Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Controller] - Steam Controller related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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The Valve Index is just an I/O device (display, tracking* and controllers), whereas the Steam Frame is also a stand-alone Linux computer (although with a very limited battery life and around the power of a cellphone).
For tracking, the Index does room-scale outside-in tracking using little boxes that you have to hang up in your room, called Lighthouse VR base stations. The Frame uses inside-out tracking of controllers using a combination of IR cameras and gyro--maybe not quite as accurate, but significantly more convenient. I believe that the original base stations that were sold with the index are no longer being made, but other ones are, though I'm not sure.
The Frame supports eye-tracking, plus eye-tracking features like foveated rendering and streaming. The Index doesn't, at least not out of the box. These optimizations essentially make things look better/sharper exactly where you're currently looking even as you look around, which generally gives you better performance.
The Frame can be used wirelessly, and comes with a dedicated 6GHz streaming dongle. The Frame also supports an interesting mode called a Multi-Link connection which uses both the dongle and your WiFi at the same time to (in theory) give you a most stable connection. Unlike the Frame, the Index must be plugged into a computer at all times.
The Frame is lighter and smaller than the Index, and has better, higher-resolution screens.