Steam Frame isn’t Launching Alongside Steam Controller on May 4th Due to RAM Shortage

TL;DR: Valve saying they were trying to keep the price of Frame below that of the Index (full kit at USD 999) was apparently about "a little below", which may now be in question. The post below is mostly speculation about Valve price policy and the resulting much higher expected prices for what was rumored as Deckard.

While the delay of Steam Frame and Machine seemed inevitable, and those mostly interested in the controller basically begged Valve to release it separately, I'm somewhat concerned about the price. A lot of people were surprised about the USD 99 price tag, and while it certainly is a high quality controller with versatile input options, similarly priced to Sony or Nintendo controllers, and still cheaper than lots of so called Pro controllers, it's still rather expensive.

The critical part is that it most likely doesn't cost anywhere near USD 99 to produce it. Controllers are high margin peripherals, and when the Oculus Rift CV1 initially shipped with an Xbox One controller that retailed for USD 60, teardowns put its production costs close to USD 15. So about 75% was just margin, something that is very likely also true for the PS Sense controllers Sony offers in Apple stores for USD 299.

Now Valve said they weren't going to subsidize their new hardware, and justified the price with lots of design and engineering costs that have to be spread over much smaller unit numbers than with Xbox or PlayStation controllers. But it doesn't bode well for their overall pricing policy, as they now sort of set the expectation that what will come next won't be cheap either. They probably could have kept the price of the RAM-less controller lower if they really wanted to. But like with Index, and unlike with the Steam Deck, the name of the game again seems to be high level experience at a high level price.

Early Deckard rumors mentioned USD 1200, split over two devices, which at the time looked like a bargain for the expected high end specs. We now have learned that there are actually three devices, designed to work together. A "streaming first" HMD offering extremely low latency from a matching mini console offering about six times the HMDs performance, plus a controller that can be 6DoF tracked from the HMD and offers input parity with the Steam Deck for all kinds of flat games to be played on a large virtual screen.

No doubt the controller would be the the cheapest part, with the HMD most likely the most expensive. After the hand-ons, there was a lot of speculation about esp. the Steam Machine's price, which should perform similar to a PS5 console, so many assumed it would have to be similarly priced to be competitive. Valve engineers reacted with frozen faces when Linus Sebastian told them this in late 2025, hinting that the Machine would actually be more expensive.

Similarly there were comparisons to the USD 500 Quest 3. Frame will be faster with slightly higher resolution and much better weight distribution, using the very versatile SteamOS with the option to also play flat games, but lacks features like color passthrough, handtracking and Quests large library of mobile optimized games. Frame's performance will be high enough to play Quest games too, but not enough for most PCVR games through local x86 emulation. Leaked framerates in (not yet Frame optimized) HL:A put it at 40-50FPS, so you'd still need a PC for most PCVR games, just like with Quest. Making it hard to justify a significantly higher price.

Now Valve got lucky/waited long enough so that other vendors raised prices. The cheapest PS5 now costs USD 600, the PS5 Pro USD 900, and the Quest 3 USD 600. But of course Valve's production costs have also risen, so if their devices were planned to be more expensive before, they now will still be.

So while the rumored pre-RAMpocalypse bundle price might have been for example USD 460 Machine, USD 680 Frame, USD 60 controller to get to USD 1200, by November 2025 this had apparently changed to Machine significantly more than USD 500, Frame close to USD 900-1000, with the controller now about 50% more expensive than many that were hoping for Valve to price things aggressively expected (the 2015 Steam Controller sold for USD 50).

So what started at USD 1200 for an unspecified Deckard bundle has by now most likely passed USD 1600 and may slowly be creeping towards USD 2000, depending on how long and horrible the AI RAM grab fallout turns out to be. And around the time of the USD 1200 rumor, Deckard was still expected to feature at least 2.5K, if not 4K microOLEDs, and I personally expected it to use an AMD APU to run all PCVR games locally. A 2K LCD HMD paired with a PS5 class mini PC for more than 50% extra on top of that rumored price would be a very different value proposition, no matter how much I'd love to run SteamOS on a standalone HMD.

I think everybody was disappointed by the specs. Those still interested often are because of SteamOS, a lot of them because they own Steam Decks and know how much of a difference it made there.

We are now close to the fifth anniversary of the Steam Deck announcement, with the hardware performance barely changed since then, and many more powerful handhelds available. Yet even in 2026 the Steam Deck was usually still the most recommend PC gaming handheld (while it was still available). And if you needed something faster, the recommendation for that was a Lenovo Go running Steam OS, or at least installing Bazzite Linux to get close to the Steam Deck's utility and usability.

