Valve Unveils Three New Gaming Devices Including a Compact Steam Machine and Standalone VR Heads

All right, so Valve announced some very cool hardware today. I was able to test some of it out last week, and it's just awesome hardware because in classic Valve fashion, they've brought some very interesting technology into the gaming space. So, there are three new devices. The first is their new Steam machine, a console-like mini PC. And then secondly, they have their new Steam Controller. And then last is their new Steam Frame, an impressive streaming and standalone VR headset. So, the first thing I want to get into is that Steam Machine. It's a small box that runs Steam OS. So, you get that super intuitive, very easy to use Steam experience for your TV or desktop gaming setup. And the

performance goal here is that any game on Steam should be able to run at 4K 60 frames per second with FSR3. Now, the CPU and GPU in here are both semi-custom chips from AMD. And the idea here is that the performance on this GPU is supposed to be over six times the performance of the Steam Deck. and it's packing 16 gigs of user replaceable memory as well as 8 gigs of video memory. Now, the first reaction when I saw this thing, I was like, "Oh my god, it's tiny." Like, it's basically a 6-in cube. It's not a perfect cube. It's a little bit shorter and deeper, but it's basically a cube. And it is so weird how small it is. It's like 3 and 1/2 L, and it's this cube that can play games. Uh,

there's a good number of ports around it. You have your display port and HDMI. You have gigabit Ethernet. There's one USBC on the back. And then there's also two USBA on the back, but there's two more up front. And you also get a micro SD slot up front. So, if you have a Steam Deck and you store your games on a micro SD, you can just pop it out and bring it over into your new Steam machine and you just transfer your game library over there instantly. It's like a very simple way to bring games over. Uh, you also get a magnetic face plate. So, they showed a couple variants that you could swap around. And there's also a DIY one where one of the employees had made like an e- in display on one of it.

Uh, and then behind this panel is a dust grill that's designed to be easily cleaned. And there's also an RGB light bar that you have full control over. And they were talking about how you could have it show the download progress of games and updates. So you can start an update and then just swap over to a show or something. And then when that bar is full, you'll know that the update is finished and now you can play the game. It's like a super simple addition to this, but it's just a nice touch. When you open up the cube, you can see it's a very dense cube. We can replace the storage on the bottom. The stock drive is a 2230 shorty, but you can replace it

with the full size 2280 if you want. And it runs a custom heat sink as well as a 300 watt power supply. There's no AC brick or anything. And the whole system is cooled with a very quiet single fan. And when it's idling and doing light task, it's like mid20s, but even at full load, like maximum effort, this thing does 28 to 30 dB. I brought my ear up to it, and you could just you could tell it is a remarkably quiet system. And it's because they put a ton of time and engineering effort into like the thermodynamics and also like the fluid dynamics of like the air flow and everything. It is very well thought out.

The air flow comes in from the big intake on the bottom as well as the intake up front and it flows through the system through the power supply and out the rear exhaust. Now, in terms of my expected performance from this device, I've only used one other laptop that had a similar GPU that had a Radeon 7600M and the performance of that was similar to like a high wattage RTX 4060 laptop. So, it's solid for 1080p gaming, but for 4K gaming, I think a lot of the heavier titles will need to lean on that FSR tech. Uh, so they let me play with the system for a while, and a couple things I noticed, the sleepwake was really good. I put it to sleep several times, and every time I fired it back up, it

was right back into that exact same state. There was no stutter or anything. Uh, and I would say that the performance was just better than I thought it would be. I think I had like because it was so small and so quiet, I was like, h, how good could this possibly be? But yeah, I was getting good frame rates off of an early demo, and swapping between two games was really fast and fluid. Now, quick note about the antennas. There's four antennas. Two of them are dedicated to the Wi-Fi 6E connection. One of them is dedicated to the Bluetooth connection. So, like if you want to play games on a Bluetooth controller, you just have, you know, uninterrupted access to its own antenna, but the fourth antenna is dedicated exclusively

for their own kind of in-house controller. Now, in terms of pricing, they didn't indicate exact pricing on this device yet, but they did say that they're not targeting like console pricing. They're just targeting, I guess, small form factor PCs. And it's just like supposed to be competitive with that kind of hardware. So, like imagine if I had to throw a number out there, I would have guessed like 7 $800, maybe like 650 when it's on a sale or something. But nothing like crazy expensive, but I think a very reasonable and fair price for what you're getting here. Keep in mind though that the hardware in here is not upgradeable like a typical desktop. You can't swap out the desk like the CPU and GPU. Like you

