Steam Frame owners who stream PC VR no longer have to choose between their game and the room around them. Valve's SteamOS 0.5.8 beta for the headset makes Room View, its camera passthrough, work with PC streaming, and PC VR games with OpenXR mixed reality support can now blend their content with the real world.
Until now, according to Valve's patch notes on Steam, switching on Room View while streaming simply hid whatever was coming from the PC. Passthrough or your PC game: pick one.
What actually changes
Valve lists three practical results of the change:
- Room View now works during PC Streaming instead of hiding remote content.
- Your remote desktop or the remote game theater stays visible while camera passthrough is on, so you can keep an eye on the room and a streamed screen at once.
- PC VR games with OpenXR mixed reality support can blend VR content with passthrough. Valve names X-Plane 12 as its example.
There's a catch, and it's an easy one to miss. Valve says the feature also needs the beta branch of SteamVR on the PC side, not just the headset beta. Update only the Frame and you won't get it. On the PC, right-click SteamVR in your Steam library, pick Properties, then Game Versions & Beta, and choose beta. On the headset, Valve says you opt into the Frame's beta channel under Settings > System > System Update Channel.
Valve also points out that this is the Steam Frame Beta channel, with "new features that are still being tested". So expect rough edges.
The smaller fixes
The rest of the 0.5.8 notes are quieter quality-of-life work:
- Overlay render quality is now locked to Low on Steam Frame and the option is hidden. Valve says this fixes problems that happened when Ultra was selected.
- Eye tracking self-calibration has been improved.
- Gamma response at the low end has been fixed on some headsets, including inconsistencies between the two eyes.
- WebXR in Chrome v157 is unblocked, after Valve fixed a permission issue that stopped it working.
For developers, OpenXR games streamed from a PC can now use the XR_ENVIRONMENT_BLEND_MODE_ALPHA_BLEND blend mode.
SteamVR 2.19.2 cleans up after 2.19.1
The headset update ships alongside SteamVR 2.19.2, which Valve links from the same post. GamingOnLinux's rundown lists what that SteamVR beta fixes, and most of it is Steam Link streaming tidy-up:
- Several regressions with overlays and game menus that 2.19.1 introduced are fixed.
- An occasional crash, and some brief visual artifacts, when the streaming resolution changes are fixed.
- You can once again drop the encoding resolution as low as 512.
- Streams cope better with brief network-related interruptions.
- On Linux, a launch problem when running the SteamRT3 client without the Legacy Steam Runtime installed in the default Steam library is fixed.
- The Quick Access Menu battery tab no longer lists the right controller twice with some third-party drivers, such as PSVR2's.
The restored 512 option is the sleeper here. If you want to wind the encode size right down, 2.19.2 gives that floor back.
Who should bother
If you mostly play standalone on the Frame, 0.5.8 is a handful of fixes to eye tracking calibration, gamma, overlays and WebXR. If you stream PC VR and want passthrough with your streamed games, it takes two beta opt-ins, one on the headset and one in SteamVR on your PC, on a channel Valve itself describes as still being tested. X-Plane 12 is the one game Valve names, so flight sim players have the clearest test case.
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