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Steam Frame pricing and release date revealed by Valve - it's a lottery again
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this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2026
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There are third party wireless streaming devices that function with the Index. It doesn't take much compute to operate wifi and process minimally compressed video.
A headset with Chromebook equivalent hardware would be significantly cheaper than a headset with Steam Deck equivalent hardware.
They wanted a device like the Quest that would let people play decent VR without needing a strong PC. I think that was the right decision when it was being planned. But now that we're mid-RAM apocalypse, the better move may have been to iterate on the Index and not try to make a new platform.
I didn't know this existed, but a quick Google found nofio, but looks pretty pricy and doesn't have great reviews... https://www.reddit.com/r/ValveIndex/comments/1b9hc7i/im_a_backer_for_the_wireless_nofio_adapter_many/
It was finicky to get setup and their company was overwhelmed with support requests for months. One of the guys in my makerspace had one and we managed to get it working (it helped that they were EEs). Outside of some rare dropped frames it was pretty smooth without any noticeable latency increase.
The Frame just uses standard Wifi7 which can push around 17-20Gbps, more than enough for low latency compressed video. It would take minimal hardware to connect to Wifi, and run the video through some hardware decoder.
I understand why they're competing with the Quest, I'm buying one because it's a good standalone that isn't made by a data vacuum company (not yet, at least). The privacy aspect and Linux solidarity are what got me (I'm also selling my Index, so it's a 'cheap' upgrade)