can swap out the RAM, but you are kind of stuck with the performance that you're going to get based on just how you bought it on day one. Uh but I think for the people that are looking for this kind of product, this is like unprecedented. It's just so cool. Something so small, so quiet, and so functional. Okay, second thing, the new Steam Controller. So, if you'll remember a few years back, Valve launched this thing, the Steam Controller Generation One. And this was beloved by a lot of people that bought it because it added like, okay, so this section here, if you're unfamiliar with it, was a touchpad. And for a lot of people that want to do couch gaming, to be able to have like touchpad or just mouseike

support in game while sitting on a couch was something really cool. And we saw more of this tech when they launched the Steam Deck because this had two of these touchpad type interfaces. And people again really enjoyed using these uh pads to interact with certain games. And so this new Steam controller is basically like this Steam Deck control system, but turned into its own controller. So you get touchpad and gyro controls with top tier magnetic sticks all packaged into this nice ergonomic design so you can use it for your couch or desktop gaming. And you can run it wired or with Bluetooth. But if you want the best connection, you run it with the RF transmitter. And this transmitter puck doubles as a charging system. It's so

cool. It's magnetic and it's super easy to use. is you just slide the controller over that puck and you get this satisfying click as the magnets suck on. And it's so good. I feel like every high-end controller should have a charging system like this and the magnets won't accidentally attach if it's upside down or something. It'll only connect the right way because there's magnetic shunts. It's really neat. Now, the controller feels awesome in hand. Now, I tested it with a bunch of games, but there's one game in particular. It's like the Ninja Turtle Splintered Fate game, and this is a game I've played a lot on my phone. I've cleared it a couple times. This is a game that needs a very tight and responsive controller. any kind of latency will suck. And the new Steam

controller felt awesome. I think a big part of it though is because of the sticks. The controller uses these TMR sticks that are a magnetic technology that's even better than Hall effect. It's supposed to be just more reliable, less prone to drift, and also have smaller dead zone than the already great Hall effect sensors we've seen. And these are unfortunately soldered on. But Valve is saying that this tech is so reliable that they really don't think people will ever need to replace those sticks. If you take a look at the back of the clear controller, you can see these capacitive sensors at the bottom of the grip and those are there to reset

the gyro. So, if you've ever used a controller's gyroscope and you're kind of like moving around like I don't know, flying a plane or driving a car or just aiming with the gyroscope, if you've ever gone to the point where you like have rotated your wrist or your hands in a position where it's like not a comfortable place and you're like, "Ah, I want to control the thing, but like I'm I want to turn more this way, but my hands already here." The idea is you let go of the controller and the capacitive sensor will detect, okay, he's let go. So, it disengages the gyro, you reset your hand, put your hand back, and now you can continue turning in that same direction instead of like twisting like

crazy in one direction. And the idea of that is so cool. Personally though, I don't use gyroscopes. Like, it sounds awesome on paper and I heard that people would love this feature. I couldn't test it properly because it's just not how I play my games. Uh there's four haptic motors, two under the touchpad, two in the handles, and they're all highdeinition linear motors. They're not just rumbling. They're actually trying to give you precise tactile feedback in your game. Now, the battery life is aimed at 30 to 40 hours, and because that charging puck is so convenient, I think it'll be more than enough battery life for most people. Uh it does not come with the Steam Deck. It's a

separate purchase. If I had to guess on its price, the original one that came at like 50 bucks, I think, when it launched, I should hope this one's like $60, $70. We'll see. but I don't think it'll be crazily priced. Uh, okay. The last thing, the Steam Frame, and this was the most impressive hardware they showed me. So, it is a VR headset that addresses two different segments. The first segment and the primary segment is that it can be used as a streaming headset. So, you can have a system like a gaming desktop or gaming laptop or that Steam Cube or rather Steam machine that I just showed you. And as long as that system has a USB port, you can stream a game over into this Steam Frame

