Steam Frame Specs: Every Confirmed Number, and the Ones Valve Has Not Given

Last updated: September 23, 2026

Part of our Steam Frame hub. See also the release date tracker, the price tracker, the Steam Frame vs Quest 3 comparison, and the Great on Frame verified games list.

The Valve Steam Frame is a standalone SteamOS headset with 2160x2160 LCD panels per eye, a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 paired with 16GB of LPDDR5X, a 21.6Wh battery mounted at the back of the strap, and a visor that weighs 185 grams on its own or 440 grams fully assembled. It has eye tracking, four greyscale tracking cameras, Wi-Fi 7, and a PCIe expansion slot. It does not have built-in color passthrough or hand tracking. It launched on September 14, 2026 at $1,059 for the 256GB Kit and $1,299 for the 1TB Kit, without a power supply in the box.

Specifications below come from Valve's Steam Frame product page, published with the September 14, 2026 launch, and from Valve's original announcement, as documented in UploadVR's write-up of the November 12, 2025 reveal, with the expansion slot detail confirmed against Road to VR's September 2 report. Where sources disagree, this page says so rather than picking the tidier number.

Where to get itValve Steam FrameFrom $1,059Sold on Steam through Valve's reservation queue. The first draw closed September 17, purchase emails have gone out in waves since September 18, and Valve has published no timeline for the waitlist.See it on the Steam Store→Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong: order through KOMODOWant a headset now? See today's VR deals

256GB kit $1,059, 1TB kit $1,299, each with controllers, the wireless adapter and Half-Life: Alyx. The 45W power supply is sold separately for $29.

Image: Valve

Display and optics

2160x2160 per eye is 4.67 million pixels an eye. Quest 3 renders 2064x2208. On paper the Frame is ahead, but the number that will decide how it actually looks is not on any spec sheet: how hard the Snapdragon has to compress a streamed image to get it across the room. That is what the eye tracking is for.

Compute, storage and power

The weight split is the design decision worth understanding. 185 grams on the face and the battery behind your head is a very different object to wear than a 515-gram Quest 3 with its mass out front, even though the Frame's assembled 440 grams is not far off. Valve also made the battery part of the strap and replaceable, which is a repairability choice almost nobody else in this category has made. What it did not make is a charger: the Frame ships without one, and Valve's own 45W unit is a $29 add-on at checkout.

Cameras, audio and connectivity

Note the two different radios. The Frame has Wi-Fi 7 with two radios, and Valve's launch page spells out the split: one is dedicated to streaming audio and video, the other connects to your Wi-Fi. It ships with a separate 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E USB adapter that plugs into your gaming PC to give that stream its own link. Multi-Link Streaming then routes data across every available connection at once, and Foveated Streaming uses the eye tracker to send the best pixels only where you are looking, which Valve says typically offers over a 10x improvement in image quality and effective bandwidth. That stack is the reason Valve calls this a streaming-first headset rather than a standalone one. Hands-on reports have described the streaming as having no perceptible lag.

The controllers

Two details deserve more attention than they got. TMR thumbsticks use magnetic sensing instead of the resistive contacts that wear down and produce stick drift, which is a fix for the single most common controller failure in the industry. And a single AA running roughly 40 hours means no charging dock, no proprietary cell, and no controller that dies mid-session with no way to keep playing.

The expansion slot, and what is already being built for it

The Frame carries a one-lane Gen 4 PCIe data port and a dual 2.5Gbps MIPI camera interface, and Valve has said it intends to publish CAD files so third parties can build their own attachments. At announcement Valve named the categories it had in mind: face tracking, depth sensors, full body tracking, entirely different tracking solutions, and color passthrough cameras.

Ten months later the first product in that last category surfaced. Komodo Station, Valve's hardware vendor in Asia, published a product page for an Arcturus color passthrough module with dual 32-megapixel sensors and 5K stereo capture, apparently earlier than anyone intended. Arcturus Industries built the camera tracking system inside the Frame, so the company selling the upgrade supplied the part being upgraded. On launch day Valve made it official, listing the Arcturus Vision camera on its own Steam Frame page as a Steam Frame Compatible accessory that adds 5K HDR color passthrough and spatial video capture. UploadVR reports a $149 price, a 10-gram weight and dual 32-megapixel Sony RGB sensors, attached through the PCIe expansion port described above. Zenni prescription inserts carry the same Steam Frame Compatible mark.

What launch day answered

What Valve still has not told anyone

The absence of a published battery runtime is the one that should bother buyers most. 21.6Wh is a real number, but watt-hours only become hours once you know what the headset draws, and that depends entirely on whether you are streaming from a PC or rendering on device. Valve has been happy to quote grams and pixels and has said nothing about how long the thing runs.

Where to get itValve Steam FrameFrom $1,059Sold on Steam through Valve's reservation queue. The first draw closed September 17, purchase emails have gone out in waves since September 18, and Valve has published no timeline for the waitlist.See it on the Steam Store→Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong: order through KOMODOWant a headset now? See today's VR deals

256GB kit $1,059, 1TB kit $1,299, each with controllers, the wireless adapter and Half-Life: Alyx. The 45W power supply is sold separately for $29.

Image: Valve