Someone Has To Challenge Meta For The Vr Throne And I Really Hope...

I've developed what I can only describe as a begrudging respect for Meta's hardware output right now. I've bought almost every Meta headset to date, and unboxing the first one in the Summer of 2020 is definitely a highlight of my VR journey so far.

However, Meta's dominance in the market is soured somewhat by Meta itself. Meta AI remains the unwanted present that just keeps on giving, the "legendary misadventure" of the metaverse is a multibillion-dollar digital eyesore, and, of course, it has laid off tens of thousands of employees in the process.

And this all makes me feel that, frankly, Meta is too comfortable. The Meta Quest 3 and Quest 3S are fantastic bits of hardware, but the closest device I've found to its dominance is the Pico 4 Ultra. Even then, Pico's hardware isn't available in the US and mostly just apes Meta, with very similar specs.

Even if the Pico 4 Ultra were to take off and steal back that oh-so coveted market share from Meta, Pico's parent company, Bytedance, is just as data hungry, making it perhaps not the competitor one would want.

Valve is a multibillion-dollar company too, but it stays in its lane more and seems content as a corporate entity to just sell games.

Valve is not trying to sell you an endless feed of AI-generated content, it's not trying to "get to know you", and it's not trying to use smart glasses to train its AI. Okay, I've done the 'rattle off bad things Meta has done' bit twice in five paragraphs, but that's a testament to how unlikable Zuckerberg's company is as an entity.

But, I'm not just rooting for Valve to take a spot in our best VR headset list because I want Meta to lose. I genuinely believe that Valve has the capabilities to make the Steam Frame excellent. Our Jacob recently flew out to its headquarters to test it out, and it seems like an impressive bit of tech.

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While it more or less matches the Quest 3 in resolution, optics, and horizontal field of view, it has a better chip, more RAM, and stronger Wi-Fi support. On the flip side, the Quest 3's colour pass-through is a touch above Valve's mono one. On paper, it's what you'd expect from a standalone VR headset going into 2026.

It's the Frame's use case that really appeals to me. Valve told us "we think of this as a streaming first device", and it comes with a wireless adapter that you can plug into your gaming PC via a USB Type-A port. This then fi

Source: PC Gamer