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
    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?