The Steam Frame headset and new controller look very impressive

Alongside the new Steam Machine home console/PC experience, Valve also dropped a huge update for the Steam Controller and a new VR headset called the Steam Frame.

All of the new hardware is launching in 2026, and the company has yet to share pricing.

Steam Frame

The new headset allows you to play both 2D PC games and 3D VR games; however, as you might have guessed, you can’t run them natively and instead, this device is built to stream games from your existing PC.

To help accomplish this, Valve has created a new form of streaming technology called Foveated Streaming, which, like foveated rendering, uses eye tracking to ensure that whatever you’re looking at is crisp, while the rest of the image is less sharp.

There’s also a new USB dongle that comes with the headset that plugs into your PC and gives a dedicated 6GHz link between the headset and your computer to make sure nothing else is piggybacking on the same network you need to beam games to your headset. The Steam Frame itself is also designed with this ethos. It has two antennas, one for streaming games from your PC and another for connecting to Wi-Fi.

There are also new Steam VR controllers.

That said, there is still a computer packed away in the headset with a Snapdragon 8 series processor and 8GB of RAM, so some games will be playable natively on the headset, but it’s unclear how many or how well the ARM chip will run games on two 4k displays that are centimetres from your eye.

Inside the headset, there’s a 2160 x 2160 LCD screen for each eye that supports refresh rates of 72-144Hz. There are also speakers built into the headset so you can play without the need for headphones. Outside the Frame, there are four cameras that do controller and hand tracking for you, so you don’t need to set up base stations like you did with previous Valve VR headsets. The company says these new cameras will even work in dark environments.

You can check out all the specs on Steam’s website, but notably, it will have a MicroSD card slot, new Steam VR controllers, 45-watt USB-C fast charging and more.

Steam Controller

While we’re still waiting on pricing for all the new Valve gear, one thing I will be keeping a close eye on is the Steam Controller.

This evolution of the company’s old gamepad brings the large touch pad squares over from the Steam Deck and makes it fit seamlessly onto a handheld controller. The new model has dual joysticks like a PS5 controller, but still retains the Xbox A, B, X, Y layout for the buttons.

On top of all that, the controller comes with a little dongle/charging base that both acts as a wireless transmitter for your controller and lets you magnetically connect it after you’re done gaming to charge. That said, you can still use the controller over Bluetooth or a wired connection if you wish.

Like the thumbsticks in the new Steam Frame controllers, the gamepad uses magnetic joysticks that should add long-term reliability to the devices since they should avoid stick drift. The regular controller also has HD rumble and gyro controls to provide more advanced haptic feedback. What’s cool about the gyroscope is that you need to grip the controller to hit two capacitive buttons underneath to activate it, so you can play without it being on all the time.

You can also map these two gyro control areas to be another button if you don’t want to use tilt controls. Further underneath, there are also four other custom buttons you can remap.

Valve says the new controller can be connected to any device that runs Steam or Steam Link, which should mean pretty much every computer and phone, plus even some smart TV boxes like the Nvidia Shield or Apple TV. On the specs page, it lists Bluetooth 4.2 as the minimum compatibility requirement, but recommends using Bluetooth 5.

Source: Steam