Do you Need a PC for the Steam Frame or is it Standalone?

Yes, you can use the Steam Frame as a standalone VR headset, but it's better if you pair it with a good PC. The Steam Frame is a hybrid device meaning it can run standalone, or you can stream content from a PC. Let’s look into it in a bit more detail so you can see if it would be something that matches your needs.

The Steam Frame is what Valve are calling a “streaming first” VR device meaning you can operate this wirelessly via the included Wi-Fi 6E (6Ghz) dongle. Or you can run it as a standalone but with some limitations.

So what does the 2nd generation Steam VR have tucked away inside the headset?
Well we have a 4nm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, 16Gb of RAM, storage wise you can have either a 256GB or 1TB, in standalone mode uses FEX emulation and Proton to run X86 windows on ARM64 hardware.

This means you can run a number of games from the headset itself such as Beat Saber, Factorio or Hollow Knight: Silksong. This gives you a lot of flexibility and some excellent games.

For example if you share a gaming PC, it means one person can use the PC and the other play some lighter titles, or if you are going away and want some light gaming options it makes an ideal travel solution.

To take the confusion out of which titles run standalone, Steam has a dedicated Great on Frame store page where every game listed has been tested and confirmed to work natively without issue.

So yes, you can play some lighter titles but to get the full experience you’re going to need to connect to your PC for some of the graphically heavier more demanding games. While the ARM64 processors have come on leaps and bounds, it is still a CPU from 2024 found in smartphones, and as such we cannot expect it to run everything.

This is where the hybrid system and the Wi-Fi dongle come into play. If you want to play titles such as Assetto Corsa, No Mans Sky or Microsoft Flight Simulator you will certainly be wanting to link this to a PC, aside from the fact you likely will be using a stick or wheel the graphically requirements of the games are just too much for the ARM64 architecture to manage.

With DLSS 5 now expected to roll out to more and more games it also makes sense especially in VR after all photo realistic textures in VR will look incredible, unless it happens to be when said texture is the ground and you have “terrain terrain pull up” being screamed at you.

Again, Valve has you covered with a Steam Store page dedicated to VR titles which is worth checking out for a full and ever-expanding list of approved VR games.

To summarize, yes there are a lot of games you can play on the Steam Frame without ever touching your PC, and we can expect this list to grow as Valve confirms more titles suitable for the device.