t’s certainly been a journey for Valve. A week prior to the Steam Frame’s launch, we spoke with two engineers at Valve about the project: Joy Lyons, hardware engineer, and Jeremy Selan, software engineer. The memory crisis and the price were a big part of that conversation. From that chat, we can confirm that Valve had aimed for a lower price point than the one it’s launching the Frame for today.
Here’s Lyons on the memory crisis:
“We set out to design this hardware with one particular price in mind, but we’ve made choices to make sure that we’re making a product that is choiceful, that people can purchase, they can upgrade with different features later. But we wanted to make sure we had a base product with really great performance. Then that price target shifted due to the ongoing RAM crisis around the world.”
Lyons also said that forecasting for the cost of certain components used in the Steam Frame is an ongoing challenge.
Not exactly boding well of the Steam Deck 2.
I’m ok with it Valve. I might not be able to pick one up right now but it doesn’t mean I’m not interested. Just please don’t give up on FEX-EMU. That to me is the true value proposition of all this.
ARM is arguably more closed source than x86. Most ARM computers violate the Linux GPL license and run a closed-source fork of Linux.
FEX is cool, but I’ll wait until RISC-V becomes viable before I switch away from x86.
I’m more excited about the waydroid integration, I want to run android TV apps on my Steam Machine.
I’d say ARM makes sense for headsets for now because of the Oculus headsets, but I wouldnt be surprised if the Steam Frame 2 ran on x86.
I wouldnt be surprised if the Steam Frame 2 ran on x86.
Chance is higher that Steam DECK 2 will be ARM/Snapdragon. So far nobody seems to capitalize on the fact that x64 ran out of patent protection this year.
So far nobody seems to capitalize on the fact that x64 ran out of patent protection this year.
Maybe we’ll finally see some more competitors appear in that space and drive competition
The rumors seem to say it will be another AMD chip.
At the moment, there is no ARM SoC that is as efficient at idle as Intel’s Panther Lake, so I dont know why Valve would tie themselves down with Qualcomm and have bad Linux support and shitty BIOS.
Even if the base AMD64 instruction set is out of patent, there’s been a steady trickle of ISA extensions over the years, and enough software expects some of them to be present that it would really hamper the usefulness of a third-party implementation if it didn’t have them.
True but emulating specific extensions is less costly than emulating everything through FEX. Basically a slimmed down version of what Transmeta tried all those years ago. Especially Nvidia would be big enough to also come up with their own extensions.
Not saying that this will happen, just that there are feasible ways for competitors
If you’re going to emulate them, it has to be at the software level instead of part of the CPU (otherwise you’d effectively just have implemented the instruction, but stupidly, and still fall foul of any intellectual property issues), so you need to run custom code when an unimplemented instruction is decoded (that’s easy - you can just trap on an invalid opcode), but also need to tell software that might try to use them that you support those extensions (plenty of software checks the CPUID on startup and just errors out if required extensions aren’t reported). That’s harder to do. You could:
- run all user software with a debugger attached, single-stepping it and intervening when the CPUID instruction appears. This would be really slow as you’d have to context switch to run some debugger code after every instruction.
- run all user software on an emulated machine, in which case it doesn’t matter what your real architecture is (although having a compatible memory model helps avoid loads of locks).
- run all user software on a virtual machine, which requires virtualisation extensions, which came later than AMD64.
I’m old enough to remember Transmeta processors. I know what they did.
And it was functionally the second bullet point, with all instructions being emulated, so the emulation software was what the CPU really ran. You can do emulation of a CPU on a compatible CPU, but it doesn’t generally end up faster than doing it on an unrelated CPU. E.g. the code you’re emulating will use all the registers the CPU has, so you have to maintain a mapping from emulated registers to real registers (and because you need some registers for the emulator, some emulated registers necessarily must spill to memory), and the code you’re emulating could use any part of the address space, so you’ve got to map from the emulated address space to the real one. Every instruction potentially needs some alteration, so you can’t just run them as-is. There can be time savings, e.g. x86 has all aligned writes under 64-bits be atomic, so on unmodifed Arm, you need to insert extra locks, and if x87 instructions are used, they don’t quite conform to IEEE754, so would need doing via many integer instructions instead of a single float instruction on non-x86 platforms, but there can also be time savings from using a different architecture, e.g. Transmeta’s CPUs had way more registers than x86, so could give all emulated registers a real register and still have enough for the emulator itself to use.
