Valve: Steam Frame Doesn’t Support Stereoscopic Rendering of Flat Games but the Feature is “on our list”

By
Ben Lang
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35

Valve says that Steam Frame won’t be able to display traditional (‘flat’) games in stereoscopic 3D at launch, but they are looking into the feature for future development.

The News

The announcement of Steam Frame came with a lot of info but equally as many unanswered questions. One thing on my mind is whether or not the headset will be able to render flat games in stereoscopic 3D (assuming the game supports it). A Valve spokesperson told me that such a feature doesn’t currently exist, but the company is looking into it.

“For […] stereoscopic 3D content on [Frame], we don’t currently support it, but it’s on our list.”

The company further said it’s considering a system-level implementation that could display any stereoscopic 3D content, whether it’s stereoscopically rendered games, videos, or photos. Should the stereoscopic 3D feature be built, Valve told me it would “be our goal” to be able to display such content when streamed from a PC or rendered directly on the headset itself.

In an age of impressive conversion of 2D content into 3D content (like we’ve seen on headsets from Apple and Samsung), I also asked if the company was exploring any technology to automatically convert flat Steam games into stereoscopic output for viewing in 3D on Frame; unfortunately Valve said it isn’t something they’re currently looking into.

My Take

Without any automatic stereoscopic 3D conversion, the big question becomes: what content is actually available to users in stereoscopic 3D?

In 2025, there are very few flat games that natively support stereoscopic 3D rendering. But there’s a handful of third-party mods that inject themselves into the rendering pipeline to generate stereoscopic 3D frames from flat games. Since these aren’t developer-level integrations, such mods can work well for some games but not others.

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Side-by-side stereoscopic rendering (where the left and right eye views are packed into a single, final frame) is the most widely compatible format for stereoscopic 3D content today. So the lowest hanging fruit for Valve would be to allow Frame to view any arbitrary side-by-side content in stereoscopic 3D, whether rendered in real-time from a game or pre-rendered images or videos.

While there isn’t a singular and widely available marketplace of professional stereoscopic 3D media, some modern phones and XR headsets can capture stereoscopic 3D images and videos. And automatic 2D-to-3D conversions of photos and videos is becoming increasingly accessible. Most of these can be viewed in one way or another on modern XR headsets and Steam Frame could eventually be among them.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Moyenitude

    a 3D Vision comeback!

    • MarcDwonn

      Hell yeah! But not soon, unfortunately.

  • Hussain X

    I really hope Valve does focus on stereoscopic 3D gaming of flat games, & encouragers developers to support it. Meta should also get Xbox to support cloud streaming of stereoscopic 3D gaming. A great way to sell more VR hardware & grow install base for high budget VR games.

    Reshade SuperDepth 3D is a great app to inject 3D into games. You can watch some videos on YouTube on Quest in 3D to get an idea what 3D gaming can feel like. E.g check out Spiderman game played by Paradise Decay using SuperDepth 3D. You can watch it in 3D, & immersion is next level. Way better than flat gaming it.

    I also love converting videos from 2D to 3D using IW3 by Nunif, freely available on GitHub. Uses AI, & conversions look fantastic, almost production level quality 3D. It increases enjoyment of video watching multiple times over. You can even watch videos in 3D at the same time it's converting. It's one of my most essential, need to have software to have ever released & I can never go back to flat viewing for high budget shows & movies. It's like I'm almost inside the world.

  • Stephen Bard

    The "Photon" app in the Quest Store converts any 2D video to 3D. You can convert 30 videos per day for free as long as they are less than 3 minutes. To convert full length movies or videos longer that 3 minutes there is a subscription available. The 3D depth is very good, but not as perfect as you can get with the Owl3D app on your PC.

    • Oxi

      Are there any apps that do it locally on your PC's GPU?

      • Stephen Bard

        Owl3D

      • Hussain X

        IW3 by Nunif, freely available on GitHub. Uses AI (locally converted by your GPU), & conversions look fantastic, almost production level quality 3D.

