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what exactly is the steam frame? (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
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im confused, its specs are amazing and on paper is more powerful than the meta quest 3, but its mainly being advertised as a streaming headset that goes from your vr spec pc (that is becoming more and more expensive these days for people).

so can it play games natively on the headset or not? i want to get it for my birthday as i see it as a worthy sucessor to my quest 2 that is amazing, but its controllers are drifiting to an unrepairable degree.

imagine no mans sky on it :0

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[–] 32 points 10 months ago (13 children)

Yes. The Steam Frame will come with the following technologies:

  • SteamOS, just like the Steam Deck, so you can play Windows and Linux games on-device with Linux (both pancake on a virtual screen and lower requirement VR games will be supported)
  • FEX to run x86_64 games on-device (small performance hit, but access to the vast majority of the Proton-compatible Steam library in return)
  • native ARM games are confirmed to be side-loadable (VR or not)
  • a wireless streaming dongle to natively stream PCVR, with foveated streaming to increase quality and reduce bandwidth requirements.

I'm super hyped and will most probably (pre)order it day one to replace my shitty CV1. I'm also hoping for a Steam Deck effect by pushing developers to optimize and use foveated rendering as it drastically reduces hardware requirements for high quality graphics.

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  • [–] 15 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    small performance hit

    How big the performance hit is depends on the game. If the game logic itself is CPU-heavy, the performance hit will be big. If the game spends most of the CPU time in system-supplied libraries or isn't CPU-heavy to begin with, it's gonna be small.

    The good news is that many VR titles aren't CPU-heavy.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago*

    Even for CPU-heavy titles it depends on the exact instructions. Sometimes multiple instructions in one architecture can be replaced by a single one in another. But that's rare, on average performance will be negatively affected.

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    From what I've seen about foveated rendering, I don't think developers need to do anything. It should just be "on" for any streamed content

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  • [–] 16 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    The frame's foveated streaming is a separate thing from foveated rendering. Foveated streaming does nothing to reduce the rendering load on the hardware running the game, it just reduces the network bandwidth required.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (2 children)

    The bugs are going to be hilarious when the game incorrectly understands what you're looking at, or breaks from looking at something too intensely

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    you have an oculus rift in the big 26? wow you 100% need the frame

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    I know. I swore my next headset would be Linux-compatible so I can reclaim the space of the windows partition I made exclusively for VR, but unfortunately, until the Frame, only old-ass headsets barely improving from my CV1 were available.

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