VR headset. That's the first kind of usage case. The second scenario is that you can use it as a standalone VR system. And standalone meaning that it's not connected to another computer. It is its own standalone device. So you could be on a plane or in a car or in a cave. Like you could just have this system and be experiencing a VR game or a VR experience just by itself without connection to a ancillary device. And this headset is very comfortable to wear. It's very lightweight. The whole product comes in at under a pound. It has four cameras up front, two more inside for eyetracking with a great screen, great optics, but it was remarkably comfortable to wear. The moment I put it on, I could just tell

like, okay, this is in terms of just raw comfort for an offthe-shelf VR product. this was the best. A lot of it has to do with the weight, but it's also like the positioning of the battery on the back. It's got this like nice counterweight effect to it. Now, the first experience that I got to try with this headset was the streaming experience. And I went into this with like very low expectations because I've tried a lot of streamed VR experiences. And as nice as the wirelessness is, it typically sucks. Like, you are streaming a lot of visual data over Wi-Fi. If there's any kind of glitch or even like a reduction in visual quality, that hiccup, it just

throws off the VR experience. It's about immersion, right? And the moment you break that immersion with like a little bit of a stutter or like something just doesn't align with the movement of your body or your head, everything falls apart rapidly. But Valve has done two interesting things in the space that change this experience completely. So, the first is that this product comes with a dedicated wireless adapter for streaming the feed into the headset. So, it plugs into your desktop or your laptop and it's a Wi-Fi 6E network that is exclusively for the visual and audio feed of this headset. So, any kind of other data, so let's say you're looking at a high score list or the game needs

to pull some kind of internet data, it will not use this feed. That'll use like the regular Wi-Fi network that you have around you, it's only for that visual feed. It's dedicated. It's uninterrupted. It's unaffected by anything else. It's just for that visual experience. Now, the second thing and the way more interesting thing that they've done is that they've introduced something called foviated streaming. So, we've heard of something called fiated rendering. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's when it uses eye trackers in VR headsets to adjust the processing power in VR systems to sharpen only the area that your eyes are focused on. That process or that technique is used in a lot of proper VR systems. Uh the

PlayStation VR does it, Apple Vision Pro does it, uh MetaQuest Pro does it. Uh there's a lot of like it's just like a very efficient way to use that processing power to make sure that you're only rendering what you're actually focusing on to make that thing that you're looking at as clear as possible. Okay, the same idea but slightly different when it comes to the fiated streaming. This is Valve's new thing as you look around in your VRC because the eye trackers are tracking what you're looking at. it is adjusting or boosting the streaming bit rate in the spot that you're looking at. And it lowers the streaming bit rate in the rest of the scene. And since you're only looking at like 10% of the image at a

time, it can allocate a lot of streaming bandwidth to just the thing that you're focused on and make that part of the image look really good. And you would think that you would be able to spot this. Like I put this on, I was like trying to dart my eyes around really quickly trying to kind of catch it and I couldn't. It's so fast. They even had a custom build of HalfLife Alex to demo this where it would only stream into the area that your eyes were focused on. Everything else was darkened. And so this fiated streaming tech is so responsive and so good that even if you try to jump your eyes around to like look into a dark area, you can't. It's just such a responsive system. Now, the

cool thing is that this technology does not involve the developer. Like with foviated rendering, the developer has to be involved because now they're like adjusting how the game is rendering the scene for the thing. But in this case, it's it's on top of that layer. So this just takes a regular game and it just whatever it's streaming to the screen in front of your face. So you don't have to get the developer involved and it works with every game that's on Steam out of the box with the image quality and responsiveness of a wired connection. Okay. The second mode or like the second capability of this VR headset is the standalone mode. And again, that's when you don't have it connected to a second

computer or another computer is just you're running off of the VR headset alone. Now, to do this, that would mean that this headset, the Steam Frame, has a chip in it. And the chip in here is actually the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the mobile chip that was in a lot of Android flagships last year. It's a very capable chip, but this is the first time I've seen it in a VR headset. And this system runs Steam OS on ARM. And for playing games, Proton handles the Windows to Linux translation, but something called fax, spelled FEX, handles the CPU translation from x86 to ARM. Now, both supposedly add very little overhead to this process. And in the early demo that I got, I was running Hades 2 in a

