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Steam Frame starts at $1059

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Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#81

Post by Rohansi »

0-_-0 wrote: post #78
TGower wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2x GPU performance[1] and RAM, along with it being your machine instead of a locked down Meta android device is worth 2x the price for many. Eye tracking is also huge, both as an additional input device, and lifting GPU performance even more with foveated rendering. [1] https://shattered.io/steam-frame-vs-quest-3/

Is there an example of foveated rendering implementation?

No Man's Sky is doing it now. It's also useful for foveated streaming which works for all games.

https://www.nomanssky.com/cosmos-update/#:~:text=Added%20sup...

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#82

Post by m4rtink »

stego-tech wrote: post #58

I think the price is very reasonable for what’s on offer (especially given the current memory crisis), and given that Valve doesn’t subsidize the cost of anything, it really shows how much Meta values your privacy and biometric data for advertising purposes (~$600 in subsidies). One thing I keep seeing reviewers skip over is VR Chat, which is weird since it’s a core VR experience that continues seeing average player…

For VRChat it has even more benefits - built in eye tracking out of the box and and expansion port for which rumoredly there should be an official project Babble lower face tracker under development. :)

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#83

Post by spijdar »

bee_rider wrote: post #76
spijdar wrote: post #69

I think the only way this is really compelling is if it's able to effectively function as a virtual Linux desktop with a reasonably clear floating monitor in front of you. I'm not sure that's appealing to me for a couple reasons that mostly boil down to "I don't really want a computer strapped to my face for hours at a time", but I'm the right kind of weirdo who sees the appeal in being able to eliminate the 32 inch…

I’m somewhat surprised nobody has pointed one of those hacking models at a Rift CV1 and said “make it work without all the Facebook junk, preferably in Linux.”

... You know, now there's an idea ...

But in seriousness, I've gone down this rabbithole ever year or two for about as long as I've had the darn thing (including one especially masochistic attempt at making it work on ppc64le), and any time I have gotten an open stack to drive it, the result has always been unusable with regard to input jitter and "general feel". Which is to say, yes, people have already figured out how to drive it on Linux.

It's just that the experience sucks.

Very impressive work by all the folks who hacked on it. But it seems like actually getting all the smoothing/filtering and interpolating sensor data is, for whatever reason, an unreasonably hard problem. Dunno if the LLMs could help at all, short of ... stealing the secret sauce from the proprietary runtime??

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#84

Post by Waterluvian »

njovin wrote: post #47
sporp wrote: post #16

Half-Life Alyx is the greatest gaming experience I have ever had the pleasure to witness. I now occasionally VR golf. It's a steep price for a niche with not a lot of games.

Everyone is missing maybe the biggest point - this isn't just a VR device. You can run some/many (depending on your library) of your regular Steam games on a 'flat screen' inside the VR environment, which makes this much more like a SteamDeck with a giant private screen for a lot of people.

Not trying to proselytize an opinion here, but every time I think about VR Goggles + a virtual flat screen, I think about how entire industries exist to make us comfortable while we watch our real flat screens. A VR option would allow me to just lay comatose-like in my bed, goggles affixed to my face, as I watch whatever. It terrifies me, partly because of how good I bet it could feel.

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#86

Post by schmorptron »

It's absolutely wild to me that they didn't include, and have devs ship profiles for some of their games, SuperDepth3D or some other depth map shader officially in some form in the Steam UI for this. If a big focus is playing your pancake library on a huge screen (due to there not being not many native VR games), having that huge screen be 3D would be a huge value add. And they're big enough to get some developers to ship profiles for their games officially guaranteeing some form of workingness(?).

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#87

Post by fg137 »

tpmoney wrote: post #65
sergiotapia wrote: post #20

Brutal pricing. It would have been brutal at $600. Having said that, there really is no other game quite like Half Life Alyx. It's so good, immersive and one of a kind. Perhaps worth the price of admission. It's so good that it kind of ruined VR gaming for me because all other games kind of felt like tech demos from that point on. Yikes, what a terrible price. 55 minutes playing on-device Half Life Alyx. 1hr 30min st…

Is it really that bad? The hardware processing and storage is effectively a S24 which retails for $800. Add the additional displays, cameras and controllers, an extra $250 doesn’t seem that out there.

Eh, I don't think that's how the maths works, especially for products that are in completely different categories. For starters, display costs relatively much more on a VR headset compared to a 6" phone screen, the unit cost is much lower for a phone that is sold in many millions, the marketing cost is different etc. There will likely be actual breakdowns that provide some perspective into this.

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#88

Post by dawnerd »

Stevvo wrote: post #21

Wish Valve would make enough of something so that everyone that wanted one could get one. I wanted to get an Index headset when they launched that. I would check the Steam store page every few months, for 5 years. Every time it said "Out of Stock". It's still out of stock in France today. They design great products, but are useless at getting them produced in quantity.

The scalpers will probably be all over this too.

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#89

Post by kikkia »

bsimpson wrote: post #67
kikkia wrote: post #15

If use for solely VR Gaming, and you don't care a ton about the privacy aspect, it is a hard sell against a new or used Q3. However, for myself personally I love the idea of it as a device I can tinker with and have full control over. I would love to also replace my laptop with it while traveling. Especially with a small wireless keyboard it has a good chance to replace my laptop for tinkering/gaming on the go. With…

Doesn't wearing a headset in public have antisocial "Glasshole" vibes? Honestly, people who cowork in public already give me the ick. Maybe immersing yourself in a headset is just a physical manifestation of the digital immersion that is already plaguing public spaces.

Im not too familiar with the term Glasshole, but on long dark plane rides, if I want to use my laptop I feel like a lighthouse, even with lowest screen brightness. If I look like a dork with it on while doing some light gaming or movie watching, that is an OK price to pay to not disturb others around me. But if you are talking about just general out in public, then it absolutely gives dorky vibes. On the train, or in a coffee shop or something, a laptop just looks much less conspicuous.

Is the Glasshole thing more geared towards recording people in public? This headset has 1. bad cameras but 2. a much better privacy posture than meta.

Re: Steam Frame starts at $1059

#90

Post by teekert »

thefz wrote: post #52
njovin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is missing maybe the biggest point - this isn't just a VR device. You can run some/many (depending on your library) of your regular Steam games on a 'flat screen' inside the VR environment, which makes this much more like a SteamDeck with a giant private screen for a lot of people.

> You can run some/many (depending on your library) of your regular Steam games on a 'flat screen' inside the VR environment I can already run 100% of my Steam games on a flat screen in front of my real eyes

Not cinema size, and not with your poor eyes focused on "infinite". And not any of this on a plane, or a train, or a self driving car, or an RV.
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