Announcing new Steam Hardware from Valve: Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame are coming in 2026. Just like Steam Deck, all three devices are optimized for Steam and designed for players to get even more out of their Steam library.

  • Cricket [he/him]@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    23 hours ago

    Thanks, I had not heard, but that makes sense. Hardware that sells a lot of units gets cheaper to manufacture as time goes by.

    Yikes, that’s not good about the bad screen door effect! I hope they fix it before release. I thought that this was a solved problem in VR, so I don’t see why they wouldn’t.

    • Wahots@pawb.social
      11·
      13 hours ago

      If it’s a screen door problem, it means they had to cut costs somewhere. Adding in a battery, SoC, networking + wifi dongle isn’t cheap at all. Adding tracking cameras isn’t cheap either. Redesigning controllers and switching them to optical ain’t cheap. And all that, coming in at less than an index system’s launch price, with tariffs on top. I think that’s just the price you pay for Questifying the index.

      Personally, I’m really bummed out that they added in a bunch of mobile crap that will swiftly become outdated within five years. The benefit of the Index was that, aside from hardware becoming worn down, all the processing was offloaded to the computer’s GPU, so buying a new GPU could instantly raise the bar for graphics and framerate for years to come.

      Give me an Index 2 with high res screens that are stupidly high refresh rate, even higher resolution motion tracking, and optional wireless accessories.

      • Cricket [he/him]@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        6 hours ago

        Let’s see what the real situation is with the alleged screen door effect. I searched around and the only first-hand report of it that I could find was from https://www.roadtovr.com/steam-frame-hands-on-valve-vr-headset-index-2/

        On reading it, it sounds like much less of an issue than people are making it out to be, using the qualifier “somewhat” and reiterating that they need to spend more time looking through it to be sure (emphasis mine):

        When I put on Steam Frame for the first time I was looking at Half-Life: Alyx streamed from a PC in the same room from Frame’s dedicated streaming dongle.

        Considering the Frame’s 4.6MP (2,160 × 2,160) per-eye resolution, I was expecting an image that looked similar to Quest 3’s display, which is 4.5MP (2,064 × 2,208). But I was surprised that the first thing I noticed was a somewhat visible screen-door effect (SDE), which is caused by the unlit space between pixels.

        Considering I haven’t (yet) been able to test Frame side-by-side with Quest 3, there’s two explanations for the somewhat apparent SDE. Either I’m completely spoiled by the high resolution displays of headsets like Vision Pro and Galaxy XR, or (more likely) Frame’s LCD has a lower fill-factor than Quest 3’s LCD, even though they have a very similar number of pixels and field-of-view.

        Thankfully, most other aspects of the image looked great. In my short time with the headset, it seemed like Frame’s custom pancake optics have similar performance to those of Quest 3, which have lead the industry for quite some time. Similar to Quest 3, the ‘sweet spot’ (area of maximum clarity) appeared to be very wide, spanning nearly edge-to-edge. I also didn’t notice any obvious chromatic aberration (separation of colors), ghosting, or motion blur. Granted, I didn’t get to hand-pick the content I was looking at, so I still want to spend more time looking through the headset to be sure of all of these early observations.

        What do you mean by “a bunch of mobile crap”, by the way? I don’t see how the Frame won’t benefit the same way from buying a new GPU?