        Note: I was the first person to write a comment on this article. I wrote quite a lengthy post including about IW3 but Disqus regarded it as spam & comment is apparently waiting for human approval & I've waited days. Since you're asking, I thought I'd let you know.

      • Hussain X

        IW3 by Nunif, free on Github. Uses local GPU.

  • Stephen Bard

    One of my favorite 3D conversion capabilities is that I run "realtime" 2D/3D video conversion continuously 24/7 on my Lume Pad 2 glasses-free 3D tablet and it looks very good with few edge artifacts. Meta recently added a window to the new Quest Homes that shows Instagram videos converted to 3D. What I really hope to see is 3D realtime video conversion running on the Quest 3 Browser, so things like YouTube will actually run realtime in 3D. I understand that the Android XR OS does realtime 2D/3D video conversion on the Galaxy XR headset.

    • Blackspots

      Instagram does 3D video conversion on the Quest 3, and probably the Quest 2

    • Oxi

      There needs to be good VR emulation of those kinds of lenticular displays and content.

  • Herbert Werters

    Support like that provided by Acer's spatiallabs for their 3D monitor would be a dream come true. If Valve doesn't do it, then I'm sure some modders will. I'm so excited about these VR glasses, you wouldn't believe it.

    So what Acer can do should be a piece of cake for Valve. Take a look at the list of games that are already supported by the monitor. It's crazy.

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    Stereoscopic rendering is expensive. The 2026 Steam Frame will use a 2023 Qualcomm ARM SoC not optimized for x86 emulation, and run Steam games through a combination of Proton Windows to Linux, Fex x86 to ARM, and DXVK/VKD3D DX8-12 to Vulkan translation. According to what Valve engineers said during the hand-ons, Frame should run Steam games at roughly the same speed as the 2022 Steam Deck, which comes with a 1280*800 display. So don't expect any miracles in standalone mode. The Frame is a "streaming first" HMD, and that will apply to flat games too.

    The Steam Machine is six times as fast as the Steam Deck, comes with the dedicated WiFi-6E that also drives the streaming stick bundled with Frame, which allows for much more stable/plug'n'play (foveated) streaming at reduced latency and higher effective bandwidth when paired with the Frame's eye tracking. So I'd expect things like stereoscopic rendering to first be implemented for the combination of Steam Machine plus Steam Frame.

    While running PCVR games or stereoscopic flat games locally on Frame sounds nice, the hardware isn't really suited for that. Trying it nonetheless will probably drain the included 21.6Wh battery in slightly more than an hour, while running Frame as a streaming client will allow it to actually benefit from the low power capabilities of the ARM architecture. It can quickly load and decode (with faster than XR2(+) Gen 2 decoders) the roughly 10% of the image size required for foveated streaming compared to for example streaming to Quest 3 lacking eye tracking, brightly flash the display for a millisecond and then fall into a low power mode until the next frame arrives, which should result in a much longer runtime.

    The standalone VR mode will probably be most useful for a few casual, low performance x86 games, ports from other ARM standalones or Android OpenXR APKs already capable of running on different platforms. And of course Beat Saber, with Frame the only non-Meta standalone capable of doing so, even more important now that Meta has ended Beat Saber support for PSVR1/2.

    The standalone "flat" mode will be useful for running flat games on a virtual screen, performance limited to what the Steam Deck can run, Android games available as ARM APKs, and (native) Linux/Windows desktop apps in some kind of desktop mode hopefully allowing to place Windows in 3D that nobody has seen yet.

    Everything else beyond these applications with rather moderate requirements will probably still require streaming from either a Steam Machine (with lots of performance improvements to be expected when combined with Frame), or a PC.

