A beta version of SteamOS is promising to increase Steam Frame battery life by as much as 12%, while you’re either gaming locally or via streaming. The update also aims to improve reliability in the latter use case, addressing software bugs and connection issues.
As we noted in our Steam Frame review, battery life isn’t one of the VR headset’s strong suits. The 21.6WHr cell can drain in just over 90 minutes in the most-demanding circumstances, climbing to around two hours in the face of lighter workloads.
With this in mind, that 12% boost won’t massively move the needle, and Valve itself caveats this increase by stating the “results vary depending on framerate and content.” Regardless, given that battery life is already so short, any increase in uptime is welcome.
Anyone hoping for a serious change in battery life beyond the limits of efficiency improvements via software will need to remain patient for alternative headstrap-based battery designs to hit the market. Valve has already said it’s looking into modular batteries for Steam Frame, possibly indicating that prior leaks concerning an Enthusiast Kit hold some water.
Outside of battery life improvements, upgrading to this SteamOS beta should stem the prevalence of ‘Error 17’ while streaming, denoting incompatible protocol settings between the host and headset. However, this also requires upgrading your SteamVR version to the latest beta, namely version 2.18.2.
Valve also says that SteamOS 0.4.3 beta fixes “wireless adapter connectivity issues that affected users in some countries.” The firm doesn’t elaborate how geography plays a part in this problem, but this could relate to the dongle’s use of a personal 6GHz band, which is unlawful in some places, such as China.
Hopefully, these changes will make their way to the stable release channel in the near future. I doubt these are the last efficiency improvements we can expect from Valve via software, but anything greater than the iterative bump we see here may well be off the table.