– person who doesnt know anything at all about the entire marketing behind the steamframe
I’m going to have a bit of a hot take, judging by the comments here. $1k is exactly what I expected when they made the announcement that it was in development, and it’s what I put aside for it. Would it be nice if it cost less? Of course it would. However, $1K is what the Index cost, and I would consider the Frame to be a substantial upgrade as a solid, daily driver headset.
As an HTC Vive adopter, ordering an ergo kit sounds par for the course for VR. You usually don’t need one unless you plan on playing for 4+ hours, so I expect the Frame will feel similar in that regard. Since I like flight sims, I plan to get the head strap or fabricate one.
As for people complaining “it only has one game”, you clearly haven’t been paying attention on Steam. There is a massive library of dedicated VR games, as well as a plethora of “pancake” games with VR support. Most games on the Meta store are also on Steam, as well.
My go-to games are Hotdogs, Horseshoes, and Handgrenades; Elite: Dangerous, DCS, Derail Valley, Pavlov, TribeXR, Beat Saber, Pistol Whip, SUPERHOT, Assetto Corsa, Battle Zone Gold, and a VR mod for MechWarrior 5. I’m planning to get some QoL mods for Skyrim VR and Fallout 4 VR and giving those a run.Are you excited for H3VR2?
Hell yeah I am. I might even buy multiple copies to gift to friends. A while ago we got the multiplayer H3VR mod working and did some Take and Hold. Many shenanigans were had.
I am still picking one up as I just want a headset with good Linux support that won’t spy on me. I’m coming from an OG Vive, so it should still feel like a big upgrade.
I’ll absolutely pick one up unless I get backlogged hard like I did with the machine.
I wanted one as an upgrade to my vive, but $1800+ is a little too steep for my wallet, the vive cost me $699 when I got it
Same. Got an index but the wiring aspect always hindered me on a short vr session. Booting up and placing base-stations. And it almost always was kind of a workout after an hour. I hope for the new one to be less warm and lighter on my head. Such that it is more of a relaxed goggle.
I sadly barely used mine but have pleanty of vr titles i alwase wanted to try but were too much of a hassle to set it all up just for an relaxed hour after work.
With the wireless and local play? Some easy minded or story games could be played on a couch without any hassle.
Oh and also no more whine from the base-stations spinning at mach 3 :3
Same boat! I missed the steam deck, so I’m also looking forward to streaming 2d games from my PC.
It’s not that prices are too high, it’s that wages are too low.
Here’s a two things that will greatly improve this situation, unions forcing higher wages, and taxing the filthy rich till they’re no longer billionaires.
When prices go up and wages remain the same, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
I mean, it’s both, right?
We all agree wages suck shit, but my company bought 64GB of RAM for our laptops last year for about $200 each, and right now that same stuff is, what, $900?
Both things can be true at once.
I’m still haunted when RAM was at all time lows in recent history and I didn’t stock up. Figured I’d do it when I did a full upgrade a year later.
😭
I recommended a laptop to someone a few days ago only to discover its price had LITERALLY DOUBLED since last year:
Had to buy RAM for my work machine a few days ago, 600€ for 32GB. Shit hurts, man.
Ouch. I recently had a set of 64 GB sticks of RAM go bad and I went through weeks of back and forth with Patriot to get it RMA’ed under their lifetime warranty.
Worth every bit of hassle but yeah, I shudder to think if anything else dies at this point.
