Got my Steam Frame yesterday and had a chance to play with it a bit. Figured I’d leave some details here since I haven’t seen much.

Some background: My last headset was the OG Vive with Index Controllers. I’ve never used another headset other than a Quest 3 at a museum exhibit for a few minutes. So for me, the jump in quality is huge, but if you’ve kept up with the hardware it might not be.

So far, I’m really enjoying the Frame though it’s not without issues. The headset is really comfortable and the initial setup was mostly pretty smooth. I did run into a bug where the keyboard input just stopped working while I was entering my wi-fi password, but a reboot fixed that.

I haven’t been able to get streaming working (more on that later), but installing games on the headset worked well. I played Eleven Table Tennis (supported) and Maestro (not supported, but works) without any real issues. Neither of those games requires moving around the room so it was nice to be able to stand in the living room and just set my location instantly to start playing. No full room setup like the Vive so I’ll definitely be using this more often. I’ve seen some complaints about the passthrough camera, but it worked great for me. I can’t read text in that mode, but I was able to walk around the house without bumping into stuff just fine.

The streaming was the only real problem I had. I run Fedora 44 and was able to get the Frame to connect using the wifi dongle and give me the option to stream from my computer, but it would always fail. If you don’t have SteamVR running on the host PC it just fails silently, but when I had it running I would get an error about video compression not being supported by my graphics card. I have a RX 9079XT so I doubt that’s actually the problem, however I still haven’t been able to figure out what I need to install to get it working. If I manage to fix it, I’ll report back.

I got about an hour and a half of gameplay before the battery died on my but I expect that to be a bit better when streaming. You can play while plugged into power but the power supply that you can buy from valve doesn’t have a super long cord.

Happy to answer any questions if you have them. I’m overall satisfied with the purchase and hope to see some software updates to fix the issues I did run into.

    • jwiggler@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      2·
      6 days ago

      I think ive tried remote play and never got it working. at least with moonlight and sunshine, i can control everything thats going on. I have had to tinker quite a bit.

      I basically now have a script that saves the state of my real monitors, turns them off, and creates a virtual monitor on my Ubuntu 26.04 pc, according to whatever resolution the moonlight client requests. then, after i close moonlight, it runs a tear down script that destroys the virtual monitor and brings the real monitors back exactly how they were. That way i can connect from my steamdeck and it matches the resolution, or i can connect from another computer and it matches the resolution of that screen.

      i have hitches with wifi sometimes, where i have to restart moonlight client (which doesnt necessarily kill the sunshine session) but for the most part it runs smooth enough for action games like Onimusha, Spider-Man, etc. I’ve also played Rocket league on it, the most latency-affected game I play, and it is better streamed than playing straight off the steamdeck.

      edit: for context im running ubuntu 26.04 with kde plasma.