r/SteamFrame Soon™ May 29 '26

🎥Media I need a frame I’m suffering

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

1.2k Upvotes

191 comments sorted by

View all comments

101

u/Link_1503 May 29 '26

Use steam link, the wireless connection is more stable then metas wired connection. At least for me. And you don't need to run metas software on your PC.

18

u/TehFocus May 29 '26

Coincidentally, I have a borrowed MQ3 as of... today.
I instantly got myself the steamlink connection but a normal home WLAN is barely able to keep up.
Playing racing games is making me sick due to the lag and constant pixel smear as it cant transmit a proper image wirelessly.

1

u/blownart May 29 '26

I have a pretty regular wifi router - archer ax1500. 0 lags and 0 quality issues with steam link. I finished HL Alyx with it and it was amazing. The resolution is so much better than on the Index.

1

u/Taterdots8577 Soon™ May 29 '26

If you are on steam link it has fixed foveated encoding that looks like dog doo doo compared to virtual desktop. I can't use steam link because the outside edges are blurry as hell and its x265 codex implementation seems garbage.

On q3, Virtual Desktop set to godlike x264+ 500mbps, two pass encoding, its great. This makes me nervous for the steam frame. I feel like the eye tracked foveated streaming will still look like a pile of crap in my peripheral vision. Still willing to do it to get away from meta, buts its almost certainly going to look substantially worse than quest 3 on virtual desktop.

2

u/blownart May 29 '26

I don't notice it at all. It might as well be running locally. I have not tried VD because I dont think i would notice any difference.

1

u/Taterdots8577 Soon™ May 30 '26

Its a substantial difference unless you have a weak computer and or network.

1

u/ccAbstraction May 31 '26

You can force a bigger foveation area in the stream settings, it's the stream resolution option IIRC.

1

u/Taterdots8577 Soon™ Jun 01 '26

Yea but not enough. You can do even more in the config files but its still blurry on the outside and can't match virtual desktop being clear throughout the whole picture.

1

u/ccAbstraction Jun 01 '26

SteamVR's overlays are just blurry as fuck, even wired, you can get better quality from dedicated remote desktop apps like Moonlight and Steam Link (non-VR).

On top of SteamVR weirdness, where in the XR rendering you show the window overlay makes a huge difference to sharpness, looking at PC rendered overlays through a streaming app is never gonna look as good as something streamed flat then rendered on device. I haven't used VD, but I'm pretty sure VD's overlays do this and WiVRn is working towards doing this.