Last year, Valve introduced three new pieces of gaming hardware: a new generation of the Steam Controller, the compact Steam Machine gaming console, and the 'Steam Frame' virtual reality (VR) headset.
All of these gaming devices were launched to such high demand that customers faced wait times ranging from weeks to months to secure their own units.
It is now reported that Valve is developing a new version of the Steam Frame VR headset, replacing the existing IPS display with an OLED panel that offers higher resolution and superior visual quality.
SteamFrameHub discovered details within the source code for a new Steam Frame product—codenamed "Plano"—which appears to utilize a Micro OLED panel with a resolution of 3,552 × 3,840, a significant upgrade over the 2,160 × 2,160 resolution of the original LCD panel.
This new Steam Frame model is expected to retain the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor found in the original version. Consequently, the primary updates focus on display quality—delivering more accurate colors and a more stable refresh rate, which helps reduce the likelihood of motion sickness caused by inconsistent refresh rates.
With this new iteration, Valve also appears to be developing a technique called "foveated scaling," which differs from the "foveated rendering" used in the original Steam Frame. While foveated rendering uses eye-tracking data to prioritize the rendering of objects within the user's direct line of sight, foveated scaling involves transmitting compressed or downscaled frames, with the display hardware itself then upscaling specific sections. This reduces the load on the graphics processing chip, lowers power consumption, and allows the device to be used for longer periods.
At the moment, it is not yet known when Valve will introduce the Steam Deck with this new OLED display.
