Steam Frame switched Wi-Fi power saving back on at startup, and Valve has now fixed it
Steam Frame was switching Wi-Fi power saving back on at startup even when the setting had been turned off, Valve says, and the fix is in a Steam client build that reached every owner on October 15. The note went up at 21:53 UTC, says the client “has just been released for all users”, and carries six changes, four of which name the Steam Frame Wireless Adapter.
Valve's own artwork for the Steam Frame hardware page, which lists the wireless adapter as included in the box. Image: Valve Image: Valve
Two of those four are about getting connected at all. Valve says it has improved “reliability of pairing with the Steam Frame Wireless Adapter”, and that the client now shows “progress of initial connection with the Steam Frame Wireless Adapter after pairing”, so a headset that is part way through a first link looks different from one that has failed.
A third is blunter: Valve has fixed “a crash in the Steam Frame Wireless Adapter driver when it fails to initialize”. The note gives no symptom, no frequency and no build number for the driver.
That adapter is in every box. Valve's own hardware page lists it as “included in the box”, running on Wi-Fi 6E at 6GHz as “a dedicated link for both VR and non-VR streaming”, which makes a driver that falls over on initialisation a problem for the whole product rather than for an accessory.
The sleep fix stops at Windows
The fourth adapter change is scoped to one operating system. Valve says it has “improved Steam Frame Wireless Adapter reliability on Windows by preventing the adapter from going to sleep”, and says nothing of the sort for Linux, which fits the position in Valve's own support guide, where adapter streaming is Windows only for now.
The remaining change leaves the adapter alone. A Playtime Mode icon now appears in the notification area, and Valve explains nothing else about it.
This is the client side rather than the headset's operating system, which has had adapter work of its own. SteamOS 0.4 carried a fix for “steam frame wireless adapter connectivity issues that affected users in some countries”, a set of countries Valve never named, and that build reached every headset on October 8.
Owner reports on the adapter are still open
The nearest report was filed three hours before the update shipped. On October 15 at 18:51 UTC a Frame owner told Valve's SteamVR tracker that the headset and the desktop host never connect over the bundled dongle at all, which the Frame reports as “Waiting...” before streaming and “Inactive” once SteamVR is running.
That report blames a client update rather than the headset. Its author says the same fault turned up on the desktop client beta, went away on the stable release, and came back when the beta became the stable client, and lists Steam build 1791918634 with SteamVR 2.18.3 on GNU Guix.
A longer thread describes the host side. Owners on Arch, EndeavourOS and a Steam Machine running stock SteamOS report that the Steam client retries the adapter link every 60 seconds for as long as the headset is unreachable, with each attempt triggering a network scan that fails after about 25 seconds.
A third owner traced an adapter stuck at “waiting” to a stale access point name, with the PC looking for one SSID while the headset's own configuration held another, and fixed it by hand with a single softapcmd refresh over ADB.
All three are open, and Valve has replied in none of them. The note cites no issue number either, so none of these threads can be read as the thing it fixed.
Valve says the build “also includes a large number of other Steam Client improvements” without naming them, and points Frame owners at its separate client notes for the rest. The previous Frame client build, the October 6 one that added a spectating indicator, carried an adapter fix too: the manual Wi-Fi channel list it offered was wrong in some regions.