So while the new Valve hardware may not be tempting at all for you, given that you already own a lot more powerful devices, a couple of years down the line you might still be temped to run SteamOS on your high end PC and RTX GPU paired with the Pimax Crystal and its eye tracking support to basically emulate a high end Steam Frame/Steam Machine combo. Just like comfort almost always ends up beating cutting edge, the overall experience usually beats specs in the long run.

TL;DR: Most Quest games will require basically zero effort to run on Frame; the Frame is way faster mostly due to Valve using a less restricted Snapdragon SoC (plus extra measures to avoid throttling); SteamOS devices are more about the experience than the hardware.

Meta has shifted Quest to mostly use the cross-platform OpenXR, adding new features there instead of in their own proprietary SDK. In addition most Quest games are created in Unity, with further abstracts platform specific details, so you can basically recompile a Quest game for SteamVR just by picking another target. Quest can run ARM OpenXR APKs that will run the same on a Pico 4, GXR or Frame. If a lot of effort would be required to port a Quest game to another ARM standalone, there'd be basically zero Pico games.

For Frame, Valve extended SteamOS with Lepton, their version of the Waydroid compatibility layer that, similar to Proton translating Windows calls to native Linux calls, translates Android calls to native Linux calls, allowing for high performance when running foreign OS binaries. So Frame will be compatible with any ARM OpenXR HMD by default. In addition Valve implemented a couple of Meta-specific OpenXR extensions for eye tracking, so your Quest 3 may not support Meta OpenXR apps that use eye tracking, and you may no longer be able to get a Quest Pro that would, but your Frame will use it to gain extra speed in Quest apps from ETFR, making it the fastest Quest you can buy. (All this applies to developers, don't expect users to just be able to copy games directly from Quest 3 to Frame.)

And you are quite wrong about the performance difference. There may be only one generation of difference between the XR2 Gen 2 and SD8 Gen 3, but XR2 and SD are very different beasts for very good reasons. To start with, the XR2 is produced on an older/cheaper process. This is feasible because its cores are clocked much slower than on the matching SD8 Gen 2, and it only contains performance and economy cores, while the SD8 has additional low power cores and one high performance core.

This makes sense because phones typically switch between burst and idle use, while VR is a constant load application and never goes into low power mode. So the XR2 using slower cores with moderate power consumption allows it to run at sustained high loads without throttling. But it also means that its peak performance is way lower than that of the matching SD.

The performance cores in Quest 3 peak at 2.05GHz, but are clocked down to 1.4GHz in graphics heavy apps like games to give the GPU more thermal headroom. This is what allowed for an extra 150% graphics performance boost compared to Quest 2. The performance cores on the SD8 Gen 3 are clocked at 3.15GHz, and it has five of them instead of three on the XR2 Gen 2. The SD8 Gen 3 also uses one high performance core at up to 3.3GHz, though this can only be used for a short time due to its high power draw/heat dispensation.

All this will give the Frame a way higher peak performance than Quest 3, but also a much higher chance of thermal throttling. Valve's way to deal with this is double sided heat pipes for better cooling, creating very precise models of heat creep inside the SoC, and game specific profiles that adjust the core configurations and clock rates on a per game basis, allowing some to use the high performance for burst calculations, while others may run only on the economy cores to save energy.

You are also wrong about the XR2 featuring custom blocks. The SD8 already contains the Hexagon DSP that Quest uses for tracking, and the Spectra ISP used for image processing. We don't know if/how Meta uses the Spectra on Quest, or if it is disabled to allow for more power to CPU/GPU/DSP. The XR2 Gen 2 is basically a reconfigured SD8 Gen 2 with some types of cores removed, one extra performance core to compensate for that, a more sustained load friendly configuration, and a bunch of extra ports to connect more cameras, which is the most likely use of the Spectra on Quest.

We'll have to wait for actual real world tests to really judge the Frame's performance, but just based on what we know about the SoC, your assumptions about lacking performance are most likely very off. It should in fact be significantly faster than even a GXR or Play for Dream, both using an XR2+ Gen 2 with higher clock rates and better cooling than Quest 3. The only standalone faster than Frame will be the AVP.

And like with the Steam Deck, the big thing about Frame will be Steam OS, not the hardware. Frame will be able to run (some) x86 PCVR games, more PCVR games when they are recompiled for ARM, pretty much every OpenXR game, tons of flat PC and Android games, and every emulated game that runs on the Steam Deck via one of the myriad emulators, with controllers offering full input parity with an Xbox/PS game controller. And that's before even looking at ultra-low latency streaming from a PC. Nobody is bothered with the 1280*800 resolution of the Steam Deck these days, and I'd expect something similar to happen with Frame. This isn't Valve's first VR HMD, portable gaming device, custom controller or Linux based OS with broad compatibility, and they have gotten pretty good at merging all these into a pretty compelling experience.

This is such a stupid move if they wait too long they will lose supporters valve should just get off their asses and release it at what ever price it is at and lower it when the ram shortage gets better