window, and it was running super smooth, and I was able to resize the window, and I was able to switch to a full VR experience of a different game. And these were just x86 games. These were not native ARM builds. And the question that I had was like how are you guys able to do this like make a game an x86 game run on ARM in Linux uh when Windows like Microsoft Windows has been struggling with this forever. like how are you able to do this so quickly and so well? And the response was simply like okay when you control the stack like you can control the OS, you can control the driver, you can control the instruction set, a single person can attack all three things to fix something in a day versus Microsoft

where they have to have like four or five different teams to coordinate which is a lot harder. And it's similar to how Steam Deck performance got so good so fast. And it made me think like if this works as good as it seems to work off of like an early look at it, I would imagine future like Steam Deck 2 or something, I could totally see it being an ARMbased chip. I'm just saying. Okay, some details of the headset. So, the first thing is that the front part detaches. So, this front piece has all the optics, the processor, the RAM, the storage, the cooling, the cameras, everything that makes this product what it is, aside from the battery pack and the speakers are all in this front

segment. And by making it detachable, users can now get a different strap system or different audio system or bigger battery down the line as those accessories pop up. Now, the speakers are very interesting. They project from the front to the back, and it's different from how the Valve Index did audio. Those had these little armatururs that would go above your ear. But on the valve frame, on each side of the frame, there are a pair of force cancelling speakers. And they had to go with that force cancelling tech because the vibrations of the lower frequencies when it was all mounted together would shake just enough to throw off the cameras. And like as you as I mentioned before, like any kind of artifacting or just

kind of imperfection in the visual system is it's not a good experience with VR. So by canceling out the vibration of the lower frequencies, they've been able to solve that. Now, the strap system works similar to like a pair of ski goggles. I found them not super easy to adjust, but you only need to do it once. Like once you set it up and you've kind of got it to your head shape and head size, you don't have to tweak it again. You just like put it on and off like you would a pair of ski goggles. There's some buttons on the front part of the frame. There's an auxiliary button on the right and a volume up and down on the left. And the pass through from the front-facing cameras was only black and white, which was surprising to me. And I think

because like there's so many budget options out there that are relatively inexpensive that have color pass through that I would expect it to be on here. But their stance on it is that we're going to try to just focus this product on gamers and that's not really what gamers use it for like the pass through stuff. However, there is going to be like third party add-ons or maybe their own that plugs up to a little port underneath the nose bridge that would provide color pass through if that's something you're looking for. the optic stack. It's pancake lenses custom designed by Valve and it's about 110 degrees FOV depending on how you measure it. There was like a typical black

perimeter to my FOV though. It wasn't like 100% screen. Uh it is a 2160 x 2160 resolution and just based on the short time that I had with it, it seemed like it was a very good optic stack as well as a really good screen. Now the controller, they call it the frame controller and it comes with the kit. It seemed to be really well tracked and the input control surfaces are all capacitor sensitive. So the buttons, the sticks, the triggers, the grips, the bottom of the handles, everything had a capacitive sensor on it so that you could just tell in games if you were even making contact with any of those points. The battery on the back is 21.6 watt hours. It's not like a huge battery, but again, the

primary focus here is comfort. And I think this is where they landed on in terms of like the balance of like long lasting and weight. The padding around all of it was really comfortable. It looks almost like hard packaging styrofoam because of its color, but it's actually a very soft material and very comfortable to wear. Pricing. So, Valve in classic Valve fashion has not revealed the exact pricing. They're aiming for something that's a little bit less than what the Valve Index was. So, that was like it depends on which package you got, but let's say 900 uh maybe 700 if you didn't have the base stations, but hopefully it's around there. The thing is this product exists.

This is the MetaQuest 3. And this product is a very inexpensive and incredibly good VR experience that you can connect to a PC and play Steam games on this. I think if I remember correctly, like 2/3 of Steam VR users are using a meta headset of some sort. Like that's how popular these things are. I think a big part of it is because they're so inexpensive. And I don't know if the average person is going to be willing to pay much more than the $500 price tag that this is for a VR experience. Uh I do think that just if you compare raw experience to one another, the Valve frame is definitely better than what the MetaQuest offers, especially with the dedicated wireless adapter and the very comfortable

ergonomics. But that thing is just super cheap. You can't ignore it. Okay. Uh that's the three new products from Steam. They will come out early 2026. That's when they're supposed to go retail. So, if you're interested in reviews, be subscribed then. Okay.