seas lol)
The intent of the Steam Frame was never to compete with a PCVR rig in standalone mode and don’t recall anybody ever saying it was. Valve explicitly stated that it was to be a “streaming first headset.”
The Frame technically has a slightly more powerful chip in it than the Quest 3 so should outperform the latter by a small margin in theory. The Frame also has eye tracking whereas the Quests do not (except the Quest Pro, which is NLA and was ~$1,500 even when it was) so the potential is there for foveated rendering to enhance framerates if developers actually bother to support it in the future. For pure standalone VR performance with native games, the Frame should outperform the Quest 3. PC games run on the headset in standalone mode will have to be done through a compatibility layer, which is probably not 100% optimal for performance. But for what it’s worth, the various Quests can’t play PC content at all so I’m not sure what the complaint is there.