    • Cfilorvyls

      But isn't steam frame's main purpose is to be used for streaming from PC anyway? There's no reason the stereoscopic conversion necessarily needs to be done on the headset.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        Sure, Valve very explicitly labeled Frame a "streaming first" HMD, and if you render the stereoscopic view on the PC, performance won't be an issue. But Road To VR apparently asked about stereoscopy support on Frame directly, which can mean two things:

        1) Rendering flat games locally on Frame with stereoscopy to be displayed on the virtual display, which should provide a much more immersive experience, but will be performance limited on Frame.

        2) Simply showing content already rendered stereoscopic, like 3D movies or a game rendered this way on a PC. There is no general standard for how to transfer the two perspectives, for example some 3D videos contain the two perspectives side by side, either each shrunk to half the width, others side by side at full resolution resulting in an ultra-wide image. Some place the images on top of each other, and game support targeting shutter glasses will send the left and right frame one after another.

        So the Frame has to be able to somehow determine which part of the image to send to which display/eye at what time. And this of course complicates foveated streaming, because you may now have two separate parts of the image that have to be transferred.

        The company further said it’s considering a system-level implementation that could display any stereoscopic 3D content, whether it’s stereoscopically rendered games, videos, or photos.

        This sounds like Valve interpreted the question as mostly being about 2), but both local stereoscopic rendering with eye tracking and properly interpreting streamed or pre-rendered stereoscopic content are probably closely related technical issues.

        We've heard that there won't be any streaming official streaming apps like Netflix for Frame at launch, but even if Valve doesn't provide any stereoscopy capable viewer themselves, it will probably only take a very short time until someone has recompiled VLC that supports stereoscopic content in various formats to run natively on Frame. But it would of course be better if there was a system wide component that would enable viewing stereoscopic content everywhere instead of every app having to re-implement this by itself.

        • Herbert Werters

          I don't understand the problem with full/SBS 3D movies. There are tools that can do it, right? What's wrong with using them to play 3D movies? Virtual Desktop, for example, can do it.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            There is nothing wrong with that. I of course don't know how Ben came up with this article, but it looks like they asked Valve how Frame would handle stereoscopic content in a sort of general way, to which Valve responded that they haven't implemented that functionality yet.

            The reason will probably be their focus on gaming, so they expect VR games either running locally or streamed to take care of properly rendering it, and themselves only render flat games correctly on a virtual screen, which are the basic requirements for running/streaming flat and VR games on/to Frame.

            Even if Valve hasn't yet created advanced options like playback for all sorts of 3D movie content or stereoscopic display of flat games that support this, nothing is stopping users or developers to come up with their own solutions, and there are already a large number of players available for ARM standalones. The whole question is more relevant regarding the expectations people have. Some people had hoped that Frame would come with sort of a Valve created universal UEVR, allowing to play all flat games in VR, which for many technical reasons wouldn't even be possible.

            At least for now Valve has apparently implemented basic VR and flat gameplay (no doubt with lots of optimizations), and even though they plan for more, people should start with that when considering to buy a Steam Frame. And not expect for example a media experience comparable to AVP, with Apple massively investing into immersive content production and playback.

          • Herbert Werters

            Yes, none of this is Valve’s core business. But what everyone forgets is that users will have all kinds of possibilities open to them. If the will is strong enough, you can do anything you want.
            I think Valve could introduce something similar to Acer with their spatial monitors and various games if they wanted to. But let’s see, maybe there will be something like Decky plugins for the frame that can generate 3D via the Z channel. I don’t know how the spatial app does that on the Acer monitor. Whether it’s real stereoscopy or extruded via the channel.

    • Blackspots

      Yes, but the Steam Frame will be using the 3rd gen Snapdragon 8, not the gen 2 as you state

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        TL;DR: I actually pointed out that it uses the SD8 Gen 3, though maybe in a confusing way. The newer SoC will make Frame (much) faster than existing ARM HMDs when running ARM binaries, but it still won't be enough for most x86 games.

        I said "with faster than XR2(+) Gen 2 decoders" to point out that the SoC in Frame is a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, released in 2023-10, while pretty much all other HMDs use XR2(+) Gen 2 based on the one generation older Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.

