Valve’s Steam Frame Launches At $1,059 With A Sweet Half-Life: Alyx Bonus
The Steam Frame just launched with two models (one with 256GB of onboard UFS storage and one with 1TB) and, similar to the Steam Machine, it is being initially offered with a preorder waiting list lottery to prevent scalping. This also helps manage what is presumably a limited supply of Steam Frame headsets, as well.
While this may limit its applicability in modern, leading-edge titles without support for foveated rendering due to the SoC's limited GPU horsepower, it may ultimately benefit all Linux gamers. In the long-term, development efforts should not only improve the current x86-on-Arm experience available for Steam Frame users, but also push development of the FEX platform further. FEX, or the FEX-Emu, is a user-mode emulator that allows x86 and x86-64 games and applications built for Intel or AMD processors to run on ARM64 Linux devices
Steam Frame Price and Specifications
- $1059 USD for the 256 GB Kit or $1299 USD for the 1TB Kit. Both Steam Frame kits use onboard UFS storage supplemented with a microSD card slot, and have otherwise-identical specs, with no extras besides more storage for the 1TB Steam Frame.
- Snapdragon 8 Gen3 SoC, which uses an integrated Adreno 750 iGPU and 8 CPU cores divided across 3 clusters. The first cluster includes a fast Cortex-X4 core up to 3.3 GHz, the second cluster includes triple Cortex-A720 power cores up to 3.2 GHz with two added 3.0 GHz cores, and the third cluster includes two power-saving Cortex-A520 cores. More performance details here.
- 16GB LPDDR5X RAM, unified for the SoC.
- 2160 x 2160 LCD displays per-eye.
- 72-144 Hz refresh rate support.
- Inside-out camera motion tracking for full 6 Degree of Freedom (6DOF) controls.
For those who want in on Steam Frame as fast as possible, the preorder queue is open now until September 17th. After that, random entrants will be selected via email and given the option to purchase the Steam Frame. As a plus, Valve is also bundling Half-Life: Alyx with purchases of the Steam Frame headset. The game has been optimized to run well on the Steam Frame and is considered one of the best VR games to date.