Have you not been paying attention to the semi-conductor and memory market? Prices are absolutely too high due to AI at this point and is part of the issue of why this and every other thing that uses a electronics is expensive as all heck. There’s a reason why my 64 GB of ram I bought for 110 dollars is now 500 bucks.
Wages and taxes are a whole other topic that while also true, is a whole other discussion outside of the release price of a VR headset.
Just to play devil’s advocate, everything is politics. If wages were higher, if multi-millionaires didn’t exist, if you owned your home and had a larger say in your communities laws and regulations, if your anti-trust agency was doing their job, if you owned a part of your work the AI bubble would look wildly different if not be impossible in its current form. We’re seeing the effects of wild wealth concentration and financial markets detached from their underlying financial output.
I’ll get one, eventually, but it’s a big purchase. It’ll probably be a next year sort of deal. I kind of figured the original price was around $750 for the entry level version, they would have probably had a 512 version but that would create a problem of segmentation of already expensive hardware. Thanks by the way, Sam Altman. Why don’t you go hump a black marker won’t ya?
Yeah. This sucks.
I was hoping for a new generation of hardware but I do t feel like it’s worth it at current prices.
It feels like a large expense for a step sideways.
People don’t have a spare thousand dollars… They just don’t.
A lot of people do have that. There are those who do and are willing to pay out the nose for tech toys to dull the pain.
I mean just look at the current sale of GPU’s.
Some people saved since the announcement a year ago.
I just wish they had better support for Linux out of the box. Still on the fence about buying one, but it’s more battery and performance related than price related (though the price is oof, fucking data centers and AIssholes)
Edit: To be clear, I’m referring to streaming from a Linux gaming rig being unsupported. Yes, I am aware SteamOS is Linux based. This will almost definitely be fixed at some point, no doubt, but still though…
I just know it would have been $600 if our biggest issue was still cryptobros.
$600 is still insanely expensive for my usage, but somewhat justifiable
It would be worth the price if they had more games to offer for it. They had how many years since half life alyx?
As someone that has at least a hundred VR games on Steam, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.
I can’t wait to hang up my Index and breach doors in H3VR with a wireless headset.
I’ve never tried VR before. Any recommendations aside from Alyx? I want to be excited
Honestly, I am most excited to come back to VTOL VR with some friends, one of which who hand-makes missions for us.
Also interested in H3VR 2, and a bunch of Flat2VR ports. Zelda BOTW, jedi knight academy, quake, half life 2, halo 3 and odst (first playthrough of ODST!), no man’s sky and robocop. I have a lot more I am interested in, but those are the main ones
Whenever Nuclear Option gets VR support, I might not leave my house for a week.
Yeah, I can’t even imagine! That would be so sick interacting with everything in the cockpit
What type of games do you like? I have a lot of recommendations.
On the note of HL:A, it’s really damn good.
Should I buy a used index instead?
The Index is great, but it’s also 7 years old.
I’m hard pressed to blame Valve for that. They’ve made massive contributions to a VR ecosystem that almost everyone seems to have stagnated in developing for.
I love VR, but it is something strange to think I’m still mostly playing the same games I bought 10 years ago. Some big players got in on it, but only to port their titles (Bethesda, mostly). Some devs have made some really cool things and development has never ceased for them, but Alyx is an outlier, really. As much as I’d like to see a follow up from Valve, I’d as much like to see that kind of energy from anyone.
You could point to Meta VR exclusives, but they hurt themselves through exclusivity.
I dunno. Alyx is the only game that makes me want to try VR. Nobody is really making any VR games for PC at all so who is to blame?
Meta/the Zucc. They bought up literally (I don’t mean figuratively) every single game studio that made a successful VR game, strung them along for three years, and then pulled the plug and shut them all down en masse.
Wow, $1100 for the entry level. I wouldn’t pay $500.
If youre interested Gamernexus did a review alongside metaquest3. I value my privacy, to that end I’m full-on leaning toward Frame, additional cost up front is nothing compared to what would be lost with Zucks VR iteration, in my mind. No one should tell you how to spend your money though, friend.