        So I explicitly pointed out that the Frame would be faster, but that won't necessarily save it performance wise in standalone mode. Year-to-year performance increases for Qualcomm SoCs have been around 30%, giving Frame an automatic advantage, and the Snapdragons include a high performance core in addition to running their performance and economy cores at almost 50% higher clocks than the XR2s. Meta also underclocks the CPU in games to give the GPU more headroom.

        So on paper the Frame will be much faster than a Quest 3. But the XR2s use slower cores for a reason, as phone SoC aren't really designed to run at the max speed for a long time, they are tuned for alternating burst/idle cycles, while VR creates constant load. Valve will have to clock down the SD8 Gen 3 rather often even if their cooling is much better.

        Valve engineers talked a lot about that in the Gamer Nexus videos. They are working on game specific performance profiles for both the SD8 Gen 3 and all the different translation layers, so a turn based game requiring burst compute may utilize the high performance core, while one causing more constant load may only run on slower performance cores. How well this works remains to be seen, and SteamOS is excellent regarding power to performance ratio optimization.

        But this is still a mobile SoC, and those have had much lower CPU performance than even slow PCs. The Steam Deck pretty much wipes the floor with Quest 3 regarding CPU speed, which is important for things like game physics, while Quest 3's GPU performance is slightly higher. The Frame SoC should be faster, better cooled, higher clocked with highly optimized app-specific configuration optimizations that will allow it to run ARM APKs much faster than a Quest 3, significantly more than the 30% generational improvements would suggest.

        But it will take some time for these APKs to become available in relevant numbers, and most people will want to play their Steam PCVR games on Frame, which will come with a very high performance penalty from emulation. I trust Valve that they invested a lot in improving FEX and ARM Proton, but emulating another architecture is always very lossy and to be avoided if possible. Frame also has to render significantly more pixels than on the Steam Deck, so performance will be an issue with many Steam games.

        There were already tons of performance tricks on the Steam Deck like the 40FPS mode added to 30FPS and 60FPS, as its 25ms frame time is much smoother than the 33ms at 30FPS while saving a lot of power compared to 17ms at 60FPS. Frame could run the virtual screen at 120Hz for high comfort in VR, but run the flat content on it at only 40Hz to save a lot of power and performance.

        I'm sure Valve will have come up with lots of Frame specific performance improvements, esp. using eye tracking, but only actual tests and benchmarks will show how well that works. They didn't let anybody run any compute heavy VR apps like HL:A on Frame during the hand-ons, and they will have had a good reason for that.

    • Oxi

      It would be a selling point for streaming flat from a PC or steam machine to the frame, which is one of the core use cases they describe.

  • Oxi

    I personally just don’t think “playing your games on a big screen wearing your Steam frame” is very compelling. It’s an LCD screen, the effective resolution is going to be much lower than a 1440p display, 4K display, maybe even 1080p display, and the controllers will likely not feel quite as natural as a game pad.

    So I have to assume valve has some form of value add they haven’t revealed for the use case. Is it adding depth to the image? Is it spatial peripherals like a virtual steering wheel, flight deck, and macros? Is it the ability to have a couch co op session with friends inside your frames? Can be frame even hook up to a dock when needed?

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      The effective resolution for the virtual screen will be below 1080p, the performance about the same as a Steam Deck for x86 games. So you can really think of Frame as a Steam Deck for your face, just with a much larger display. And ignoring everything else they may have cooked up, that alone may be enough for many, me included.

      I love my 1st gen LCD Steam Deck, my main issue is the small screen and that it is quite large to take with me, so I use it within my flat most of the time. And according to Valve, about 20% of all Steam Decks are sitting in Valve's own, rather expensive Dock, connected to a large display, plus an unknown amount doing the same with a 3rd party USB-C to HDMI/DP cable or hub.

