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

Last updated: September 8, 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 color passthrough or hand tracking. Valve has confirmed every number on this page and none of the money: there is still no price and no release date beyond summer 2026.

Specifications below come from Valve's own 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.

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.

Cameras, audio and connectivity

Note the two different radios. The Frame has Wi-Fi 7 with dual radios for normal network use, and it ships with a separate 6GHz Wi-Fi 6E USB adapter that plugs into your gaming PC to create a dedicated point-to-point link. That adapter 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. No price, and no date.

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.