I think the performance of Frame for standalone gaming is a lot better than most people assume considering it's specs

I didn't really buy the Frame for standalone gaming performance, as like many others I assumed the mobile-first chip inside it would be ill-suited to that purpose.

Since getting my 1TB Frame on Friday I've been loading it to the gills with games to try to test the standalone gaming performance and I've found myself really hooked on that aspect of the experience.

I've tested a wide variety of games but the ones that originally got me excited were Mass Effect & Nier Automata - they both run extremely well on the Frame and are super fun to just chill in a comfy chair and make progress in the story for each.

That got me more curious about how far you can really push it, and I loaded up Lies of P and to my surprise it ran pretty well.

I'm pretty impressed overall with the possibilities of the standalone component of the Frame. Of course it's a VR-first device and works best as a PCVR companion, but there is just something so freeing about playing standalone wherever you want without having to worry about line of sight with wifi or streaming performance or anything else.

The biggest issue right now is there seems to be random bugs in the translation layer which causes crashes. I couldn't get any modern FromSoft titles working (Elden Ring, Nightreign, & Armored Core all fail at the anti-cheat runtime), and some games have mysterious black screens (like Doom 2016, Halo MCC, even some VR-games like Ragnarock) - but I have high confidence these will be sorted out in time.

It reminds me a bit of the Steam Deck launch, where people were incredulous that a game like Cyberpunk 2077 would ever run on it - yet only one year later they made enough optimizations to certify it as running on Deck.

Considering this is Valve's first ARM-based device, I can see a similar evolution for the ARM translation layer that we saw with Proton - meaning, great things ahead.