      So there is an actual market for a Steam Deck like machine that offers a larger screen, and the Stream Frame folds into a very tiny package easier to fit into a bag than Steam Deck plus case for even better portability and undisturbed gaming everywhere. The Frame controller will offer full input parity with an Xbox/PS controller, and you can also use Frame with the new Steam Controller that includes the Deck's trackpads and gyro for games requiring keyboard and mouse, thanks to the incredible powerful Steam Input. The Steam Controller can even be 6DoF tracked by Frame like the PS4 DualShock in PSVR1 games like Moss.

      Stream Frame as a flat gaming console will be a niche device, and just like the Deck, will never reach anywhere near mainstream Switch numbers. But also like the Steam Deck, it will be great for those looking for a still mobile, but less compromised gaming option with all the flexibility a PC can offer. And that specific group might love the Frame very hard.

      • Oxi

        While I can imagine someone using it while traveling, I’m not sure that’s enough. It may work for you but if it does, why not a steam deck and XReal glasses?

    • VR5

      It's actually very compelling and if it's comfortable enough, Steam Frame users will hardly ever go back to small screen gaming. The only games I play on PC monitors (or even TVs) are 8bit pixel art games that don't really benefit from a large screen.

      Resolution is overstated (only really matters for text/work) and most people have LCD screens anyway.

      • Oxi

        That doesn’t sound convincing at all, quality of display clearly matters, that’s why people buy OLEDs and 4K monitors, and this use case has been tried before from the oculus go to the apple vision pro and it has never really become a winning pitch for the main use case of a product.

        • VR5

          Steam Frame is basically the same 4K display with pancake lenses as Quest 3 and that is an amazing quality display. Sure people buy OLED but even more people buy LCD. Acknowledging that OLED is high quality doesn't mean that LCD isn't. Resolution is a number, it's objective, it's easy to market and to impress people with. But for watching stuff (not reading), size of display is more important than resolution. As long as resolution is good, a large screen will always be an attraction. Case in point, when you have handheld consoles in different sizes, the larger ones sell better. When people upgrade their TV, it is usually a bigger one. And smartphones also have grown in size.

          HMDs basically end the size race and put jumps in resolution back on the map. 4K makes no sense for smartphones but for HMDs it did. 8K makes no sense for TVs but it does for HMDs.

          AVP is ridiculously expensive. Its relative success doesn't show anything, it's simply priced out of the mainstream. Nevertheless it's another example of the above mentioned pattern: it has higher res but lower FoV than Quest 3 and isn't selling as much. 3S has even lower res and is selling even more. Size is more important than resolution.

    • Herbert Werters

      Pick up a gamepad, close your eyes, and imagine it has been sawed in half. Then you'll know it will work.

  • eadVrim

    Reshade 3D depth works like a charme for most games.

    • namekuseijin

      yes, but it requires plenty of tweaking per game and even then some games simply won't work

      No good for a console-like product

  • Sven Viking

    Support for basic existing side-by-side 3D videos and such should be available immediately via existing VR apps. Having it built in would be convenient, but 3D for existing games would be something that could actually make a difference. I guess mods will take care of that as long as they have support for native 3D windowed applications though.

    Another thing is that ideally, it wouldn’t just be stereoscopic but head-tracked 3D, so it was genuinely like looking through a window frame into a 3D world on the other side even if you moved or tilted your head.

    • Oxi

      While there are 3rd party options, things that valve buys into feel like a class above. Proton, FEX, etc

  • Mash Alien

    So even less of a reason to get this over a Quest lol

    • MrSoul127

      Yeah. On top of things like, not an OLED and prob going to be a grand US lol

  • Nick

    Saying it's a feature that other headsets have is a little reckless. Those headsets have applications that have stereoscopic effects and SteamOS will allow developers to add similar apps. It's open. If adding the effect to your flat screen library is not officially supported someone will add a decky loader plugin to wrap your game with ReShade and enable stereoscopic on the virtual theatre screen. Hell, I'll do it if no one else does.