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Steam Frame

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Re: Steam Frame

#301

Post by wlesieutre »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #191

Little disappointing its not got colour passthrough. I am not convinced this generation of headsets will really be the ones that AR breaks through but still its a bit disappointing and has been useful with the latest Quest headsets. Other than that it looks fairly solid.

It was noted in some articles that the "expansion port" could hypothetically be used for a color passthrough module later. But I also read that the Index had a similar port and never did much of anything with it, so that may never happen.

Definitely a cost measure to not include color passthrough, I'm not in the market to replace my Quest 3S but I'm very curious to see what price they hit with this.

Nice that it has a microSD slot so you can buy the low storage on and not be stuck with 256 GB forever.

Re: Steam Frame

#303

Post by esseph »

cyberax wrote: post #124
esseph wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so much of an issue when neighbors with paper thin walls see that 6ghz as a -87 signal That said, in the US it is 1200MHz aka 5.925 GHz to 7.125 GHz.

The One Big Beautiful Bill fixed that. Now a large part of this spectrum will be sold out for non-WiFi use.

Different spectrum. They're grabbing old radar ranges.

Also talking about adding more spectrum to the existing ISM 6GHz band.

Re: Steam Frame

#304

Post by jdprgm »

Annoying not to include price or release date.

Considering the quest 3 came out 2 entire years ago this feels too close in terms of hardware instead of feeling like a next generation headset.

Responses do seem fairly positive though. I wonder if this had been released as the quest 4 though would you all be reacting as positively?

Re: Steam Frame

#305

Post by remir »

andoando wrote: post #234
phantasmish wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh hell yes. There was a leak of specs (via a benchmarking database) of an upcoming machine from Valve and I had my fingers crossed that it was a mini PC and not some VR thingy, saw this thread, and was sad for a moment before I spotted this post. 6x as powerful as the Steam deck (that I use plugged in anyway 98% of the time—I’d have bought a Steam Deck 2, but I’m glad I get the option to put money toward more perfor…

What is the draw of the Steam machine though? They say the price is comparable to similarly specced PC. So why not just buy/build any mini PC? There's plenty of options for that

It's a console basically. It comes ready to play without much maintenance needed from the user.

Re: Steam Frame

#306

Post by tym0 »

TGower wrote: post #274
tym0 wrote: post #92

Now that they've ported Steam to Android with FEX + Proton [0] (what this is running), the question is will they release it for the rest of Android devices? There is a ton of Android gaming handhelds and people are already experimenting with things like Winlator [1] but having well supported way could be awesome. [0] https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX [1] https://github.com/brunodev85/winlator

Unfortunately not, at least outside of the Linux VM shipping in new Android versions https://wiki.fex-emu.com/index.php/FAQ#Will_FEX-Emu_.28Linux...

It appears I was wrong about Android. The fact that they said you could just install APKs on it made me think what they called SteamOS was just Android here but your link is clear that FEX doesn't run there.

Guess they have yet another translation layer to run these APKs?

Re: Steam Frame

#307

Post by pixelpoet »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #96
pixelpoet wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an awesome shader on shadertoy that illustrates just how extreme the fovea focus is: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM Linus the shrill/yappy poodle and his channel are less than worthless IMO.

Imagine if we could hook this into game rendering as well. Have super high resolution models, textures, shadows, etc near where the player is looking, and use lower LoDs elsewhere. It could really push the boundaries of detail and efficiency, if we could somehow do it real-time for something that complex. (Streaming video sounds a lot easier)

As a lover of ray/path tracing I'm obligated to point out: rasterisation gets its efficiency by amortising the cost of per-triangle setup over many pixels. This more or less forces you to do fixed-resolution rendering; it's very efficient at this, which is why even today with hardware RT, rasterisation remains the fastest and most power-efficient way to do visibility processing (under certain conditions). However, this efficiency starts to drop off as soon as you want to do things like stencil reflections, and especially shadow maps, to say nothing of global illumination.

While there are some recent'ish extensions to do variable-rate shading in rasterisation[0], this isn't variable-rate visibility determination (well, you can do stochastic rasterisation[1], but it's not implemented in hardware), and with ray tracing you can do as fine-grained distribution of rays as you like.

TL;DR for foveated rendering, ray tracing is the efficiency king, not rasterisation. But don't worry, ray tracing will eventually replace all rasterisation anyway :)

[0] https://developer.nvidia.com/vrworks/graphics/variableratesh...

[1] https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/pubs/2010-06...

Re: Steam Frame

#308

Post by cruano »

vanadium1st wrote: post #185

Such a miss not having good full-color AR included. I’m a VR enthusiast with a Meta Quest 3, and it’s a shame that this headset is better than the Quest in every way except the most important one. In my opinion, VR gaming never becomes more than a gimmick. It adds a questionable improvement in graphics and immersion at the incredibly high cost of excluding yourself from the real world. Right now it’s not worth it, an…

> It adds a questionable improvement in graphics and immersion at the incredibly high cost of excluding yourself from the real world.

That's a feature for a good number of games, if not most. For example, Resident Evil 4/8 in VR are by far the best horror experiences I've had, and part of it is that you stop seeing your living room while playing.

> The motion controls in VR will also always be severely limited by the fact that you can’t see your surroundings.

There is zero chance that aiming with a controller is more intuitive than point-and-shoot. What I get from your comment is that the movement can be awkward which is absolutely true, but plenty of games have neat ways around that. And then there are games that require no actual movement, like racing games with a sim setup.

Re: Steam Frame

#309

Post by wat10000 »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #115
modeless wrote: post #60

Foveated streaming! That's a great idea. Foveated rendering is complicated to implement with current rendering APIs in a way that actually improves performance, but foveated streaming seems like a much easier win that applies to all content automatically. And the dedicated 6 GHz dongle should do a much better job at streaming than typical wifi routers. > Just like any SteamOS device, install your own apps, open a bro…

> Roughly equivalent resolution to Quest 3 and less than Vision Pro. This won't be suitable as a monitor replacement for general desktop use. The real limiting factor is more likely to be having a large headset on your face for an extended period of time, combined with a battery that isn't meant for all-day use. The resolution is fine. We went decades with low resolution monitors. Just zoom in or bring it closer.

The battery isn't an issue if you're stationary, you can plug it in.

The resolution is a major problem. Old-school monitors used old-school OSes that did rendering suitable for the displays of the time. For example, anti-aliased text was not typically used for a long time. This meant that text on screen was blocky, but sharp. Very readable. You can't do this on a VR headset, because the pixels on your virtual screen don't precisely correspond with the pixels in the headset's displays. It's inevitably scaled and shifted, making it blurry.

There's also the issue that these things have to compete with what's available now. I use my Vision Pro as a monitor replacement sometimes. But it'll never be a full-time replacement, because the modern 4k displays I have are substantially clearer. And that's a headset with ~2x the resolution of this one.

Re: Steam Frame

#310

Post by seabombs »

Brilliant, I'm anxiously awaiting Australian pricing details (and release dates...) but could definitely seeing myself getting one of these as my first VR device, and the controller looks great too.

Being able to run games on device (and on ARM) is very cool, but I wonder if there is a cheaper/lighter/longer-battery-life version of this that is stream only? That's probably a better fit for me personally, I can't imagine not having a streaming device nearby when I would be using it.

Also hate to be picky, but looks like the frame controllers pair directly to the headset so maybe can't be used on their own? Would be nice to use them standalone too.

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