Things must not be going too well for good old Tim.

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Quoting: pb

Quoting: TermyYou sure can. I printed https://www.printables.com/model/1855218-power-bank-mount-for-steam-frame [External Link] to strap the powerbank to my chest and with that 20000mAh, the playtime is for all practical considerations unlimited.

If my calculations are right, strapping a 20000 mAh powerbank, which I also happen to have, would in theory extend the session from 1.5h to 5h, but... will it be able to charge the frame in real time while gaming? Given that it takes more than 2h to fully charge with a dedicated charger? I know that the last 20% takes the longest, but still... have you already tested that setup and can confirm?

I've been playing most of my time with an small powerbank in my back pocket. It works and extends the play time as you'd want to. But I don't think it's taking the full 10 W from it though. I've also heard a report form a 45W powerbank being attached and there the battery doesn't even get used at all until the powerbank is empty.

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Quoting: pb@Liam in light of your recent steam frame review, I wonder if you find the index' controllers significantly more comfortable and whether they work with the steam frame...

Steam controllers feel better for hand/finger motion actions. They are much heavier though.

I'm pretty sure they need base stations to run and I haven't tried whether they can work independently of the headset.

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What? My Frame didn't come with kitties. I'm furious!

Good write up and it mostly mirrors my experience.

I'm with you on the controllers. While They feel fine for controller controlled games, they don't feel quite nice for more VR like controls. Also rhythm games like Synth Riders (and presumably BS as well) don't require you to use the buttons and sticks during play, but there is not comfortable space in between them to put your thumb. You can still accidentally press a button or worse you can even press the "Steam" button, leading to near-instant death.

@Liam: When did you test your streaming battery life? I've experienced a sizeable increase since the update from this weekend.

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Quoting: Marlockqled sure is an improvement against common led backlight for LCD displays, but is there a technical advantage to it over using OLED in VR?

It is said they aren't bright enough to be used with pancake lenses. And without those you need to use fresnel lenses, which give substantial light scatter (as can be seen in the Index). So it's a choice between superior clarity or superior contrast.

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Am I excited for it? Yes! I have over 350 hours in Star Citizen, so I have a good idea what they can do. Will I be able to join in on this when it releases .... uhhhhh, not so sure. Performance will be an issue. Where I was still able to run SC in some sort of reasonable manner back in 2020, it started becoming more and more of an issue. And while some of that can surely be attributed to the MMO aspect of it, I don't really see them making anything for lower spec machines. I don't think the absence of current gen consoles is an accident.

It'll look great. Nothing I see in the trailer looks out of place from what's already in SC. The immersion will be amazing, but I do hope that they spent their time fixing a lot of the traversal jank as they promised they would for SC. To be fair, I don't know if SC is better these days because I haven't really played it for the past two years.

As for story, I'm hopeful. They can do good things, but there is (or at least was) very little of it in SC. But over the past decade they built up a huge lore-library covering hundreds of years of history, so their world building should be on point.

Will it actually release "on time"? Possibly. I heard they were inviting some content creators / community members to play it at their office, so that at least shows some confidence.

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It all sounds very good on paper. But here's the problem. When I got my Frame I was struggling to make it run smoothly compared to my Index. The simple problem was that even though the resolution of the Frame looks like a minor upgrade over the Index, it still meant doubling the number of pixels. This thing adds another 80% in pixels on top of the Frame, giving you a nice 3.6 times the number of pixels to the Index. Because of the distortion applied to the rendered image in order to make it presentable through the lenses, you'd ideally need another 30% increase in resolution. If you don't, you get the VR equivalent of aliasing problems. Apply all that and this piece of hardware requires you to render 3.4 4k @ 120 fps screens to actually get the best out of it!

My aging 2080 Ti is already struggling with the Frame resolution. The beast of a GPU you're going to need to get the best out of this hardware is going to be insane. I'm not sure even a 9070XT is going to be enough.

Secondly, all that data needs to be streamed as well. And I still haven't figured out how to make Frame levels of data stream reliably.

So yeah, sounds nice, but not sure if it can actually provide its value on normal hardware.

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From a casual glance it seems to be a mix of Halls of Torment with Soulstone Survivors with a few little spins. Both pretty good games, so that's not problem. It is a 3d game though, so depending on how chaotic thing get, performance is going to be an issue. As was proven by Soulstone Surivors, which you can still tank to 30 fps on a good run.

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Will try it this weekend. First weekend I had a great streaming experience, but last Sunday I suddenly had lots of stutter with the dongle latency sometimes jumping from the normal 10-11 ms to almost 100 ms. Not even sure if that's related to SteamVR or whether the system decided to interfere since it aware of it as a network interface.

Edit: I found the SteamOS script that changes a bunch of settings for the adapter (collectively named "low latency mode"), so I'll have to give that a go.

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From asset flips to slop flips.

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