Half-Life: Alyx updated to bring Foveated Rendering on desktop

27 Oct 2026 at 8:37 am UTC
| Last updated: 27 Oct 2026 at 8:43 am UTC

By Liam Squires-Hand

Valve are still adding in improvements to the excellent VR game Half-Life: Alyx, with the latest update out now. With Foveated Rendering on desktop now available, many more gamers across different VR kits should be able to use it.

• Add a setting under Advanced Performance to enable Foveated Rendering on desktop for supported hardware (for DirectX: NVIDIA GTX 16XX+, RTX 20XX+; AMD requires launching with -vulkan). Can increase rendering performance. Enable eye-tracking on your headset for best results. More information here.
• Enable stencil buffer tagging when running natively on Steam Frame to help improve reprojection quality.
• Fix several rendering crashes common in workshop content.
• Fix “Gnome Alone” achievement failing to unlock for some users.

The VR headset must support eye tracking in their SteamVR driver, here are example of SteamVR drivers capable of it:

• SteamLink on Valve Steam Frame, Meta Quest Pro, HTC VIVE Focus Vision, Play For Dream MR, Samsung Galaxy XR, Pico 4 Pro/Enterprise.
• Virtual Desktop on Meta Quest Pro, HTC VIVE Focus Vision, Play For Dream MR, Samsung Galaxy XR.
• Bigscreen Beyond 2e.
• Oasis for Windows Mixed Reality on HP Reverb G2 Omnicept.
• Somnium VR1 Visionary, Titan and Ultimate edition.
• Apple Vision Pro with KRVR.

More headsets are capable of sending eye tracking data to SteamVR with additional 3rd party drivers:

• Sony Playstation VR2 with Bnuuy Solutions’s PSVR2 Toolkit.
• Pimax Crystal series and Dream Air series with Sboys3’s CustomHeadsetOpenVRor Pimax-EyeTracker-SteamVR
• Varjo Aero, VR and XR series with Varjo-EyeTracker-SteamVR.
• (probably more that we don’t know about!).

Steam Deck🟥 Unsupported
Platform:⚛ Proton / Wine (Windows)
Release Date:📅 23rd March 2020
Devs:Valve
Official links:Steam
🌐 Externalm.
Tags: Proton, Steam Frame, Action, FPS, Steam, SteamVR, Valve, Virtual Reality (VR) | Apps: Half-Life: Alyx
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