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Valve announced Steam Frame today, but what’s the difference between the company’s first VR headset, Valve Index? Read on to find out.

Index is a tethered PC VR headset that uses the company’s SteamVR tracking standard, requiring laser-emitting basestations that the headset and Index controllers use to localize spatially for room-scale gameplay. You also need a VR-ready PC, since it’s not a standalone device.

When it was launched in 2019, there were a few VR headsets on the market that made use of optical tracking, sometimes called ‘inside-out’ tracking, like Rift S, Windows Mixed Reality, and the original Quest—which weren’t as precise as SteamVR’s decidedly more cumbersome tracking standard. If you were primarily a PC VR gamer looking for the best all-around headset at the time though, Index was a no-brainer.

But PC VR headsets are lighter now, and the ‘no-brainer’ award for users in the SteamVR tracking ecosystem has moved on to slim and light PC VR headsets—like Bigscreen Beyond 2, which supports the full gamut of SteamVR tracking devices, like Tundra trackers, Index controllers (aka ‘Knuckles’) and more.

Early next year though, there will be a new headset in town: Steam Frame. Like Index, Steam Frame can play PC VR games, although you can ditch the basestations and two-meter tether, because Valve’s latest and greatest uses optical tracking and comes packed with a Wi-Fi 6E dongle in the box, which plugs into your computer for directly streaming Steam games (VR or otherwise). That means you’ll be sacrificing those hard-earned SteamVR tracking accessories, but maybe going fully wireless will be worth it.

Since it’s a standalone sporting a Qualcomm Snapdragon Series 8 Gen 3 (released in 2023) running SteamOS, you can actually directly download flatscreen and PC VR games to play natively. No wires, PC, or anything else required. While not all PC VR games played natively are guaranteed to work well out of the box, Valve seems to have a plan.

Valve says flatscreen games should play on Frame just fine, although more demanding PC VR games will need to be optimized by developers first: exactly why the company is first releasing dev kits to studios. We also expect to see some sort of badging system on Steam in the future (à la Steam Deck) that lets you know when natively downloaded PC VR titles run great, okay, or not at all. Whatever the case, Valve isn’t stopping you from trying.

But because dev kits are only now just heading out the door, that means price and release info is still MIA, due to come in “early 2026,” Valve says. In the meantime though, you can have a look at just what Valve has cooked up for its long-awaited first standalone VR headset in our hands-on with Frame—which handily beats Index in nearly every measurable category.

Nearly. While Frame’s 2,160 × 2,160 per-eye LCDs and pancake lenses beat Index’s 1,440 × 1, 600 per-eye LCDs and Fresnel lenses by a long shot, Frame’s monochrome passthrough definitely feels last (last) gen over the full-color passthrough on Index.

Hackers may be able to remedy that by jacking into the gen 4 PCIe slot in the user-accessible port, which supports up to two 2.5Gbps camera sensors. Like Index’s ‘frunk’ USB port, Valve isn’t making anything first-party for the PCIe slot, which is a bummer. Whatever the case, gen 4 PCIe certainly has more bandwidth than the ol’ frunkster.

Steam Frame vs. Valve Index Specs

More Steam Frame Announcement Coverage

Valve Unveils Steam Frame VR headset to Make Your Entire Steam Library Portable: Valve shows off Steam Frame, the standalone headset that can stream and natively play your entire Steam library—with only a few caveats right now.

Hands-on: Steam Frame Reveals Valve’s Modern Vision for VR and Growing Hardware Ambitions: We go hands-on with Valve’s latest and greatest VR headset yet.

Steam Frame’s Price Hasn’t Been Locked in, But Valve Expects it to be ‘cheaper than Index’: No price or release date yet, but Valve implies Steam Frame will be cheaper than $1,000 for the full Index kit.

Valve Says No New First-party VR Game is in Development: Valve launched Half-Life: Alyx (2020) a few months after releasing Index, but no such luck for first-party content on Steam Frame.

Valve is Open to Bringing SteamOS to Third-party VR Headsets: Steam Frame is the first VR headset to run SteamOS, but it may not be the last.

Valve Plans to Offer Steam Frame Dev Kits to VR Developers: Steam Frame isn’t here yet; Valve says it needs more time with developers first so they can optimize their PC VR games.

Valve Announces SteamOS Console and New Steam Controller, Designed with Steam Frame Headset in Mind: Find out why Valve’s new SteamOS-running Console and controller will work seamlessly with Steam Frame.

Steam Frame vs. Quest 3 Specs: Better Streaming, Power & Hackability: Quest 3 can do a lot, but can it go toe-to-toe with Steam Frame?