TL;DR: The Frame includes an audio module with speakers and microphones, and its advantages go way beyond the SoC, thanks to lots of very clever optimizations by Valve that lift it far above just being faster.
The audio section with dual speakers and dual microphones attaches magnetically directly behind the core module, and they apparently spent quite some effort on it. During the hand-ons Valve engineered detailed how they had dual driver sending audio signals in two opposing directions, because otherwise the vibrations would have reduced tracking accuracy.
So the audio section isn't part of the 185g core module, but part of the 440g total weight of Frame. And this solution allows for third parties to release straps similar to those on Index with off-ear headphones, or use bluetooth headphones, or for someone mostly interested in productivity use to simply remove the audio section and, with a proper strap, have the core module just floating in front of the face without touching it, similar to what was possible on Quest Pro.
But much more important than the total weight will be weight distribution, with the core module only making up 42% of the HMDs total weight. How well the balancing with the battery pack works with the default wide soft strap remains to be seen, and will depend a lot on how stiff it becomes in actual use. I'm still somewhat astonished they plan for an extra comfort kit that adds a top strap instead of bundling it by default, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that Frame will be fine without it until we get actual reviews.
I wouldn't count on add-ons either, even if later adding hires passthrough might be a nice option. It seems unlikely that Valve didn't include it due to weight, as adding a pair of hires color cameras would only have added a few grams. My guess is that they wanted to avoid the significant computational load that comes with passthrough geometry correction unless you do it on a dedicated chip like Apple does with the R1. On Quest 3 you pay for color passthrough with reduced performance, and it is still not particularly good. So Valve probably decided it simply wasn't worth it, and adding it later via an add-on will introduce the same issues. I would have liked color passthrough too, but Valve positions Frame as a pure gaming HMD with zero interest in MR games. For convenience issues like finding your controllers the PSVR2 class b/w passthrough will be fine, the main disadvantage will be that those playing flat games on a large virtual screen won't see their own room in color and will have to settle with a virtual environment.
But overall I expect the Frame's advantages to go far beyond the faster SoC, with hardware, software and doing things smarter. The SD 8 Gen 3 is faster, but not optimized for constant load applications. So without specific optimizations, the Frame would show similar thermal throttling issues like we saw on Gear VR or Daydream using regular phone SoCs. Valve's workaround was very precise testing to find out which parts of the SoC produce which thermal load under what specific conditions, and then create game specific core configurations and speeds, so some games may run only on efficiency cores, others use the burst optimized high performance core. The faster SoC alone wouldn't be all that useful if they had to underclock it to make sure there is enough thermal headroom like Meta does with the CPU in their XR2 SoC, but paired with some very fancy dual-sided heatpipes plus that game specific configuration, it should punch way harder than any XR2.
A lot of that extra performance will be eaten by FEX x86 emulation, but even there the game specific optimization strikes. FEX allows to configure what is actually emulated, so they could for example enable AVX2 emulation or not. And depending on game they will enable whatever provides the most benefits. Which could mean deliberately deactivating AVX2, forcing the game to fall back to SSE4, which might lead to an overall improved performance because other parts can run faster. And that's just the things they mentioned during the hand-ons, I expect there to be a lot more.
They recently released the Steamworks documentation for Frame, revealing some interesting details. They not only support FEX for x86 emulation, Proton for Windows, Lepton for Android and OpenXR for general VR compatibility, but support a number of Meta specific OpenXR extensions for direct compatibility. And by now many Quest developers have gotten their Frame dev kits, and most Quest apps run pretty much out of the box. The Steam Deck became the ultimate emulation machine, and I am now wondering if soon I will finally be able to play my large Oculus Go library again, after Meta removed backwards compatibility on Quest 2 for idiotic reasons. And how long it will take for someone to write a wrapper that converts Oculus 0.8 SDK calls, so people can once again experience the original 2013 DK1 Rift Coaster on a 2026 Steam Frame.
And Frame supports eye tracking and dynamic foveated rendering, which still requires integration by developers. But of course people hacked DFR for Pimax Crystal into Skyrim VR, so I have no doubt that someone will get Skyrim to run on Frame with ETFR and modern upscaling thanks to everything being open. It's not only that the headset supports eye tracking, which should be the default, and not adding it to Quest 3 just in case was IMHO a big mistake by Meta. It is what you can actually do with it with all the other components like the Gamescope compositor that allows for lots of nifty post-processing options even for a decade old PCVR titles, abandoned years ago, and released long before their devs even considered mobile HMDs, foveated rendering or eye tracking.
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